Warning: This article contains full spoilers for Peacemaker Season 2’s final episode!
Peacemaker Season 2 just ended its eight-episode run on HBO Max with a major turning point in the life of John Cena’s aspiring do-gooder Christopher Smith. Creator James Gunn teased that the finale would lay the groundwork for 2027’s Man of Tomorrow movie. And Gunn seems to have made good on that promise, with the finale strongly hinting at which character will serve as the common enemy uniting Nicholas Hoult’s Lex Luthor and David Corenswet’s Superman. So why are we so unhappy with the big reveal?
Let’s break down why Peacemaker Season 2’s finale doesn’t quite gel with the rest of the DCU. We’ll also explore the other big revelations in this episode, like the debut of Checkmate and the planet Salvation. Here’s everything you need to know about the ending of Peacemaker Season 2.
Peacemaker Season 2: What’s the Deal With Rick Flag?
Everything seems to be going Chris’ way in the closing moments of “Full Nelson.” He and Jennifer Holland’s Emilia Harcourt finally have their big emotional breakthrough. Chris and the gang liberate a giant pile of cash and use it to open their own peacekeeping agency called Checkmate (more on that in a bit). Chris and Emilia even attend a Foxy Shazam concert, giving Gunn one last excuse to play Season 2’s earworm-y theme song.
But fate has a different plan in store for Christopher Smith. No sooner does he win it all than it’s cruelly taken away from him by Flag and his ARGUS agents. “Full Nelson” ends with Chris being abducted and taken to an ARGUS black site facility. There, he’s promptly dumped into a world Flag has selected for his metahuman prison planet. Gunn confirmed at a press conference that it’s called Salvation (again, we’ll get to that in a little while). Flag banishes Chris in revenge for the death of his son, Joel Kinnaman’s Rick “Ricky” Flag, Jr, leaving Peacemaker marooned and weaponless in a land full of hungry monsters. And it sure sounds like he’s just the first of many planned prisoners.
Before getting into the comic book origins of Checkmate and Salvation, we really need to address the elephant in the room. What’s the deal with Rick Flag? Why has this character taken such a hard and sudden heel turn in Peacemaker Season 2?
The thing about Grillo’s character is that he was never portrayed in a particularly villainous light before now. From the start, he’s been the more level-headed, rule-abiding alternative to Viola Davis’ Amanda Waller. If outright calling him a hero is too much, Flag was certainly on the right side of the conflict in 2024’s Creature Commandos. The same goes for his small role in Superman, where he was clearly distrustful of Luthor.
Even starting out in Peacemaker Season 2, Flag wasn’t really a villain so much as a man grieving the death of his son. However much Flag may be using his position to carry out a personal vendetta, you can understand and empathize with him. But that empathy is mostly gone now. Flag has gone from distrusting Luthor to becoming Luthor. Is there any difference between Luthor building a prison between dimensions and Flag using the QUC to dump prisoners on an alien world?
Even the way Flag treats his agents in Episode 8 seems like a step too far for the character. We see him sending wave after wave of ARGUS troops into the QUC as glorified cannon fodder, joking and flirting while his men die horrible deaths. Again, calling Flag an outright hero may be too much of a stretch, but the character had a basic humanity in the DCU that’s suddenly absent at the end of Peacemaker Season 2.
Is Rick Flag the Villain of Man of Tomorrow?
This sudden pivot in Flag’s characterization is all the more troubling because all signs point to the character taking on a bigger role in Gunn’s Superman follow-up, Man of Tomorrow. For all the speculation that Brainiac is the major threat looming over the heads of Luthor and Superman, it’s looking like Rick Flag Sr. is the actual villain of Gunn’s next movie.
Flag clearly has a distaste for metahumans (despite previously leading a team of them). He sees them as causing more problems than they solve, nothing more than trash to be disposed of on a remote, out-of-the-way planet. In Man of Tomorrow, Flag may decide that Luthor should be among that group. That may be what forces Luthor to align with his most hated enemy. Superman is never one to turn down someone in need. Plus, he knows firsthand how dehumanizing it is to be abducted and imprisoned with no due process.
