12/09/2025
I'm sure this will p**s off many, many, many people, but let me stress I was a HUGE fan of Season 1, seriously consider it my favorite superhero thing ever, of all-time. I’ve watched it all the way through three times. I also loved the Superman movie. That one grew on me. It came out on my birthday and I got to see it in a theater which is a VERY rare privilege for me due to epilepsy issues. Since its VOD release, I've watched it a few times and had it running in the background while working on the baseball NES games feature. Got ALL that? Good.
WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED?! Peacemaker Season 2 is BORING! Oh god, it just fu***ng sucks! This plot moves at the pace of tectonic plates. Each new episode feels like it has moved the bigger story forward a couple atoms at most. The humor that was so good in season one is so forced and so cringey here. Bird blindness? BIRD BLINDNESS? ARE YOU FU***NG TAKING THE S**T? If this guy doesn't end up being a double agent who is actively sabotaging ARGUS, then this guy is the single worst character in the history of fiction. Bird fu***ng blindness? I assume this is like a witty attempt at satirizing Game of Thrones-like plot armor because they needed Eagly to survive the first raid of Peacemaker's house and they needed Tim Meadows to also escape uninjured and Gunn thought-up "bird blindness" and it was the single stupidest fu***ng idea ever but it cracked him up so much that he just added about fifty fu***ng million bird blindness jokes and they all suck, each and every one of them, and it's not made funny because the guy is obnoxious. It's less a running gag and more of an ammunition factory because it completely bombs every time. I cannot remember a single character in any show I ever (once) loved that is just so fu***ng soul-sucking and demoralizing every single fu***ng time they cut back to them. When Tim Meadows is on screen in Peacemaker, I know what I'm about to see is so forced and so fu***ng unbearable and plot stopping and boring that I literally cannot believe this is the draft of the season they greenlit. Does anyone tell James Gunn "no" over there or did that stop after Superman was pretty good? Because if that's the case and this is what his work with nobody hovering over him saying "no" looks like, oh dear.
It's not ALL bad. The main plot is very interesting! Seriously, I can't get enough of it. Literally. I can't get enough of it. I sure wish there was a lot more of it, because the b-plots and literally every character but Peacemaker himself makes me want to fu***ng scream. They took interesting characters and found the most boring fu***ng things to do with them and so characters I loved in Season One I just can't stand anymore because they're taking me away from the good stuff. The stuff that I haven't seen a million times before. The interesting stuff. In season one, Harcourt started as a stereotypical girl boss, but it was funny because of the dynamic with her and Peacemaker, a dude bro "do*****ag Captain America" who she hated. Well, so much for that. Now she's just the stereotypical girl boss without the person to play off of. You know, that thing that's in every fu***ng show anymore? Right down to her literal first fu***ng moment of season two being told she had toxic masculinity. HAHA! IT'S FUNNY BECAUSE SHE'S A CHICK AND SHE'S TOUGHER THAN THE GUYS! I GET THAT JOKE! I'M A JOKE GETTER! RIMSHOT, AM I RIGHT?
No, actually, James Gunn and HBO Max should have hired the struggling cymbal players of the world (and truly they are our forgotten heroes) to go to the houses of everyone watching the season 2 premier, and when Harcourt's first scene starts, the cymbal players have their cue to position your head between their instruments. When the "you have toxic masculinity" line happened and it cuts to Harcourt, wait one second, then BANG the cymbal players smash their cymbals right into your fu***ng head, because that's about how lazy and uninspired her writing has been. It's your fu***ng wife, dude! Give her something better than this s**t! I loved that character in season one and now every time they cut to her picking a fight with someone, I wish that were me picking that fight, because *I* wouldn't last. I would be unconscious on the concrete, and that we would joyous, because then I would be free from caring about this show that I used to love being reduced to a fu***ng slog where NOTHING happens 99% of the time and everything is just so fu***ng lazily written and boring and unfunny. "Hey look, Vigilante is asking questions about how many eyes things have now. It doesn't feel forced at all. I can't wait for the next ten variations of this joke."
My god, I loved these characters in season one. I loved every single side-character. I loved the banter between them. I loved Murn. Apparently the Butterflies really were the only thing that made it all work. In season two, none of the B-plots work at all. Episode four was the point where every time we're taken away from Peacemaker himself, I find my heart sinks. It feels like a stand up comedian bombing in the middle of a swimming pool, paddling just to keep its head barely above the water. It reminds me of like Westworld or True Blood where the first season had me eating out of its hand, and then in season two they just come up with the most slow moving, water treading, "please stop showing the B story, it fu***ng sucks and it's not working and these once interesting characters are just fu***ng unbearable to listen to another second." It is NOT the same as dye beard from Season One. You cannot pay off these jokes because they're not having a positive effect on the narrative. Dye Beard worked because (1) it took like a second or two of screen time and didn't require a ton of exposition and (2) it showed how Chris couldn't help but make it hard to like him and how he was just a run of the mill bully. That's why the pay off at the end hit the way it did. You can't make bird blindness or how many eyes something has pay off that way. It's just bad.
And it just feels like this didn't need to be eight episodes. It doesn't feel like eight episodes of story is happening. It feels like each episode is like one third of a potentially really, really good TV show, but the other two-thirds is just the incorporeal concept of misery manifesting itself as a streaming TV show. It really does remind me of True Blood where they had a really great first season, but the second season you could tell they were struggling to fill time and they had to tread water for the plot points that actually were interesting, so there's a lot of filler. Watching Season 1 back, it moves at roughly the same pace or maybe just slightly faster, but the characters got to play off each other. These are BORING characters apart from each other, and it's the interaction between them that made Season One the best thing to happen to superhero media. You'd have to be high on your own supply to keep THOSE characters apart from each other for the first four episodes, but then to introduce the most boring characters into this mix is just, wild and weird and like..........
I don't know what to say. It's seriously like watching a TV show run in place for an hour a week every week. Bird Blindness should be the new Jump the Shark. If THAT is the best s**t he could come up with, the most hack writing s**t I've ever heard in my life, then he should have just said "f**k it" and brought back Murn. I was hanging on the edge of my seat with Murn. You could go places with a guy who is really just an alien butterfly piloting a dead guy who was apparently the "worst person" the alien bug could find so they wouldn't feel guilty. You can't go anywhere with bird blindness guy. If give so little a s**t that you're writing bird blindness, then f**k it, bring back the dead crushed bug guy in the same body. Why not? It's better than bird blindness.
And after Peacemaker Season 2, I'm never watching another superhero show after the first season. They're one and done from here out. Loved the Boys season one, and it became on the nose and boring after. Loved Doom Patrol season one. Loved Supergirl. Loved that Superman cartoon that I can never remember the name of but it was fun the first season and impossible afterward. If everything that happens in the last three episodes is wiz-bang fun for the whole depraved family, (thumbs up) cool! Maybe you should have done five episodes instead of eight, because after three years, Peacemaker Season 2 so far feels like it has been one or two episodes worth of happenings stretched out into four incredibly boring episodes that occasionally have something neat, where all the characters who played off of each other just aren't around each other. It's terrible. I'm so disappointed.
