‘Peacemaker’ Season 1 Recap: What to Remember Before Season 2

From merciless blowhard to damaged but well-meaning himbo, John Cena’s Christopher Smith, aka Peacemaker, took a heck of a journey in the first season of his HBO Max show. First introduced in James Gunn’s 2021 movie “The Suicide Squad,” Peacemaker spun off into his own series, also helmed by Gunn, in January 2022.

That’s more than three years between seasons, so if you need a thorough recap of what happened in “Peacemaker” Season 1 before you watch Season 2, read on.

First, Is “The Suicide Squad” Canon?

The continuity of the DCU is a bit confusing thanks to convoluted franchising amid major behind-the-scenes studio regime changes. “The Suicide Squad” and “Peacemaker” filmmaker James Gunn is now also the Co-CEO of DC Studios, at the helm of a new DC Universe, distinct from the DC Extended Universe that his first two DC projects existed in. So is the Peacemaker in “Peacemaker” the same guy from “The Suicide Squad?”

Yes, explicitly so in the first season. And going forward, though the DCU may retcon the exact details of who, what and where, the core of the character created by Gunn and Cena remains the same. So do the most important experiences he had in “The Suicide Squad.” It’s the starting point for “Peacemaker,” from which Chris Smith evolves into someone capable of love, friendship and loyalty.

What Happened in “The Suicide Squad?”

In “The Suicide Squad,” we meet Christopher Smith, aka Peacemaker, as a prisoner of Belle Reve. Trained since childhood to be a stone-cold killer, Peacemaker gets recruited by Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) to join her Task Force X alongside other antiheroes, including Bloodsport (Idris Elba), Ratcatcher 2 (Daniela Melchior), Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), and most importantly, Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman). Waller sends them on a suicide mission to Corto Maltese, tied to something called Project Starfish.

Peacemaker’s whole thing is that he’s a hypermilitaristic, all-Americana psychopath who made a vow for peace, no matter how many men, women and children he has to kill to get it. Yikes! And indeed, after a few sequences that display how deadly he can be in action, Peacemaker ultimately becomes an antagonist to his own team in pursuit of his skewed version of justice.

Task Force X discovers that Project Starfish is, in fact, a gigantic space kaiju with mind control powers called Starro, which the American government is complicit in imprisoning, experimenting on and manipulating for political control. That’s a deal-breaker for Flag, who snatches up the evidence and promises to take it to the press. Peacemaker, on Waller’s orders, kills Flag, a soldier he admires, to prevent that from happening, and as Rick dies, he utters his final words: “Peacemaker, what a joke.” In the aftermath, Bloodsport shoots Peacemaker before he can execute Ratcatcher 2 just for being a witness, and Chris spends the rest of the movie under rubble until the post-credits scene reveals he somehow survived.

After Task Force X’s plan goes awry, Starro breaks out of containment and unleashes its wrath on the people of Corto Maltese. When the remaining squad teams up to help them, Waller orders them to stop, threatening to trigger the bombs implanted in their skulls if they continue. Fortunately, her staff at Bell Reve — including Harcourt (Jennifer Holland) and Economos (Steve Agee) take a stand against their merciless boss, knock her out and help Task Force X save the people of Corto Maltese. Peacemaker, notably, does not get the hero moment or character evolution that the rest of his team did. Yet.

If you want a more in-depth recap of the film, you’ll find that here.

Meet the Real Peacemaker

Flag’s death and his dying proclamation haunt Peacemaker throughout Season 1, serving as the traumatic blow that cleaves open his whole persona and the way he looks at the world.

We meet him at the start of Season 1 in the hospital, where he’s been recovering from the injuries he sustained during Project Starfish. After his doctor discharges him, he tries to sneak back home, a musty mess where he finds his dad never canceled his phone bill, and he’s got hundreds of missed calls — but they’re all from the same person, his wildcard fellow criminal-killing friend, Vigilante, aka Adrian Chase (Freddie Stroma).

Far from the self-assured, merciless killer we met in “The Suicide Squad,” the real Chris is a bit pathetic and hungry for affection. He’s so desperate for approval, he gets giddy when the waitress tells him “good choice,” and so desperate for love, his best friend is a bald eagle, Eagly. He’s also utterly oblivious to how much the people around him think he’s a racist villain. That’s a setup for comedy, but it’s also a testament to the fact that he hasn’t internalized his father’s bigotry as part of his identity. But we will get to the monster that is Auggie Smith.

