Peacemaker Season 2 Premiere Mirrors Pilot’s Shocking Ending — And It’s Not an Accident

Season 2 of James Gunn’s Peacemaker opens with an episode that deliberately mirrors the series pilot. John Cena returns as Chris Smith / Peacemaker, and the premiere, titled “The Ties That Grind,” repeats several concrete beats from season 1’s first episode: he reaches out to his handler Emilia Harcourt, faces rejection, seeks connection through sex and debauchery, and again kills an opponent with a device built by his father, Auggie. The second season began on HBO Max on Aug. 21 and runs for eight episodes.

How the season 2 premiere mirrors the pilot and specific scene-by-scene parallels.
Connections to Chris’s past deaths: his brother Keith and Col. Rick Flag from The Suicide Squad.
Which objects and relationships recur, especially Auggie’s devices and emotional legacy.
Release details for season 2 on HBO Max.

Episode parallels: the same emotional beats

In the series pilot, Chris follows Emilia Harcourt (Jennifer Holland) into a bar and makes a crude pitch: I haven’t been with any woman in a long time. I’m not asking for emotional connection here, I’m just asking for fun. Genital-to-genital contact. Harcourt shuts him down. Later, Chris goes home with a woman who turns out to be a super-strong metahuman. Chris fights, is badly hurt, and then activates a sonic-boom helmet made by his father, which kills the woman. The pilot ends with Chris sitting in the parking lot, stunned and alone.

Season 2 opens with a similar pattern. Chris approaches Harcourt again; they had hooked up recently while drunk, but Harcourt calls it a fuck-up and shows no interest in a relationship. Chris reacts by looking for connection elsewhere. Instead of a single partner, he participates in a drug-fueled orgy. Then he enters an alternate dimension where Auggie and his brother Keith are alive and emotionally supportive. After a fulfilling conversation, an alternate-universe Chris attacks; wounded and cornered, Chris instinctively uses one of Auggie’s devices and kills his opponent. The episode ends with Chris sitting over the body, visibly shocked and asking himself What just happened?

Why Auggie’s devices and family keep showing up

Across both episodes, the lethal device that ends the scene is one of Auggie Smith’s creations. Auggie’s abuse and teachings are a recurring factual thread in the series: his treatment of Chris shaped Chris’s ideas of justice, his behavior toward others, and his emotional needs. Season 1 focused on Chris confronting Auggie’s legacy and ultimately killing Auggie. Season 2 places Chris in situations where he again leans on Auggie’s tools and, by extension, Auggie’s influence.

Two other deaths are also directly referenced in season 2. First, Chris accidentally killed his brother Keith as a child during a bare-knuckle brawl their father pushed them into; Auggie repeatedly used that event against Chris with the line The wrong son died!

Second, in James Gunn’s 2021 film The Suicide Squad, Peacemaker killed his handler Col. Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman). Season 2 includes a selectively edited flashback of that killing, showing Chris desperate and wounded before he stabs Flag through the heart. The series frames that incident alongside the pilot and season 2 premiere deaths, highlighting how Chris’s fear and desire for approval—especially from figures like Amanda Waller—factor into those moments.

Cycle of harm and thematic notes

Objectively, the show places the same sequence of events—rejection by Harcourt, searching for connection, and an instinctive, fatal use of Auggie’s device—at the ends of both the pilot and the season 2 premiere. The series also connects those events to Chris’s past: the childhood death of Keith and the killing of Rick Flag. In context, the show links these moments to patterns of abuse and the difficulty of escaping a violent legacy, often summed up in the idea “hurt people hurt people,” which the season 2 premiere revisits through plot and imagery.