Season 1 of James Gunn’s DC spin-off series Peacemaker originally ended with a cameo that was daring enough to make Gunn nervous. (Spoilers ahead for an episode from 2022.)
Battered and bloodied after just barely saving the world from an alien invasion, anti-hero Peacemaker (John Cena) and his surviving teammates are headed away from the battlefield to get medical treatment when the Justice League finally arrive, too late to help.
The cameo happened during the Zack Snyder era of the DC Extended Universe, so the Justice League consists of Snyder’s cast. Superman and Wonder Woman are silent and seen only in silhouette — Henry Cavill and Gal Gadot aren’t in the sequence. But Jason Momoa and Ezra Miller showed up to reprise their roles as Aquaman and Flash — and to throw a little shade around.
Problem is, three years later, none of this cast and none of these characters are still canon in the new DCU continuity that Gunn is overseeing as co-chairman and co-CEO of DC Studios. So season 2 of Peacemaker opens with a “previously on” recap that retcons that scene out of existence — a symbol of how Gunn is rewriting some parts of DC movie and TV history while keeping other elements.
Peacemaker? Still canon in the new DCU. Peacemaker meeting Wonder Woman? Nope.
[Ed. note: Spoilers ahead for the new cameo gag in Peacemaker season 2, episode 1.]
Instead of Snyder’s Justice League, we get the Justice Gang seen in Superman — Superman, Supergirl, Mr. Terrific, Guy Gardner/Green Lantern, and Hawkgirl. Once again, only two of the original actors are actually present — this time, it’s Nathan Fillion as Guy and Isabela Merced as Hawkgirl. But the energy is about the same, with a new brief round of back-and-forth banter, and a new immature rumor Peacemaker has been spreading about one of them.
The real gag here is that Gunn — who directed the season premiere himself — plays the retcon entirely straight-faced, just full-on memory-holing the Snyderverse version of the cameo as if it never existed. In on Peacemaker: The Official Podcast, an episode-by-episode series breakdown Gunn is recording with cast members Jennifer Holland and Steve Agee, Gunn explains: “Now we come into the new DCU — and really, you look back at season 1 of Peacemaker and almost everything [in it is still] canon. We’re doing little tiny things — maybe there’s no Bat-Mite, maybe there’s no Green Arrow, I don’t know. They’re pretty small things. But the appearance of the Justice League is totally wrong and doesn’t fit. And so we have a plan for it.”
That plan turns out to be pretending it never happened, via the familiar medium of the recap reel — which in this case both sets up and pays off a gag between Peacemaker and Guy Gardner. In the original version, Peacemaker tells a hospital worker in episode 1 that Aquaman has sex with fish. The season finale, episode 8, comes full circle, with Peacemaker shouting “Go fuck another fish, asshole!” over his shoulder at Aquaman as his team walks past the Justice League. Aquaman says he’s “so fucking sick of that rumor.” Flash snickers that it isn’t a rumor. “Fuck you, Barry,” Aquaman shoots back.
But with the retconned version, there’s no earlier episode to call back to — so Gunn throws in another flashback to a different scene that didn’t previously exist, where Peacemaker admits that Guy doesn’t like him because Peacemaker once threw up all over him while Guy was flying him around. In a typical bit of defensive deflection triggered by admitting to a failing, Peacemaker adds that the sick thing was, he thinks Guy kinda liked it.
All of which leads to Guy Gardner complaining to Hawkgirl that Peacemaker is an asshole who likes to tell people Guy is a “puke freak.” Same tone, still transgressive, still kinda sexual, just a different guy with a different weird fetish.
It’s hard to imagine Peacemaker continuing into some projected future without Gunn’s involvement — the boundary-pushing, the sloppy but oddly endearing characters, the frequent needle-drops, and the big themes of reluctantly found family are all so inherently his. But it’s still fun to imagine this one particular scene getting retconned again and again as new creatives take over at DC in the decades to come, with Peacemaker getting season after season solely so new teams can rewrite this sequence with their own version of the Justice League, and their own insults about League members’ fetishes. Maybe we’ll eventually find out what Peacemaker tells everyone that Superman’s secretly into.
