James Gunn Finally Confirms the News Peacemaker Fans Have Been Waiting For

5 days ago 9

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This article contains MAJOR SPOILERS for Peacemaker Season 2, Episode 7, "Like a Keith in the Night."

James Gunn has confirmed that the runtime of Peacemaker Season 2, Episode 8, will be the longest in the series. The season has introduced and unraveled plenty of story arcs, and there's now plenty of room to resolve all of that.

Peacemaker's Season 2 finale will run for more than 57 minutes, Gunn revealed on Threads. Comments quickly rallied around the update, with one describing it as "the Super Bowl for DC fans." "You'll be happy to know next week's episode is over 57 minutes long," Gunn wrote in response to a fan's remark on the penultimate episode, which ran for only 33 minutes. That's great news for the series, considering Gunn hasn't given Season 3 the greenlight. If anything, he hinted that Season 2 is the end of Chris Smith's arc, at least for the moment.

Episode 7 left several plot threads unresolved. The cliffhanger saw Chris's band of misfits squaring off with Rick Flag Sr. and A.R.G.U.S., even though Chris was more than willing to hand over the portal to Flag and Bordeaux. Flag commandeers the portal as Chris is arrested, leaving the door wide open for shocking twists in Season 2's final episode. Second to Chris's, his brother Keith's arc is arguably the most compelling in the season, his supervillain turn strongly suggested toward the end of the episode.

James Gunn Explains Peacemaker's Unresolved Trauma

Chris Smith and Alternate Emilia Harcourt walking past the mural of the Top Trio on a wall in Peacemaker Season 2

Speaking to Collider, Gunn said Episode 7 is all about Chris's unresolved trauma, and how that was only exacerbated after he discovered a parallel world. "He's unhappy with the fact that he hasn't been accepted as a hero," he explained. "He's unhappy that his father was abusive and unkind. He's unhappy that his brother is dead. So he finds another world in which the girl he loves fawns over him, and his brother is alive, and his father is kind, and he's a hero. But like anything, there's a darkness to it all."

Season 2 also explored heavy themes, even for an R-rated superhero show. It's revealed in Episode 7 that Earth-X isn't the utopia Chris first thought; it's instead a broken reality where twisted morals are the norm. "There's something that he's not seeing," Gunn added. "I mean, the price in this case is Nazi America. That's what the price of all this happiness was on the show." What's even more heartbreaking is that Auggie Smith's Earth-X doppelganger is the father Chris has been yearning for, a hero in a villain world.

"Auggie is generally a good human being who is opposed to what the Nazis are doing," Gunn confirmed (via ComicBookMovie.com). "But Keith (and Chris 2), well...I don't know. Sometimes the apples fall very far from the tree - on both Earths. Auggie on Earth X has compassion in a way that our Auggie never did."

Peacemaker's Season 2 finale premieres on Oct. 9 on HBO Max.