From Project X to Project Butterfly

Of course, Peacemaker only served four of his 30-year sentence, so ARGUS isn’t just going to let him go. When he gets home, a new team is waiting for him, guns drawn. There’s Harcourt (Jennifer Holland), his new handler, and John Economos, the tech and tactics guy, who were both on Waller’s team at Belle Reve in “The Suicide Squad.” Harcourt, in particular, despises Peacemaker. Then there’s Leota Adebayo (Danielle Brooks), the friendly newbie on the team, and the fearsome Clemson Murn (Chuckwudi Iwuji), who’s running the operation.

What’s the operation? Project Butterfly. And like Project Starfish before it, the name offers some hints about what kind of “monster” they’ll be facing. They want Peacemaker to be their gunman, killing people they call “Butterflies” — if he says no, he goes back to prison, or there’s always the bomb in his head. First up on his hitlist is a sitting U.S. senator … and his wife and kids.

During that mission, Peacemaker learns the hard way that the term Butterfly isn’t just a cute nickname. And he learns a bit about himself, too. The team has a sniper rifle locked in on the senator and his family, but despite his vow (peace, no matter how many men, women and children he has to kill to get it), Peacemaker can’t execute the mission and kill the kids, even after he sees clear evidence they’re not human.

Fortunately, Vigilante followed them to the mission site, and he’s got no problem taking the shots … at least the first three. Before he can take out Senator Goff, Judomaster (Nhut Le) shows up, and the pint-sized, Cheeto-guzzling snarky defender of the Butterflies kicks all their asses in no time.

Judomaster and Goff take and torture Peacemaker and Vigilante for information. Well, Vigilante is tortured, Goff just makes Peacemaker watch. Meanwhile, Economos captures Judomaster by T-boning his car and beating him with a tire iron, while the rest of the team breaks out Peacemaker and Vigilante. After Peacemaker shoots Goff in the head with a shotgun, a small insectoid with iridescent wings crawls out of his skull. Project Butterfly. Shortly after, a tactical screen reveals there are hundreds, maybe thousands of them embedded in people all over the world.

It’s a full-scale alien invasion, and as an off-the-books mission (any official investigation into the Butterflies gets shut down), this ragtag group is humanity’s last hope.

A Legacy of Violence

Chris doesn’t just battle existential, potentially world-ending threats in “Peacemaker” Season 1, he’s also waging an internal war against the heinous, violent way of thinking that his father taught him. Played by the great Robert Patrick, Auggie Smith is horrendous. A hateful extremist, proud white supremacist, and relentlessly abusive father, Auggie is Chris’ root rot, poisoning his growth and prosperity from the ground up.

Auggie is profoundly cruel to his son, and seemingly has been his whole life. He doesn’t react at all when Chris tells him he was in the hospital for months. Auggie just snarls and calls his son “pathetic” for letting somebody shoot him. The only time we see him smile? When Chris tells him the horrific story of how Bloodsport’s father locked him in a crate with starving rats. He calls his son a “simp,” and ensures Chris knows he never thought about him once while he was in prison.

He trained his son to be a killer since childhood, something that sounds like super-spy Black Widow type stuff, but “Peacemaker” makes it so painfully pedestrian. In this case, it’s just a racist man putting a screwdriver in his son’s hand and making him kill someone. It’s a crass and cruel father, placing bets on his young sons, making them no-holds-barred fight in a dirt pit, and then holding it against Chris for the rest of his life when it goes tragically wrong.

Eventually, that’s what we learn happened to Chris when he was a child. Scrapping with his brother Keith at his father’s behest, Chris landed a blow that caused Keith to start seizing and foaming at the mouth before he died. He grows up blaming himself for his brother’s death, but his father blames him even more.

And Auggie is not just a constant nightmare in Chris’ life, he also gets tangled up in Peacemaker’s business with ARGUS. After Chris has a one-night stand gone wrong, he winds up killing the metahuman girl after she attacks him. Economos whips up some guy-in-the-chair magic and swaps the evidence to implicate someone else – unfortunately, he chooses Peacemaker’s father, and Auggie gets locked up for the crime.

Even more unfortunate, Auggie is very much at home in prison, where there’s an eager group of violent white supremacists who idolize him as the White Dragon. Loosely inspired by a comic book character of the same name, this version of the White Dragon also integrates Peacemaker’s comic origin as the son of a Nazi. In fact, the White Dragon isn’t explained much in the show beyond being a white supremacist supervillain. Enough said.

