James Gunn’s knack for blending comic-book spectacle with biting social commentary has always been a hallmark of his work. But as Peacemaker Season 2 barrels toward its grand finale on October 9, 2025, the conversation swirling around DC Studios’ co-CEO is as much about what his shows say as what they leave unsaid. According to Collider, Gunn recently confirmed that the highly anticipated season finale, titled “Full Nelson,” will be the longest episode yet, clocking in at over 57 minutes. Fans, who had grumbled about the previous episode’s brisk 33-minute runtime, were delighted by Gunn’s promise: “You’ll be happy to know next week’s episode is over 57 minutes long.”
That extra time may be needed, given the explosive territory Season 2 has ventured into. Peacemaker, led by John Cena’s Christopher Smith, has always been a wild ride, but this season steered into even darker, more provocative waters. The central twist? Smith finds himself in an alternate dimension—one where he’s finally celebrated as a hero, his abusive father is kind, and his beloved brother is alive. But as Gunn explained to Collider, “the price in this case is Nazi America. That’s what the price of all this happiness was on the show.”
This alternate world, inspired in part by Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, is no mere backdrop. It’s a Nazi-dominated America, complete with swastika flags, work camps for people of color, and a society that has chillingly normalized fascism. Smith’s fantasy of acceptance comes at a horrifying cost—a point Gunn says was meant to mirror the character’s inner turmoil: “He’s unhappy with the fact that he hasn’t been accepted as a hero. He’s unhappy that his father was abusive and unkind. He’s unhappy that his brother is dead… So he finds another world in which the girl he loves fawns over him, and his brother is alive, and his father is kind, and he’s a hero. But like anything, there’s a darkness to it all. There’s something that he’s not seeing.”
But not everyone is satisfied with how Gunn is handling these weighty themes. As Comic Book Club Live pointed out in a pointed critique published October 3, Gunn’s DC Universe projects—including Peacemaker, Creature Commandos, and Superman—have a pattern of brushing up against real-world issues, only to pull back before fully engaging with them. In the latest episode, “Like A Keith In The Night,” the show’s characters navigate the Nazi America of Earth-X. Auggie Smith (Robert Patrick), Smith’s father in this reality, and Keith Smith (David Denman) are alive and part of a superhero team called the Top Trio. While Auggie insists he isn’t a Nazi—“I didn’t create the problems in my world, missy. I don’t agree with them. I applaud you if your world is perfect and you fight every injustice you ever see. Is that what you do? Unfortunately, I haven’t got the strength for that. I fight the madmen, murderers, and monsters in front of me because that’s all I can control. And at the end of my life, when I stand in judgment before god, I hope that he knows that I did the best that I could, and I left this world a better place than when I came–”—the show doesn’t let him finish. He’s abruptly killed by Vigilante (Freddie Stroma), sparking debate among the characters and viewers alike about complicity and resistance in evil systems.
Peacemaker’s anguished response—“He wasn’t a Nazi”—is met with skepticism, both within the show and by critics. As Comic Book Club Live notes, Auggie may not have subscribed to Nazi ideology, but he “was a prominent part of a superhero trio who lived a rich and mostly carefree life in a Nazi dimension. He was not in a work camp. He regularly saved people who would be considered Nazis in name as well as deed.” The article draws parallels to the concept of “Good Germans,” those who lived under the Nazi regime without actively resisting it, and questions whether Gunn’s narrative risks normalizing or excusing such passivity.
This isn’t the first time Gunn’s approach to political themes has drawn scrutiny. In Creature Commandos, the season started with a pointed premise—a sorceress leading a men’s rights group modeled after real-world organizations like the Proud Boys—but soon shifted focus to more familiar territory: the theme of found family. In Superman, Gunn was quick to clarify to Variety that the film’s fictional conflict between Boravia and Jarhanpur was not intended as an allegory for the Israel-Palestine conflict, insisting, “Absolutely 100% of that movie was written and done before anything ever happened between Israel and Palestine, and everyone continues to refuse to believe that that’s not what it’s about. It’s not. It just isn’t. You can take whatever you want from that, to mean what you want, but I didn’t write it to be a stand in for Israel and Palestine.”
Instead, Gunn says his focus is on the emotional journeys of his characters. “I write the show for the emotional angle, just like I wrote Superman to be about kindness. If there was a sociopolitical aspect of Superman, it’s that there has been an absence of kindness and understanding and loving a human being, no matter what their thoughts or feelings are.” But as Comic Book Club Live argues, this approach can feel like a dodge: “It’s not enough to say ‘be good to each other’ and leave it at that when ICE is regularly rounding up people off the street and shipping them to foreign countries, possibly never to see their families again. Kindness is important, but that doesn’t help trans kids who will die without access to health care.”
Gunn’s defenders might point to his personal history as a reason for his caution. After all, he was famously fired from Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 over resurfaced tweets, only to be rehired after a public outcry. He’s spoken about how that experience changed him, and how growing up in a segregated St. Louis shaped his early, limited understanding of race and identity. On a recent episode of the Peacemaker: The Official Podcast, Gunn reflected, “Where I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, is an incredibly segregated place… I always thought there’s Black people, there’s White people, and then everybody else is White. Mexicans are White. I never once in my entire, until I was, like, pretty old, like embarrassingly old, I never thought of a Latino or a Latina as a person of color. Just that they were White!”
But as Peacemaker Season 2 draws to a close, the stakes of these creative choices feel especially high. The superhero genre has always been political, from Superman’s Depression-era battles with corrupt landlords to Peacemaker’s satirical take on American militarism. Gesturing at real-world injustices—fascism, racism, the cost of complicity—without fully wrestling with their implications, risks leaving viewers with little more than a glance out the window at a world in crisis.
With an all-star cast including Frank Grillo, Tim Meadows, Michael Rooker, Danielle Brooks, Freddie Stroma, Jennifer Holland, Steve Agee, Isabela Merced, Nathan Fillion, and Sean Gunn, Peacemaker has never lacked for talent or ambition. The question, as the finale approaches, is whether Gunn will finally push his characters—and his audience—beyond the safety of metaphor and into the uncomfortable, necessary work of confronting the world as it is.
Whatever the answer, fans and critics alike will be watching closely when “Full Nelson” airs on October 9, hoping for a conclusion as bold and unflinching as the questions the show dares to raise—but has not yet answered.
