Let’s Talk about Earth X

Traditionally I don’t review individual episodes of a television show. Series premieres are one thing, since I do like to do a kind of “where we started vs. where we ended up” comparison eventually, but I don’t often feel a need to pick out individual episodes during a run to review. If a season is eight, ten, twenty episodes long, one episode from the middle doesn’t normally stick out as something I should review. I want to know the whole story of the season, especially when it’s a serialized story, and any one episode may not be more or less important to that story than others. The season is what matters, not just one episode within.

Of course, then every once in a while an episode gets elevated in the public discourse and it’s hard to ignore that maybe, just this time, I should make an exception. Such is the case with Peacemaker’s second season, where the sixth episode dropped in quite the left turn shift in the story that everyone online is talking about. So we’re going to get down into it and discuss not just the implications of this episode for the season as a whole, but also what the discourse around it is saying. Naturally, be prepared for spoilers if you read past this point as I’m not going to hold back.

In the season up until now, Chris Smith aka Peacemaker (John Cena) has felt adrift. He helped save the world at the end of season one and yet the world still views him as a joke (if not as an outright villain). The woman he loves, Emilia Harcourt (Jennifer Holland), doesn’t love him back, and while he has friends he doesn’t feel like he’s really making any progress in his life. After one night (with alcohol, drugs, and an orgy) he wanders into the dimensional gateway that he and his father found (and then set up in his father’s house) and finds another door not unlike the one he came through. Shockingly this leads to another world not dissimilar to his own, with another Peacemaker, and where his dad and brother are both still alive.

After trying to figure out what all this means (and accidentally killing his other self from this new dimension), Chris eventually decides that he’ll abandon his old life and take over as the Peacemaker of this new world. It has his family, it has a version of Harcourt that wants to be with him, and everyone here treats him like a hero. He can finally have the life he always wanted. But when his friends figure out a way to follow him through the dimensions, they force him to really look around and confront a truth he somehow hadn’t noticed: the dimension he decamped for is actually Earth-X.

For those that don’t know, Earth-X was introduced in 1973 and is a version of Earth when the Nazis won World War II. It features a “Fourth Reich” lead by villainous versions of superheroes we know, such as Overman (Superman), Brunhilde (Wonder Woman), and Leatherwing (Batman). None of those heroes appear in Peacemaker (at least, not by the end of the sixth episode, “Ignorance is Chris”), but presumably they exist somewhere on this world. Instead of those heroes we get a different version of Chris / Peacemaker, his father, Auggie / Blue Devil, and his brother, Keith (whose superhero/supervillain name isn’t known). And this is the world, we think, that Chris has been dropped into.

Now, first of all, I will preface this by saying that we think he’s on Earth-X. We see a version of the American flag where the stars are replaced by a white swastika. If that’s not the Nazi-led Earth-X then it’s some other version quite similar to it. That one reveal allows us to infer a lot about the world, but it’s not the only thing that stood out when you really paid attention. Naturally his father, a white supremacist villain in the Earth-Prime continuity, being a hero over in the other world felt a little weird. Also the fact that there weren’t any people of color, if you were paying attention, was also a touch strange. Heck, there was a food stand selling bratwurst, not hot dogs, in a brief scene earlier in the season. This wasn’t just a sudden rug pull, this was Earth-X (or something like it) all along.

The question many online were asking was: how could Chris not notice? Did he never look at a flag flying in the breeze, or question why his father, a white supremacist in his world, would suddenly make a face turn and become a hero? The answer to that is that Chris grew up in a white supremacist household and, along with not being the brightest bulb around, likely would ignore a lot of little hints that others would notice and think strange. While it might be a bit of a stretch for Chris to never notice an American flag and realize something was off, many other things could be brushed off by the character because they simply weren’t outside the norm for him.

Plus, he was caught up in the moment. He had a version of his dad that loved him (as opposed to the dad he actually grew up with that hated him because Auggie blamed Chris for his brother’s death). His brother, Keith, is also alive, and he can finally see what kind of person his brother would become. And the Amelia Harcourt here is into him and wants to be with him. All off that likely gave him blissful blinders, with Chris simply not wanting to see anything that was odd or weird because then he’d have to confront the fact this perfect, happy place he thought he found was actually a nightmare world.

I think all of that is interesting. In the long run it could force Chris to confront his own issues and the way he views the world, and it could force him to make new choices and work on himself in the process. Of course, being on a Nazi world also poses a sudden and immediate threat for him and his friends (all of whom came to drag him back to his world), heightening the stakes for the last two episodes of the season. Overall I think this was a solid twist for the season that pushes everything. It’s a great way to close out this season’s story.

All of that being said, the internet is still full of idiots and many people online aren’t happy with this twist. Most of them, of course, are the usual far-right voices. They immediately say that setting the other dimension on Earth-X is pushing a liberal agenda. Well, okay, they don’t know that it’s Earth-X because they aren’t deep into comics, but making it a Nazi world is pushing the agenda in their books. “Oh, it’s a Nazi world. Clearly the writer is commenting on the current state of politics.” This despite the show being apolitical otherwise.

Let’s make it clear: if you see a Nazi symbol in a show and immediately feel like your political ideology is somehow being attacked, that says more about you than the show. As G.I. Robot would note, “that sounds like something a Nazi would say.” Just having the story set on Earth-X isn’t immediately a political statement, and it’s weird that we’ve moved so far from a point where Nazis could just be the villains of stories (because Nazis are evil) and now are somehow the “woke left pushing their politics”. That is quite the cultural shift over the last few years.

But even then: so what if this is meant to be a subtle dig at the state of the world. I’m not saying it is, but if you want to read it and say, “the heroes are fighting against Nazis and facism,” isn’t that a good thing. How is battling Nazis supposed to be bad? In a ranking of history of the world’s greatest villains, the Nazis would rank at the number one spot in my book, and if we had to rank it by individuals, all the Nazi leaders would absolutely take up the Top 10, maybe the Top 20. Again, if you have an issue with the heroes battling Nazis for the last few episodes of the second season of Peacemaker, go back to what G.I. Robot was saying.

In short, I think this episode was great, a solid twist that was properly hinted at but still feels like a gut punch all the same. Those online that hate it are uncomfortable with the implications the show made (whether the series intended to or not) and that says more about them than anything else. For the rest of us, the sane, the ones not aligned with the far-right, this is a winning episode that absolutely makes for a great season of television. And for those on the far-right that hate it: go have a solid think and realize you’re on the wrong side, and not just about this episode.