Most unfortunate of all? Auggie’s not locked up nearly long enough. After he learns who framed him (In fact, Chris, the only one who can’t see who his father is, willingly tells him), Auggie promises to go straight to the cops, so Adebayo manipulates Vigilante into trying to kill him. That gives us some of Vigilante’s best moments when he gets himself thrown into prison, but his haphazard plan doesn’t work. Worse, once Auggie thinks his son tried to have him killed, he high-tails it to the detectives on the case, Sophie Song (Annie Chang) and Larry Fitzgibbon (L0chlyn Munro), who ensure his release and turn their attention to arresting Peacemaker.

The Quantum Unfolding Chamber

One more thing about Peacemaker’s dad to remember: he’s got a massive, extremely unexplained, physics-defying chamber in his house. This is what Gunn has dubbed the Quantum Unfolding Chamber (QUC), which in some way seems to allow Peacemaker and the White Dragon to create their high-tech super-suits (or helmets, in Peacemaker’s case). It doesn’t have a very big role to play in Season 2, but it’s confirmed that the QUC will have a significant role to play in the DCU and “Peacemaker” Season 2.

The 11th Street Kids

This is a James Gunn production, so naturally, Peacemaker’s group of oddballs and outcasts was destined to form a found family. In fact, Gunn describes Season 1 as a love story about the friendship between Chris and Adeyabo, in particular, but the whole team sparks up a true-blue friendship after the most unlikely of circumstances – they defeat a killer gorilla together.

Their investigation leads them to the Glan Tai Bottling Company, and on the way to the mission, Chris and Economos finally find something to bond over: they’re both fans of Hanoi Rocks and jam out to the song “11th Street Kids.” Inside, the facility is full of Butterflies. With the help of Peacemaker’s X-ray helmet, they take care of the Butterflies with ease – until they meet Charlie, a Butterfly-inhabited silverback gorilla who protects the facility.

But the team has each other’s back through the whole fight, and Economos saves the day when he kills the gorilla with a chainsaw. After that, they’re a real team, and Harcourt consecrates that bond when she snaps a candid photo of them all celebrating their victory and sends it to their new group chat: the 11th Street Kids.

Adebayo’s Betrayal

Unbeknownst to the rest of the team, Leota Adebayo isn’t just a newbie, she’s the daughter of Amanda Waller, director of ARGUS. And Waller sent her in with a mission: to plant a diary on Peacemaker for all the violent chaos that has and will come from the Butterfly task force. As Harcourt (who is outraged that Adebayo would betray one of her own team members) says, they were “going to lone-shooter the guy.”

That means Chris and Adebayo’s friendship love story also includes some heartbreak. While sharing a celebratory drink after the Glan Tai Bottling mission, the two have a lovely moment of camaraderie, and he tells her he’s never had someone who had his back before. And that’s when she plants the journal.

Murn’s Big Secret

Adebayo isn’t the only one on the team keeping secrets, as she learns when she puts on Peacemaker’s X-ray helmet and sees the Butterfly living in Murn’s head.

She panics at first, but soon realizes both Harcourt and Economos already know, and Murn is the sole dissenter of his kind, working with humanity to help stop the Butterfly invasion. He also feels tremendous guilt about taking a human body, but says he chose the worst person he could find in Clemson Murn. That means he also has insight into how to hit the Butterfly invasion where it counts. But before Murn and the team can launch their attack, Goff gets a win.

That’s because Peacemaker kept Goff alive, trapped in a jar at his place. He even got the Butterfly stoned and tried to have a yes/no conversation after Goff drew a peace sign on the inside of his jar. But when Detective Song and Detective Fitzgibbon come storming in to arrest Peacemaker, he and Vigilante have to escape through the roof and Goff breaks free from his jar when Vigilante falls out of a tree.

Goff wastes no time taking over the body of Detective Song, a violent and bloody process, and stages a mini invasion of the local police department. That means that Murn’s man on the inside is also compromised, and he knows the location of where they’re staying, so they’re exposed. Goff shows up in a hurry and summarily executes Murn, first shooting him dead without question and then crushing his insectoid body when he tries to fly out of Murn’s mouth. He dies in the palm of Harcourt’s hand.

Peacemaker vs. The White Dragon

While Harcourt and Adebayo are squaring off against Judomaster, Peacemaker, Vigilante, Economos and Eagly get locked into battle with Auggie, in his full White Dragon supersuit. Now that he’s out of prison, he’s made it his mission to kill his son, suiting up and rallying his troops to hunt him down.

