Review: Peacemaker, "Full Nelson" | Season 2, Episode 8

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I’m going to have to make my peace with the underwhelming Peacemaker finale.

With season two’s main story—about Chris thinking he’d finally discovered the answer to his family problems and finding out the grass has a lot more swastikas on the other side—wrapped up in episode seven, the eighth and final episode, “Full Nelson,” is more about tying up a few emotional loose ends and setting up what’s to come in the world of Peacemaker and the larger DCU (with a little bit of authorial self-indulgence from James Gunn using his platform to highlight some music he likes even more heavily than usual).

After the spectacle of the previous episode, it’s intentionally anticlimactic, and has a future-setting final-moments twist executed in a dramatically inert way. It’s an oddly deflated end to a season that features great high points (the reveal that the alternate-universe version of Chris Smith’s father Auggie is actually a good guy moments before he’s killed) and glaring low points (Adebayo and Adrian being kept waiting around with nothing to do for almost the entire season). There are always enjoyable moments on Peacemaker, but they don’t always come together in a coherent way, and that’s particularly true in this finale. It doesn’t end in a satisfying way because its main character is mostly absent from the story, on screen and emotionally. 

There were episodes earlier this season that Chris wasn’t physically in very much, but it was always his story. Even if an episode spent more runtime with Harcourt or split it up between the rest of the ensemble, the show was always telling Chris’ story. But this episode isn’t from Chris’ point of view; it’s not really from anyone’s, bouncing around in an unfocused way. The scene where Adebayo and her wife split up is from Ads’ perspective, and while it features an excellent performance from Danielle Brooks showing off her Juilliard-trained acting chops, it’s in the service of a nothing story thread that was mostly only referenced, not seen, and never made an impression. The whole thread could have been excised and not been missed. There are also a couple of scenes at A.R.G.U.S. that are kind of randomly from Bordeaux’s perspective, a character who’s a cyborg having an affair with her boss, but neither of those things really matter either.