Peacemaker: How [SPOILER] Returned In The Finale

Warning: Contains spoilers for Peacemaker season 1.

In the Peacemakerseason 1 finale, White Dragon made a surprising return, but Robert Patrick’s Auggie Smith appearance is just the start of a bigger Peacemaker story. Peacemaker is set in a period of the DCEU when everyone knows that superheroes and metahumans exist. This means that it can be hard to know what it really means when someone appears to return from the dead.

In Peacemaker episode 7, “Stop Dragon My Heart Around,” Peacemaker (John Cena) finally stood up to his father and acknowledged that it was ultimately White Dragon’s fault that Keith died. This confrontation ended with Peacemaker shooting Auggie Smith in the head with a Luger and leaving him very much dead. At the beginning of Peacemaker episode 8, “It’s Cow Or Never,” Vigilante calls back to the fact that they killed Peacemaker’s father, but later in the episode Peacemaker sees White Dragon in the woods, and he appears once again in the finale moments of Peacemaker season 1 at Chris Smith’s trailer.

When Peacemaker sees White Dragon in the woods while looking for the Sonic Boom helmet, the switch to Harcourt’s (Jennifer Holland) point of view makes it clear that he is not really there. Peacemaker acknowledges that his father is not really there and that he is metaphorically being haunted from beyond the grave. While the return of White Dragon as a ghost might seem like a strange choice, it ties into Peacemaker’s original comic narrative. In the comics, Peacemaker’s father is the Nazi Wolfgang Schmidt and Peacemaker saw him take his own life as a child (a trauma that is replaced by Keith’s death in the Peacemaker TV series). For a large part of his comic book run, Peacemaker is haunted by the ghost of his father who urges him to kill, and it is sometimes not clear whether Peacemaker is hallucinating because of his trauma or actually being haunted by a spirit.

This aspect is further complicated in the Peacemaker comics by the fact that Peacemaker has some interesting beliefs about ghosts. In the Peacemaker TV series, James Gunn has given Peacemaker a range of helmets with special powers. In the comics, this is somewhat different with the helmets only being bulletproof. However, likely as a result of his trauma, Peacemaker believes that the ghosts of those he has failed to save live in his helmet and talk to him, pushing him to save others (through his traditionally violent means).

Peacemaker season 1 was established as following Peacemaker redefining himself after Rick Flag’s The Suicide Squad death and pushing back against his father. The fact that he was able to stand up to his father and ultimately kills White Dragon is important. However, the fact that Peacemaker hallucinates his father’s ghost in the Peacemaker season 1 finale helps to demonstrate that trauma is a complex beast and not something that is solved by a single confrontation. Instead, White Dragon’s return in the season finale helps to set up the difficult road ahead for Peacemaker in the confirmed Peacemakerseason 2.

About The Author

Faefyx Collington
(487 Articles Published)

Faefyx Collington (They/Them) is a senior features writer for Screen Rant. They’re a British writer of both fiction and non-fiction, focussing on science fiction, fantasy, and mystery for the former and on culture, gender, and current affairs for the latter.
Never content to settle to one thing, Faefyx is also a co-host and producer of the podcast and video series “Unramblings,” and can occasionally be found making music around the internet as well.
Having acquired degrees on both sides of the Atlantic, Fyx has settled (for the moment) in the southern United States where they live with their spouse and an entirely appropriate number of cats.

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