Since I've been talking about Peacemaker anyway I figure I might as well share my thoughts on the finale and season 2 as a whole, since I have a lot of them. (warning for full series spoilers)
Before the finale, I was really enjoying season 2. Everything felt well set up, the reveal in episode 6 was amazing, so it made perfect sense to me for the season to end on tying up the Earth X storyline and have Keith return in some way for revenge, considering the attention given to the fact that Harcourt didn't kill him, and have the season end on a big fight that would lead into the tying-up of character moments. But it didn't!!
The direction they chose to go for the finale seemed completely out of left field. The Earth X storyline is completely forgotten about, with none of the loose ends remembered, and instead the finale focused way too much on ARGUS using the doors. While the doors had been related to the season as a whole, it's not what was built up for SIX EPISODES, so that ultimately being the final goal of the season didn't feel connected in the way it should have been. What was built up was the fact that the universe Peacemaker had been inhabiting was Earth X, so the fact that the group ultimately only spends about 30 minutes there and then gets the hell out of dodge felt like a complete lack of resolution for what was built up.
I am a pretty big DC fan, to be clear. This doesn't mean I'm upset when there's no big action fights or big cameos. Cameos are fun, and seeing Lex was great, but I didn't care whether there was a big finale cameo or not; the show was about the 11th street kids so attention shouldn't be drawn away from them. But the lack of any real fights this season felt completely off.
Season 1 was an action-focused show. There was some form of fight nearly every episode, and each time they were there for a reason. Season 2 has like, two, and they're right at the start in episodes 1 and 2. While I do think the increase in character-focused storytelling was important for all of them, the show's identity as an action series felt forgotten about. A lot of the core components of Season 1 also felt forgotten about, like Peacemaker's helmets? Adebayo outing Waller felt like it had barely any impact? I'm not even sure if we saw Vigilante kill anyone apart from Earth-X Auggie.
Overall, everyone just felt like they had lost something of themselves this season. Adebayo and Economos were definitely the strongest in terms of writing, while Rick Flag Sr was BY FAR the weakest. By the finale, he feels like a completely different person than he was in Creature Commandos, and rather than feeling like a natural progression it felt like he had just decided to go full asshole for barely cognizant reasons. We have been shown that Flag is an emotion-driven character, so it makes sense that he would hold a ton of resentment towards Chris, but I got the impression that the way he had attacked Chris in episode 5 (?) was to convince Chris was that the reason they were following him was personal, rather than to find the portal. The fact that it DID end up being fully personal, rather than only partially revenge-driven and partially for strategic reasons made Flag feel much less smart.
Now for the season 2 finale itself. The cliffhanger was a bad idea. What was great about season 1 was that it's a fully watchable show without knowing any of the context of the universe it was in. Sure, you got a lot of extra tidbits out of it being a DC fan, but it was easy and still good to watch in a casual context (I genuinely think this was the one good thing about it being in the dying end of the Snyderverse, because there was nothing left to tie it into.) Ending the show on something that most casual fans have never even heard of (Salvation) was not a good idea. It's something that could be set up, sure, but having it be such a central part of the ending was not the move, especially when we had never even heard the NAME salvation during the season up to this point. Maybe they could have had Flag mention Salvation in an early episode, in a throwaway way where more committed fans might not catch on, so that casual fans can make the connection at the end and have it be more satisfying. I don't know, I'm not a screenwriter. But even then, to me -- a non-casual fan, the finale felt like a huge nothingburger.
To be clear, I didn't hate the finale. There were a lot of good moments and jokes, parts like the universe crawl was fun, and Danielle Brooks' performance in Adebayo's scene with her wife was great and genuinely emotional. But a lot of it felt like it was either rushed or wasted time. A lot of the emotional tie-ups feel rushed -- I don't think Chris could get over all his issues with just one conversation with his friends, and I don't think the way he and Harcourt got together felt quite right either. in Episode 7, the whole conversation they have screams that Chris is still thinking of his own emotions rather than hers, and the way he pressures her into telling him that the boat meant something felt quite off -- she lacked quite a bit of agency in both of these scenes, with Chris pressuring her to express love towards him. Whether or not she does love him, (which the show implies that she does,) the way this went about felt wrong to me.
The other rushed aspect in terms of character was how quickly Bordeaux, Fleury and Judomaster all decided to join up with the 11th Street Kids. Don't get me wrong, I like all three of them and I did like them joining, but the way it was gone about could have utilised more set-up in the earlier episodes. I get discovering Salvation was a prison would have been a pretty big reality check for Sasha, but I think incorporating some kind of questioning of their missions could have benefited this sudden change of heart; especially when all that we saw of Sasha particularly before was her blind loyalty toward Rick and then flirting and sleeping with him. Her being a cyborg also didn't seem to lend to much apart from that one moment in Episode 5 when she goes to shoot Chris?
The parts that felt like wasted time were mainly the two separate live-show sequences. Two was too many, I'm sorry. It felt like an over-indulgence on the part of James Gunn. The show does have a strong musical identity, and these sequences were fun and well-filmed, but when you only have so much time each episode, and in a finale episode particularly, that time should have been dedicated to the actual story. A lot of the finale just feels like a bunch of setpieces that lack actual connection to what we've been seeing up in the show until now, that act more as just a spectacle.
Ultimately, I think the show could have benefited a lot more from keeping itself focused to one, contained story (with small hints towards and elements that could be incorporated in the greater DCU), rather than focusing too much on setting up things for the DCU, so they could focus on a small group of plot threads and tie them up, rather than having so many loose ends. It's what worked so well about Peacemaker S1 and Creature Commandos, so I'm not sure why they decided to go so hard on the universe set up. Peacemaker S2 has unfortunately been the weakest DCU project so far, and I think future projects would benefit from staying self-contained, rather than becoming 'homework'. Maybe my opinion will change in the future, but who knows.
