Peacemaker Season 2 Review: Notable Orgy Scene Stands Out
hasn’t lost his punk edge. Clark Kent may never curse, but the Peacemaker cast are happy to take up the sweary slack. (Notable additions to the ensemble include Tim Meadows as an oddball government agent and Frank Grillo as a ruthless colonel with a distinctly non-military pompadour.)
The action picks up a month after the events of Superman, and Smith is struggling to parlay his alien invasion foiling into a sustainable superhero career. Things aren’t going much better for his local cohort of found family. Tetchy hacker Economos (Steve Agee) is being forced to surveil Peacemaker by the shady Argus agency, the usually sunny Adebayo (Danielle Brooks) is struggling with a breakup, and flinty butt-kicker Emilia (Jennifer Holland) is now a pariah in the intelligence community.
Only semi-reformed serial killer Adrian (Freddie Stroma) seems to be doing okay, even if his new interest in owls verges on the obsessive. After a particularly crushing career setback, Smith digs out a cocaine baggie marked “for a rainy day” and tries to party away his pain. What follows is an expansive and sustained orgy scene that must have required bringing in intimacy coordinators by the busload. Plenty of other HBO shows have featured group sex scenes, but Peacemaker is the first where the post-orgy logistics of cleaning up and turfing participants out are addressed in a subsequent episode.
Bubbling away beneath all this self-loathing is Peacemaker’s discovery that the Tardis-style storage unit he uses to stash his guns and helmets is actually a quantum gateway to 99 other universes, including one alternate reality where things turned out better for Chris Smith. Should he keep plugging away in a world where it feels as if he can never do anything right? Or rush toward a dimension where Peacemaker is beloved and has a cool customized motorbike called the P-Cycle? As Adebayo sagely notes: “This is becoming some messed-up Twilight Zone stuff.”
The sporadic bursts of ultraviolence will be a barrier to entry for some, but underneath all the crunching fight scenes and crass jokes, there is real heart. Gunn clearly loved these damaged characters enough to carry them over to his shiny new universe, but he is also never afraid to put them through the wringer. It makes even the tiniest victories in their lives feel monumental.
The show would also collapse without the full-body commitment of Cena. He has long nailed the petulant side of Peacemaker while hurling himself into the physical comedy. As the longstanding attraction between Smith and Emilia intensifies this season, he also gets to play goofily romantic. Is he a good actor, or a great one? In an upcoming episode, there is a scene where Smith is deeply hungover and blearily begins checking his phone while relieving himself. Mid-stream, he realizes how late he is going to be for a vital meeting. The sight of Cena angrily shouting “PISS!” at himself to try to speed things up is an Emmy-worthy masterclass.
Peacemaker season two is available on Sky Max and Now in the UK and HBO Max in the US and Australia.