Flag may be the threat that forces Superman and Luthor to put aside their differences and fight for a common goal. We may even see both characters banished to Salvation in Man of Tomorrow, cueing up the inevitable return appearance of Cena’s Peacemaker. It seems that absolute power is corrupting Flag in the same way it did Waller before him.
Again, it’s just a little hard to swallow this abrupt pivot in characterization with Grillo’s character. Part of the appeal of Flag was that he wasn’t Amanda Waller. Why even sideline Waller in the first place if we’re just getting another person with the same temperament running ARGUS? Hopefully, Gunn has something else in mind for Flag that can restore him to a more morally ambiguous player in the DCU rather than an outright villain.
That said, Gunn would argue that Flag was never the noble character he might have seemed in Creature Commandos and Superman. At a recent press event, Gunn noted that Flag is a deeply flawed character whose greatest sin is overestimating his own intelligence.
“I think we saw a guy in Creature Commandos, which, when you’re first watching that season, he seems like he’s the good guy, but he’s absolutely not,” Gunn told reporters. “He screws up everything again because he thinks he’s smarter than Waller, which he isn’t. And he messes that up and he falls for this woman and is kind of played by her… the whole time. And that to me is the fun thing about Rick Flag. He’s totally imperfect.”
Checkmate’s DCU Debut
As we see late in Episode 8, Chris and the gang have formed their own peacekeeping agency called Checkmate. Checkmate is an organization with deep roots in the DC comics, even if this version is a pretty significant deviation from the source material. In fact, about the only common thread here is the involvement of Sol Rodríguez’s Sasha Bordeaux and Freddie Stroma’s Vigilante.
Checkmate was created by Paul Kupperberg and Steve Erwin and originally debuted in 1988’s Action Comics #598, with Waller forming the organization as a splinter agency of Task Force X. Vigilante’s nemesis, Harry Stein, is put in charge of the agency, with Stein opting to model its organizational structure around chess pieces (characters serve as kings, queens, bishops, knights, etc.).
Checkmate played a key role in the 1989 crossover “The Janus Directive,” but the monthly Checkmate series was eventually canceled with 1991’s Checkmate #33. After fading to the background of the DCU, Checkmate roared back into the spotlight thanks to 2005’s Infinite Crisis. Writer Greg Rucka spearheaded a new, modernized Checkmate series in the aftermath of that Crisis, one which included his creation Sasha Bordeaux as a major character.
Gunn made it clear he was heavily inspired by his love of the Rucka run at the press event, saying, “I’ve always liked Checkmate. Those Greg Rucka stories of Checkmate are just comics that I really, really love. So I always wanted to try to build Checkmate into it somehow. And the idea of allowing Ade to really fulfill what is her sort of destiny and be the one who founds Checkmate in this universe was important to me. I also like the idea we’re really using it to deal with all these different characters.”
Gunn revealed that the idea here is to give the 11th Street Kids an opportunity to do good on a larger scale.
“I said on Threads the other day, when Auggie gives his speech at the end of Episode 7, some people judged it very harshly. Some people think he’s a hero,” Gunn said. “I dunno if he’s either of those things. I think he’s a good man who is trying to fight in small ways, but doesn’t think he can win anything bigger than that. And I think that he is definitely still doing okay in that universe.”
Gunn continued, “Harcourt and Economos, they’re worker bees. They’ve worked for intelligence organizations their whole lives. They’ve basically done what they said. They’ve broken out a couple of times, like at the end of The Suicide Squad, but basically, they’re worker bees. And so I think that Aug is speaking directly to our court’s soul at that moment, and that leads into this desire to create an organization using all of the blood money that is truly for the good, and to create an organization that is going to be separate from the other institutions in the DCU, which is the government and corporations and the Justice Gang, the typical metahuman gangs. I think it’s the real culmination of the 11th Street Kids and their desire to be good.”
The DCU Adapts the Salvation Run Comic
As for the planet Salvation, that also hearkens back to some of DC’s early ‘00s comic books. That world was introduced in 2007’s Salvation Run, which is based on a story pitch from none other than Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin (though the comic itself is written by Bill Willingham and Lilah Sturges).
