The “Peacemaker” twist is a wake-up call for America

Every non-white and/or queer person in America has been in Leota Adebayo’s shoes at various times, walking down a street in an unfamiliar place, minding their business and expecting nothing more than to enjoy the sunshine and fresh air.

If, by chance, they encounter one of the locals, as Adebayo (played by Danielle Brooks) does at the end of the most recent “Peacemaker” episode, they might wave and smile, partly to reassure the stranger that they mean no harm.

Seven out of ten times, that person returns that smile or does nothing. In a hypothetical eighth instance, they may do what the woman driving by Adebayo does in the episode, which is portentously titled “Ignorance Is Chris”: the passerby might respond with a look of shock or possibly outright malice.

The ninth theoretic instance is harder to shake. Maybe the neighborhood watch confronts you, demanding to know what you’re doing on their sidewalks. Maybe they menace you by driving slowly next to you as you’re walking. Maybe they call the local cops to do that for them.

Tenth time cases make national news. Occasionally. They’re why we know the names of Sandra Bland, Trayvon Martin and Ahmaud Arbery, people driving, walking, or jogging through places their residents would designate as safe, nice places to live. Just not for people who don’t look like them.

This is why the final scene of “Ignorance Is Chris” is both validating and terrifying to watch. The five episodes leading up to the second season’s huge reveal revolve around John Cena’s titular hero, also known as Christopher Smith, stumbling through a world that looks exactly like ours — but better. That’s what he tells Adebayo, anyway. In this “best dimension ever,” his father, Auggie (Robert Patrick), is loving and proud of him. His brother, Keith (David Denman), whom our world’s Auggie prodded him to accidentally kill when they were kids, is alive and supportive. The Smiths are a wealthy superhero team known as The Top Trio. The world worships them. Best. Dimension. Ever.

So when Adebayo and the rest of Peacemaker’s 11th Street Kids, a misfit crew that includes Emilia Harcourt (Jennifer Holland), Vigilante (Freddie Stroma) and Economos (Steve Agee), follow Chris into the dimension known as Earth X, Adebayo doesn’t suspect this place might be hazardous to her health. After all, the entry point to this parallel universe is a tony study inside a well-appointed McMansion. A window provides a view of a tree-lined street. It’s nothing like Chris’ shabby rambler in Earth Prime.

Alternate universes always come with a catch, and some of this show’s Very Online viewership figured out Earth X’s fatal flaw early in the season. I did, too. I’m not saying this to brag, but rather, to affirm the shrewd experiment that series creator James Gunn concocted within this second season.

In defense of the benevolent and blinkered souls like Chris, when a place only shows you love, acceptance and prosperity, there’s little reason to look for some obvious reasons that others may not be treated as kindly. And Gunn, who wrote and directed the episode, ensured those clues were milling about in plain view, albeit in the background, for the entire season.

Every Earth X extra is white — the folks on the street, the diners in a cozy family restaurant, the employees at A.R.G.U.S., the government agency Peacemaker works with. Vigilante has a double in this world who is his precise copy in every way except one: Earth X Vigilante hates his dimension’s Peacemaker so much that he joined the Sons of Liberty, that world’s terrorist group (or, depending on your perspective, its freedom fighters).

Our Chris Smith’s main worry is that his kindly alternate dimension father and brother will find out that he killed his doppelganger in an act of self-defense;  Earth X Peacemaker would have murdered him otherwise. (Chris also cut down Earth Prime’s Auggie, which means he’s now offed his father, brother and a version of himself. Any therapist would have a gold mine to work with if he were their client.)

But in all the times Chris visits this wonderful new world, we never meet Adebayo’s counterpart, or the carbon copies of Earth Prime’s multicultural A.R.G.U.S. hit team hunting Peacemaker, led by Tim Meadows’ Agent Fleury.

Even if you missed all of that, and all the more so if you suspected what was coming, an astute viewer might have noticed a tiny rumble in their guts when Adebayo announced she was taking a walk, suggesting, “It’s safer than in here!”

The glaring neighbor lets Adebayo know that’s not true. The woman pulls into a driveway, exits her car and grabs another bystander. Others pour out of their homes. Keith is also driving down the road, but slams on his brakes and leaps out of his truck when he sees Adebayo.

Adebayo is Peacemaker’s unconditionally loving best friend, the glue that binds the 11th Street Kids. But Keith wasn’t raised to consider her value or humanity. “One got out! A Black!” he yells to his neighbors. They form a mob and chase her on foot. Some seem to be smiling, reminiscent of the merry onlookers grinning for the camera in grisly lynching photos.

