In episode 6 of DC Studio’s Peacemaker season 2, the 11th Street Kids follow Peacemaker (John Cena) into what he calls the “best dimension ever” in the hopes of persuading him to return home. As the episode’s name, “Ignorance Is Chris,” implies, Chris has been so blinded by the pleasures of fame, fortune, and love that he’s overlooked some very serious red flags about this other world. This episode confirms a fan theory about what dimension he’s found, while also setting up a fresh conflict with Chris’ family with deep comic book roots.
The character of Peacemaker was created by Joe Gill and Pat Boyette for Charlton Comics in 1967. Very much a product of the Cold War, Chris Smith was originally portrayed as a Geneva-based diplomat who worked on nuclear disarmament plans and tried to prevent conflict. When negotiations failed, he would don the mantle of Peacemaker to fight and sometimes kill arms dealers and warlords along with Silver Age threats like lava men and subterranean shapeshifters. Peacemaker’s costume and the jetpack he has in the other universe date back to the original version of the character.
Peacemaker is also deeply connected to DC Comics’ use of the multiverse. When Charlton Comics went out of business, DC bought the rights to its characters, using the Crisis on Infinite Earths event in 1985 to bring them into the fold. A very different version of Peacemaker popped up in 1986 in issue #36 of Paul Kupperberg’s Vigilante comic book run, where he’s a violent psychopath who thinks that the souls of those he kills reside in his helmet.
[Ed. note: Major spoilers ahead for Peacemaker season 2, episode 6, “Ignorance Is Chris.”]
Peacemaker got his own DC Comics series from Paul Kupperberg and Todd Smith in 1988, and that version fuses aspects of his previous runs. This Chris Smith lives in Switzerland and uses high-tech weapons to fight for peace, but he’s also hounded by the voice of his dead Nazi father who constantly berates him for his weakness and urges him to kill without mercy.
In this continuity, Peacemaker was Christopher Schmidt, born in 1951 Austria to Wolfgang Schmidt, an S.S. officer responsible for the death of 50,000 inmates in a concentration camp. When the truth about his crimes came out in a post-war inquiry, Wolfgang killed himself on Chris’ fifth birthday. Over time, the trauma caused Chris to hallucinate a specter of his dad who would lecture him while wearing an S.S. uniform and punctuating his points with a riding crop.
James Gunn obviously had to update this version of Chris’ backstory for the 2020s, making Auggie Smith (Robert Patrick) a leader of an American white supremacist organization called the Aryan Empire instead of a Nazi officer. But having Chris visit Earth X, where Nazi Germany won World War II, allows him to bring the parallels even closer.
Chris killed Auggie in Peacemaker season 1 and the season finale ended with Chris seeing his fathers’ ghost, demonstrating he’s just as haunted by his monstrous father as the ‘80 comics version of the character. Given that John Economos (Steve Agee) confessed to Earth-X Auggie that Chris had killed his real son, it’s likely that Chris will have to kill his father again – and possibly kill his brother a second time, too.
The comics and that brief appearance by Auggie in the season 1 finale demonstrate that Patrick might stick around, continuing to pepper Chris with abuse whenever Chris tries to be heroic or take a less violent path. Auggie’s malevolent influence was already seen in season 2’s third episode. After spending just a bit of time basking in his father’s love, Chris started mercilessly murdering members of the Sons of Liberty, tossing aside the progress he’d told the Justice Gang he was making when it came to respecting human life.