I'm not quite sure what to do with the second season of "Peacemaker," which has shifted from being less live-action "Venture Brothers" to more generic superhero antics, and also being used as a connector piece between the big screen "Superman" movies, which is the exact sort of thing that got the MCU in so much trouble. There is a compelling hook for the season, which is that Peacemaker has to confront more fallout of his past misdeeds while dealing with his romantic feelings for Harcourt, with the added complication of discovering that the quantum portal his father left him happens to lead into other dimensions. And one of these other dimensions is a world where his father and brother are still alive and well.
I like all the secondary characters in Peacemaker, including Adebayo, Economos, Vigilante, and Harcourt, who have taken to referring to themselves as the 11th Street Kids. They get a bunch of new antagonists, including ARGUS agents played by Tim Meadows and Sol Rodriguez, plus Frank Grillo as Rick Flag Sr., the new ARGUS leader. There are a ton of cameos from James Gunn regulars, and a few faces from "Superman" too. Judomaster (Nhut Le) is back, and as lovably annoying as ever. And I have absolutely no issue when the show is focusing on any of them. The trouble is that Peacemaker is the central character, and he's in an absolute funk this year that is no fun to watch. When he's not mooning over Harcourt, grieving family members, or feeling guilt-ridden over killing Rick Flag's son, he's allowing himself to avoid his problems by being drawn deeper and deeper into the alternate dimension, where everything is obviously too perfect to be true.
Some of the new concepts are interesting, but in general everything's a lot more toned down than the previous season. It feels like Gunn has to be more budget conscious, so only the finale really features any expensive CGI setpieces and creature effects. This isn't a bad thing in the least, but it does mean that this round of "Peacemaker" is less about fantastical comic-book adventures, and more intent on focusing on the real, personal problems of its oddball crew, and it's not very good at that. I don't fault any of the actors, and John Cena remains wonderfully committed, but the material just isn't working a lot of the time. The banter and the silly team dynamics are as good as ever, and Vigilante is quickly moving up the ranks of my favorite characters in this show, but every time we cut back to Peacemaker in existential crisis, it really takes the wind out of their sales.
It doesn't help that there is a lot of indulgent fanboy excess going on. It feels like that since James Gunn got away with certain things in the first season of "Peacemaker," he's doubling down in this one. For instance, there was that great opening dance sequence everybody loved in season one. Season two gives us a new one, set to Foxy Shazam's "Oh Lord." It's a perfectly fine song, but it doesn't deliver that big dose of bombast that Wig Wam's "Do You Want to Taste It" did. And the music references and playlist curation are a lot more prominent this time around. Foxy Shazam even shows up in the finale, where the camera lingers on their performance for an uncomfortable length of time. Maybe Gunn is more interested in being a deejay than a showrunner for this crew.
Sophomore slumps like this are pretty common, and I have no reason to think that future seasons of "Peacemaker" won't improve from here. There's plenty about the second season that I did enjoy. However, I think that it's pretty telling that certain brief cameos were the best parts of the episodes they appeared in, and I finished off the season much more interested in the further adventures of pretty much everyone except Peacemaker. Frankly, it was rough finishing this batch of episodes, and now both of James Gunn's DC television projects have thrown up some major red flags for where the rest of the new DC franchise is going.
At least "Peacemaker" is better than "Creature Commandos," but not by as much as it should be.
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