This is a nightmare realization of an ambient fear that people of color and gay folks in this country learn to live with. You can follow all the rules and exist within society’s prescribed norms and limits, and still stumble into the wrong place at the wrong time and be forced to run for your life. Many white people, even the most well-meaning, cannot fully comprehend that. Chris Smith certainly doesn’t.

His harsh wake-up call occurs when he and Earth Prime’s Harcourt find a small American flag at A.R.G.U.S. headquarters. The stripes remain, but there are no stars, only a swastika. Indeed, it’s the slightest shifts that change everything in alternate dimensions.

In our reality, where a whites-only town in Arkansas made recent headlines and our president urged U.S. military generals to use American cities as “training grounds,” you have to wonder how far removed we are from Earth X. White supremacists like Auggie are on top right now. Give them jet packs, and we’re pretty much right there.

So if “Peacemaker” viewers were puzzled as to how a backwards, murderous bigot like Earth Prime Auggie could manifest as a doting father and an affluent man in a nearly identical world, now we know. Earth X is the place where the Nazis won. It bends to his will. His sons are strong. Its version of Emilia Harcourt is a sturdy Aryan girl who only wears jewel tones and skirts and is infatuated with Chris. The Harcourt we know, who sports black jeans and gets into bar fights just to feel something, is astounded that Peacemaker didn’t immediately sniff out the rot in this utopia. It has been in front of his face the whole time.

DC’s movies largely abandoned their comic books’ social parabolic endeavors during the Zack Snyder era. Marvel didn’t try to venture much deeper, although “Black Panther” and “Captain Marvel” are among the rare exceptions. Most superhero movies are more concerned with expanding the franchise than using their heroes to dissect weighty cultural and political issues.

Gunn’s “Superman,” however, returns to the character’s roots as a symbol of the immigrant’s resilience and the power of empathy. David Corenswet’s Clark Kent isn’t merely invulnerable; he’s also unyielding in his view that in an era defined by corporate cruelty, being nice is true punk rock.

“Ignorance Is Chris” includes a surprise guest cameo by Nicholas Hoult’s Lex Luthor, who forges a deal with Earth Prime’s Rick Flag Sr. (Frank Grillo) – a preview to what’s in store for the 2027 sequel “Superman: Man of Tomorrow.”

But these are distractions, pulling our attention away from the season’s secret mission to test our powers of observation, another aspect of practicing empathy. The film preaches that message, while “Peacemaker” surreptitiously places the audience inside its version of a “What If . . .” simulation.

If you didn’t solve the mystery of Earth X before the close of “Ignorance Is Chris,” you weren’t alone. HBO Max held back screeners for Episode 6 to ensure the reveal’s maximum impact, but Gunn told several trades that he conducted a private viewing to see if anyone could spot that Earth X was only populated with white people.

“No one noticed at all,” he told Variety. “And that was people of color, too, by the way. It wasn’t just, you know, the whites.”

Conservatives had a fit over “Superman” supposedly going “woke.” That was a major summertime theatrical release, whereas “Peacemaker” is still being discovered by the broader public. But that also lends the “Ignorance Is Chris” twist its own edge. What other mainstream title would dare the audience to confront their own “see no color” blind spots by immersing them in a narrative constructed around its amiable protagonist?

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As Gunn tells Variety, and devoted “Peacemaker” viewers already know, Chris is not a bad person. “He’s not a racist, but he does have this sort of narcissistic tendency to judge moments based on how he’s being treated and judged,” Gunn said. “. . . I mean, you think we’re blind for not noticing it on a TV show with clips that are 30 seconds long; he didn’t notice it walking and driving around that everybody was white.”

In other words, the aim isn’t to make people feel guilty about missing the obvious clues. Instead, we might pause and recognize ways to exercise more vigilance about the ways some people are treated differently from others, which is all that anyone like Adebayo might ask.

“Ignorance Is Chris” doesn’t explain how America became the land of the Nazis and home of whites only; that’s forthcoming. Still, it discloses enough for us to register how far Chris must travel in his self-improvement journey. The distance may be greater now, since one adventure during his Earth X interlude involved him slaughtering people he now knows shared his inclusive values.

Like Adebayo told him before he decided to leave our imperfect world behind for one where peace has been achieved through aggressive intolerance, “No matter how green the grass is over there, our biggest problems in life are the ones we carry within ourselves.” That includes our biases. Christopher Smith is learning that the hard way. Aren’t we all.

New episodes of “Peacemaker” stream Thursdays on HBO Max.