A precursor to another Crisis storyline, 2008’s Final Crisis, Salvation Run deals with the fallout of many DC villains like Joker, Lex Luthor, and the Flash Rogues being marooned on a distant planet dubbed Salvation. Similar to the Peacemaker series, the idea is to rid Earth of its growing metahuman problem. However, Waller and Task Force X don’t count on the fact that Salvation is actually a secret training ground for Darkseid’s Parademons, which gives Luthor et al access to Boom Tube technology.
“I liked the concept of creating this prison that was absolutely inescapable, but was also a little rash because they think it’s not dangerous from their initial tests,” Gunn said. “But in the comics, and [in Peacemaker], obviously, there’s hints of it being dangerous, but I also like the idea of being able to create this other environment where people that are considered bad metahumans are going to have to figure out a new way to create a society. And that was what was always interesting about it for me.”
In the case of both Checkmate and Salvation Run, DC fans shouldn’t be expecting a full 1:1 adaptation of the source material. As much as Gunn’s DCU leans on the comics for inspiration, he’s never been one for direct adaptations. That won’t change now.
“It really is about the concept,” Gunn said. “So there’s a very distinct storyline with Joker versus Lex Luthor and all that, but it’s not that. The part that really spoke to me was the beginning of it, where in that version, Rick Flag, Jr. and Amanda Waller were like, ‘F*** it. Metahumans are a pain in the ass. They keep escaping. Let’s just get rid of them permanently.’ And they send them to the other place. And of course, there are a bunch of repercussions about sending a bunch of bad guys to another dimension, and in this case, the sole person there right now is a good guy who has to survive on his own.”
As with the comics, where Salvation Run ended with the villains escaping and returning to Earth with vengeance in mind, the real importance of the Salvation situation in the DCU may involve what happens when these characters do inevitably return. How do heroes like Superman and the Justice Gang react to what Flag has done? Is there a point where ARGUS goes too far in its pursuit of peace and order?
Will There Be a Peacemaker Season 3?
Naturally, one of the big questions now that Peacemaker Season 2 has ended is when and where we’ll see Cena’s Chris Smith next. Is there going to be a Season 3? Maybe, but Gunn doesn’t seem focused on that in the immediate future. The Salvation situation seems more geared toward setting up other projects like Man of Tomorrow and Creature Commandos Season 2 (which Gunn confirmed is currently being written).
“This is about the wider DCU and other stories in which this will play out right now,” Gunn said. “So that doesn’t mean that there won’t be, I don’t want to never say never, but right now, no, this is about the future of the DCU.”
We’re expecting Cena to return in Man of Tomorrow, possibly in a more substantial role than his quick Superman cameo. Where that sequel leaves Chris may well determine when and how Gunn tackles a potential Peacemaker Season 3. But Gunn does at least seem to have plans for the alternate universe version of Chris’ brother Keith (David Denman) introduced in Season 2.
“I have plans for Keith,” Gunn said. “I just haven’t figured out exactly how it’s all going to work out, so I have to make sure I can do it. It’s hard with the interdimensional hopping stuff to make these things come together in the way I’d like. So I have what I would like to happen with Keith, but I’m not sure. I’ve got to make sure it’ll work.”
Let’s also not forget that there’s a clear path forward for the rest of the show’s cast without Chris. He may be marooned on Salvation, but Checkmate still exists. Gunn could well be planning a Checkmate spinoff series rather than a Peacemaker Season 3, as we see this fledgling organization grow into something bigger. Whatever comes next, Gunn confirmed that we will see Checkmate continue to play a key role.
“You’ll definitely see Checkmate carrying through,” Gunn said. “They’re a thing now, so they’re a part of what’s going to happen, and I think they’re going to be really, really good at what they do. So when we see them next, I think their circumstances will be a little bit different than the startup that they’re at now.”
Do you want to see a Peacemaker Season 3 or a Checkmate spinoff? What are your thoughts on Flag’s heel turn? Let us know in the comments below.
For more on Peacemaker, check out IGN’s review of the Season 2 finale.
Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on BlueSky.
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