The inevitable battle finally occurs in the penultimate episode of Season 1, when Peacemaker squares off against his supervillain Nazi father and his legion of white supremacists. It’s a harsh battle, and Eagly gets injured, but ultimately Peacemaker wins and finally does what he now realizes he should have done a long time ago. He kills his dad. Afterward, he starts to have visions of his father, hurling the same old insults.

Don’t Have a Cow

After their respective fights, the gang meets up to execute the plan that can end the Butterfly invasion for good. The insectoid aliens feed on an amber, gooey substance. That’s what they’ve been shipping at that bottling company. And it all stems from a creature they call the Cow, a giant, pitiful, wormy thing that excretes their food source. And there’s only one Cow. If the team can kill the cow, they kill the invasion.

They make a plan to infiltrate the ranch where the cow is stored and use Peacemaker’s helmets to blow up the cow by sneaking in the Sonic Boom helmet and using a radio to issue the “Activate Sonic Boom” command. But Economos gets freaked while sneaking in to drop the bag and doesn’t take it low enough down the stairs before he leaves. That means they have to go back in, first Peacemaker, then Adebayo, who follows with the horribly designed Human Torpedo helmet as a last resort. Though she misses her first shot, Peacemaker activates it at just the right time, allowing them to take out the Cow in grotesque fashion.

More Than Anything in the World

That is a choice that Peacemaker doesn’t make lightly, because it’s not quite the cut-and-dry “hero saves the world” moment he might have hoped for. Before they kill the cow, Goff makes a final plea to Peacemaker, who the alien believes is a kindred spirit, willing to go to any extreme for the virtue they believe in. For Goff, that’s saving the Earth and humanity from the destruction that ravaged the Butterfly’s home planet. They see humans making the same selfish, short-sighted choices in spite of science, and decided to stage an alien invasion to save the world.

But Chris finally has his found family, a group of friends, and he puts the phrase “love you more than anything in the world” by choosing not to go with Goff’s plan, killing the cow instead. The team emerges triumphant from the barn, though Harcourt is critically injured, and Peacemaker finally gets to have his hero moment, walking away with his friend just in time to tell the latecoming Justice League to take a walk.

How Does Season 1 End?

“Peacemaker” wraps things up while setting the stage for Season 2 with a few key moments. Let’s dig into them.

The Justice League

Yep, there was a Justice League cameo at the end of Season 1, including Ezra Miller’s Flash and Jason Momoa’s Aquaman (who was also a major running joke throughout the first season). So is that cannon in Season 2? Not really. Gunn has confirmed that bit of unwieldy phantom franchising will be retconned in Season 2 to exist within the DCU.

Adebayo Cleared Peacemaker’s Name and Outed Her Mom

Just like Chris ultimately chooses his new family over the fate of the world, Adebayo chooses them too in the end. To make things right for her betrayal, she goes to the press and confesses that she planted the journal in Peacemaker’s apartment at Waller’s behest. That’s not just a character beat for Adebayo, it also sets the stage for Rick Flag Sr. (Frank Grillo), who previously appeared in “Creature Commandos” and “Superman,” to take over ARGUS in Season 2.

Harcourt’s Warming Up

At the beginning of the Season, Harcourt detested Chris – in fact, she wouldn’t even call him that, insisting she call him Peacemaker. Harcourt sees him as a murderer, and as the season goes on, you realize she sees him as something even worse: a betrayer of his own team. That’s pretty much Harcourt’s No. 1 thing, you never ever betray your own team member. But that also means she has to be somewhat loyal to him once he’s on her team, and that gives him the chance to prove himself.

After nearly dying in the mission to kill the cow, Harcourt spends days in a coma and Peacemaker stays there the whole time. When she wakes up, they share a nice moment hand in hand.

A Bittersweet Goodbye

We end Season 1 with Chris on his porch. He’s sitting with Eagly when Goff flies up to him, and Chris feeds Goff the last of the amber fluid Butterflies feed on — sweet because it’s an act of kindness, bitter because it’s Goff’s last meal. With the cow gone, the alien will die off after that.

Chris sips a beer with Eagly and Goff when a shadow falls across his face and the camera reveals he’s still seeing the specter of his father, Auggie, haunting him like a ghost and sitting right there on the porch with him.

“Peacemaker” is streaming on HBO Max.

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