Peacemaker Recap: When One Door Opens

By
Scott Meslow,
a freelance entertainment and culture critic and author.

Need I Say Door

Season 2

Episode 4

Editor’s Rating

4 stars

Peacemaker
Need I Say Door

Season 2

Episode 4

Editor’s Rating

4 stars

Chris’s desire for a nicer life is what is leading him towards uncertain doom.
Photo: Curtis Bonds Baker/HBO Max

Whenever an alien finally makes first contact, I hope they encounter a better earthling than Auggie Smith. In a prologue set 35 years before the events of Peacemaker’s second season, we join Auggie and his two adolescent sons on a hunting trip. Spotting movement in the nearby brush, Auggie fires his shotgun and blasts off the hands of a shocked, screaming extraterrestrial. Chris is horrified, but Auggie isn’t just a shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later kind of guy; he’s a shoot-again-and-never-ask-questions kind of guy. Having blown the alien’s head clean off its shoulders, he swipes the strange, metallic device it was carrying — a device that opens a portal to the quantum unfolding chamber.

After this bloody prologue, “Need I Say Door” is a race against the clock, as Chris and Adebayo attempt to relocate the quantum unfolding chamber from the Smith household before A.R.G.U.S. can get it open. (They’re aided in the attempt by Economos, whose clumsy attempts to stall the A.R.G.U.S. strike team from opening the door provide most of the episode’s biggest laughs.)

Where is Harcourt as her fellow 11th Street Kids are on the run? She’s licking her wounds after yet another brawl when Rick Flag Sr. comes knocking. At last, the A.R.G.U.S. director confirms Harcourt’s deepest fear: On her way out the door, Waller black-booked Harcourt, ensuring — despite the key role she played in literally saving the world — that she’ll never get another job at an intelligence agency. But he also offers Harcourt a reprieve: If she can deliver up Peacemaker, she’s back in. It’s worth questioning whether anything Flag Sr. says can be trusted — we know, at the very least, that he’s motivated by a hunger for vengeance at pretty much any cost — but Harcourt seems to take him at his word.

Meanwhile, Chris and Adebayo have slipped away to the old Smith hunting cabin, where they manage to relocate the quantum unfolding chamber just in time. At this point, Chris could run right back to alt-Evergreen, which he describes to Adebayo in glowing detail, from his alt-self’s relationship with Emilia to the survival of his brother Keith. She’s unnerved, and rightly so, by Chris’s insistence that the seemingly happier life waiting for him on the other side of the door might rightly be his, and not something he’s stealing from a stranger. It’s also in this conversation that Adebayo delivers the message of the episode, and maybe the season: “No matter how green the grass is there, our biggest problems in life are the ones we carry within ourselves.”

It may not be subtle, but it resonates. Peacemaker’s second season has been just as funny as its first, but the best gags have largely been delivered by wacky side characters like Tim Meadows’ Langston Fleury or Michael Rooker’s Red St. Wild. Despite Rick Flag’s sneering, dying appraisal that Peacemaker is “a joke” — a moment from The Suicide Squad that Peacemaker’s second season has referenced over and over again — there’s been nothing especially comedic about John Cena’s performance over the past four episodes. What stands out is the loneliness and the hunger for a happier life he knows he might never achieve on his own merits.

As the episode ends, Chris is heading toward exactly the kind of dead-end he’s spent the season hoping to avoid. As the guitar licks of H.E.A.T.’s “A Shot at Redemption” wail over the soundtrack, Chris is driving straight toward a rendezvous with Harcourt that doubles as an A.R.G.U.S. trap. For now, at least, the grass on the other side of the door is looking much greener.

• Unless there’s a twist coming? The somber look on Chris’ face as the episode ends suggests he already knows he’s walking into a trap, and I’m hoping Harcourt wouldn’t sell him out just to get back into Harcourt’s good graces. Here’s hoping they’ve got a secret plan to turn the tables on a spy organization that — at least while Rick Flag Sr. is running things — seems very, very unlikely to leave Chris alone.

• In what sounds like a very Dreamstone-like scenario, Adebayo suggests that the “alternate universe” is actually just a portal to a dimension that delves into his mind and creates a “world” that simply contains whatever he wants. Reddit sleuths, noting the sheer lack of racial diversity in alt-Evergreen, have convincingly hit on a different explanation: It’s a parallel universe in which white supremacy fully defines American culture, echoing the darkest and wildest dreams of Auggie “White Dragon” Smith from Chris’ own universe.

• Owing to an incredibly unconvincing lie from Economos that Red St. Wild instantly believes, the world’s deadliest eagle hunter now believes he can purge the United States of all transgressions against native and indigenous people just by killing the “primal eagle.” Pray for Eagly.

• So now we know how Auggie, who never exactly seemed like a technological genius, got access to a quantum unfolding chamber. As for how he pulled off all those amazing helmets: “It’s complicated,” says Chris — a story, apparently, for another time.

• Kupperberg Park, the site of Chris and Harcourt’s upcoming meeting, is named in honor of DC Comics writer and editor Paul Kupperberg, whose 1988 Peacemaker limited series was the primary inspiration for James Gunn’s take on the character.

• Rick Flag Sr. references both a time when he had a broken back and a time he defied Amanda Waller’s orders in Pokolistan, all of which should sound very familiar to viewers of Creature Commandos.

• The phone number for Adebayo’s security firm is an actual U.S. phone number: 509-142-7223. At the time of this writing, I got a “your call cannot be completed as dialed” message, but maybe it’ll be functional by the time this recap runs? Let me know in the comments.

• Per the post-credits scene, a complete list of the foods Red St. Wild claims he can taste in Eagly’s four-day-old poop: Cold cuts, potato chips, peppermint, soap, Twizzlers, M&Ms, Fruity Pebbles, protein powder, tikka masala, lima beans, pad Thai, A5 Wagyu, and beluga caviar. “Oh my God, that eagle eats better than I do.”

• “What kind of grown man spits on another person?” Ask Jalen Carter, I guess.

• “You judge me for ridding the world of beaked vermin?”

Peacemaker Recap: When One Door Opens