Spoilers ahead for episode 6 of Peacemaker Season 2, though if you haven’t seen it already, what are you doing? Why are you here? Watch that episode, stat.
Anyway. In a recent interview with GQ, James Gunn talked a little about the reception to episode 6 of Peacemaker Season 2 and the big Earth-X reveal. For the uninitiated, Earth-X is a parallel dimension where the Nazis won World War II, thus turning the USA into a white supremacist state where all people of color are either dead or locked up. All throughout Season 2, we’ve only seen Earth-X through Chris’s eyes, where he calls it the Best Dimension Ever, all the while failing to notice that there are no people of color in this world, as Harcourt later points out.
At the end of the episode, when Adebayo (Danielle Brooks) heads out for a walk, people start giving her weird looks. It’s not long before the entire neighborhood starts chasing after her.
It was a big turning point for Peacemaker Season 2 and, in my opinion, completely worth the slow burn of the preceding episodes. Gunn mentions that he’d gotten a lot of pushback for this episode in particular, but responded with: “Let’s not be bashful about this. Let’s just do the story that we want to do and I don’t want to have to pull punches with it.”
After the episode aired and the reactions started pouring in, Gunn stated, “I have a few racists that have called me polarizing, but I’m okay with being polarizing and letting racists fall to the wayside. People have loved this episode the most, so it’s exciting.”
While Peacemaker is generally a very humorous show, Gunn isn’t blinded to the fact that this episode would be dealing with a very sensitive issue. He recognized that it needed to be handled in a way that lent gravitas to the matter, while also keeping it in line with the tone of the show. “We’re dealing with racism and at the same time, there’s humor in this episode,” Gunn say, “And so, you’re dealing with something very delicate and yet we’re not being delicate about it — but I don’t think we’re not being delicate in a non-thoughtful way. I think we’re being thoughtful about it.”
Gunn also made sure to run the script past Brooks before filming, stating, “When I was first writing the episodes and I first finished the episode, I sent it to Danielle Brooks and we had a big conversation. I wanted to make sure she was okay with everything… you don’t want to treat it lightly and there’s a humorous aspect to it, but it’s also very scary. It was about the way we handled all that.”
We’ve only got two episodes left in Peacemaker Season 2, so it remains to be seen just how Chris will handle this revelation of his brother and father being white supremacists, and whether he’ll be able to go back to his original dimension.
Peacemaker is now available for streaming on HBO Max.
