Peacemaker Season 2 Dives Darker and Deeper into the Multiverse

By contrast, “Another Rick Up My Sleeve,” the third episode of Peacemaker season 2, demonstrates how James Gunn applies the multiverse with more ambition — leaning into the kind of speculative, philosophical uses seen in shows and films like Fringe, Everything Everywhere All at Once, and Dark Matter. Rather than a parade of cameos, Gunn lets alternate realities probe identity, desire, and moral limits.

Ed. note: This article contains major spoilers for Peacemaker season 2, episode 3.

In the season 2 premiere, Chris Smith (John Cena) slips into an alternate Earth — Gunn’s so-called Earth‑2 — where Auggie (Robert Patrick) and Keith (David Denman) are alive. There, Chris is a celebrated champion with the family rapport he’s always craved and a legitimate shot at a relationship with Emilia Harcourt (Jennifer Holland). As the episode wryly notes, it feels like the “best dimension ever” to him.

The reality is alluring because it appears to solve everything. After a string of self-destructive choices that mirror the show’s first episode — seduction, rejection, carousing that ends in violence — Chris finds an opening: in Earth‑2 he kills his doppelgänger rather than an alien, and that act becomes his ticket into a more desirable life.

However, living in Earth‑2 exacts a different, deeper price than disposing of a corpse. The original trauma that shaped Chris — accidentally killing Keith as a child, and the lifelong guilt and shame Auggie heaped on him — was the emotional spine of season 1. Auggie’s abuse and the constant comparisons to Keith propelled Chris toward his worst impulses and ultimately led to Auggie’s death at Chris’ hands once the truth of Auggie’s cruelty became clear.

Chris insists he’s changed — telling the Justice Gang he’s no longer indiscriminate and promising Earth‑2 Harcourt he won’t repeat old mistakes — but his actions betray that claim. Instead of facing grief, addiction, and the patterns Auggie planted in him, Chris lapses into a fantasy of easy redemption: fame, family, and a romance that validates him. He chooses the appearance of improvement over the hard work of actual change.

The show also invites a closer look at the world Chris steps into. The crowds cheering his Peace Cycle are uniformly white, and Earth‑2’s ARGUS employees and the DMV victims of a Sons of Liberty attack skew the same way — a striking contrast to the more diverse teams in Chris’ original reality. That homogeneity reframes Earth‑2’s “perfect” veneer, suggesting power and privilege may be baked into the world he’s so eager to inhabit. The Sons of Liberty’s campaign — targeting government offices that house citizens’ data — starts to read less like random terrorism and more like resistance to a regime advantaging a superhero‑backed elite.

Earth‑2 Auggie has a hero’s mantle as Blue Dragon — a pointed inversion of his original White Dragon persona — but that rebranding doesn’t necessarily mean his worldview has been redeemed. If Auggie and Keith had remained a united, celebrated force on Earth‑2, it’s plausible they could have leveraged interdimensional technology to consolidate influence. In that light, the Sons of Liberty’s targets start to make strategic sense: they’re striking the infrastructure of a system that could be protecting a supremacist power structure.

The episode’s violent confrontation with the Sons of Liberty exposes Chris’ relapse into brutality. Keith’s unflinching lethality — destroying an escape helicopter and accepting the civilian toll — and Chris’ readiness to kill impress and seduce Earth‑2 Harcourt, who seems drawn to the violence rather than repelled by it. Rather than prompting introspection about why his counterpart was self‑destructive, Chris opts for the immediate comforts of acclaim and romance.

That arc echoes the multiverse tales Gunn appears to be referencing: works that begin as wish‑fulfillment — what if life had gone differently; what if loss had been avoided; what if you’d made another choice — but then interrogate those fantasies by exposing how alternate paths can harbor darker outcomes. Stories like Dark Matter, Fringe, and Everything Everywhere All at Once turn speculative possibility into a means of examining character, culpability, and the capacity for harm.

For Chris, the harder fight isn’t against an external alternate‑reality opponent but against the unchanged parts of himself. He’s tempted to flee into Earth‑2’s flattering mirror instead of earning the trust and connections he’s already built. That internal reckoning — choosing to confront or conceal the impulses that made him dangerous — is the kind of moral crucible that makes multiverse storytelling meaningful when it probes identity instead of merchandising.

Peacemaker is streaming on HBO Max, with new episodes premiering every Thursday through Oct. 9.

Source: Polygon