This isn’t to say that other multiverse stories haven’t used the existence of other worlds to flesh out their characters. Spider-Man: No Way Home does see Peter Parker learn that with great power comes great responsibility. And even the dismal The Flash does send Barry Allen into a world where his beloved mother still lives and his father has not been imprisoned for the crime. It’s just that both films treat the character development as a bump on the road to return performances by actors from other, better movies: Tobey Maguire! Andrew Garfield! Michael Keaton! CGI nightmare version of Christopher Reeve!
Even the mostly-excellent Spider-Verse movies can sometimes lose sight of Miles Morales’s struggle to find his place in the onslaught of wacky Spider-people. Who can think about what it means to belong when faced with Peter Parkedcar, the Spectacular Spider-Mobile.
Thus far, Peacemaker hasn’t given into such temptations. Going into season two, most expected that the multiverse conceit would be a way for James Gunn to clean up the remainders left over from his reboot of the DCU. This way, everything from The Suicide Squad and even Peacemaker season 1 could be canon to Chris, even if the world around him was different.
But Gunn has shown little interest in wasting time explaining canon, and his stories are all the better for it. Instead, he’s focused on Chris as a human being, albeit a human being in a fantastic situation.
When we first met Chris in The Suicide Squad, he was a lunkhead idiot. He declared that he loved peace so much that he was willing to kill for it, a statement delivered without irony. Even more than his team’s mission to Corto Maltese, Chris was worried about proving that he was the best, resulting in a (very funny) sequence in which he and Bloodsport try to one-up each other by killing people in interesting ways—inadvertently wiping out the rebels they’re supposed to be helping. By the end of the film Chris blindly follows Amanda Waller’s orders and kills Rick Flag Jr., a man he claimed to respect.
Throughout Peacemaker‘s first season, we see how Chris became that type of person. His father Auggie, a KKK leader who dons Iron Man-esque armor to become the White Dragon, instilled in Chris a deep sense of insecurity. Auggie taught Chris and Keith that they could only be accepted by being the best, and they could only be the best by violently beating up others. And yet, through his relationship with the misfits who call themselves the 11th Street Kids, Chris finds a different type of acceptance, one that stays even when he fails, one that stays even when the Justice LeagueJustice Gang refuses to acknowledge his role in stopping an alien invasion.
