Peacemaker faces the White Dragon in “Stop Dragon My Head Around”

After letting the Butterfly escape and take over the police department just after they released Auggie Smith from prison, Peacemaker and his ragtag team have a whole fleet of cops and thugs coming after them. Will they survive the assault from the Butterflies and the White Supremacists? We find out in the new episode of Peacemaker, “Stop Dragon My Head Around.”

Not too bad an episode, I must say. Has its problems, and I’ll get into them, but overall a solid show. Part of that is just how much conflict we get. With two teams of villains after them, the show splits our heroes up in half, and we get a nice back and forth. Peacemaker, Vigilante and Econ (oh, and Eagly of course) battle against Auggie Smith, who’s all suited up in his White Dragon outfit and backed up by his hooded minions. On the other side of town, Agents Adebayo and Harcourt must shake off the Butterfly-controlled police force.

Looking at these stories from far away, they make internal sense. The face-off between Peacemaker and his old man has been coming for a while, so there’s weight and stakes. That’s also present in the Adebayo and Harcourt story — Murn is there, and remember that he’s a rogue Butterfly — although not as much.

It hits the beats you know the story will hit, and I don’t have any complaints about that. However, when you look at the details, there’s some sloppiness that bugs me. My first nit-picky example is that when Peacemaker and Vigilante begin their fight with Auggie and his clan, Vigilante approaches them slowly. I get it, they’re building up to something cool, fair enough. However, I can very clearly see that one of the minions has a gun. Uh, shoot him before he does something?

I get that this is a comic book show so the minions have to allow the heroes to do whatever they want to do even though if it was anyone else they would just shoot them dead in an instant, but why let the bad guys have guns at all? But then again, why would this vicious gang of racists not have guns? Conundrum.

The plot-holes of Peacemaker

But that’s just a minor lapse in logic. A major one: Peacemaker finds out Auggie is tracking him through his helmets. He gets rid of the one he wears by tying it to a raccoon, but later realizes that the rest are in the trunk of the car Vigilante just stole. They’re already all in a duffle bag, they have an escape car right there, and they know they have little time. So instead of quickly tossing the bag on the side of the road and taking off, Peacemaker feels the need to zip up the bag and walk a couple yards away to throw it.

Why? Why not just leave it on the side of the road? This is the easiest problem to fix and you are fixing it in a way that increases your odds of dying; to me it comes across as the show forcing Peacemaker to make a dumb decision because otherwise Auggie wouldn’t be able to find him.

But Murn makes the crown jewel of dumb decisions after the Butterflies break down the door of his hotel room and shoot him in the stomach. Clearly, these Butterflies are not aware Murn is actually one of them, but instead of playing dead, Murn escapes right in front of them.

Again, why? He didn’t need to do that to save Adebayo and Harcourt. So why? Just to set up this mushy moment of a final goodbye? I just don’t get it. Murn is a clever character (I thought). And even if he wasn’t, even the dumbest creatures have self-preservation instincts. Why ruin your own chance of escape? Maybe you can chalk it up to Murn wanting to die, because he knows he would need to kill another host and doesn’t want to. But then, why not just, I don’t know, not do that? You can live outside of a host. Peacemaker kept a Butterfly in a jar and was able to communicate with it just fine. Whatever perspective I try to look at it from, it makes no sense.

The story wants to have certain beats, and I understand that, but you need to get there in a way that makes me feel there was no choice but to get there, not because the characters made stupid choices that would never have been made otherwise.

Last aspect of the plot I take issue with: Judomaster’s inclusion in this episode felt veeery superficial to me. First we see him at a convenience store where he (probably) kills two men whose only offense was childish mockery, and for some reason the shop clerk is okay with it. Then he appears to fight Adebayo and Harcourt, and they beat him up, possibly killing him. It’s a well-done action scene, but I don’t really understand why he’s there. As a team, they have collectively kicked his ass a total of three times now, and it’s getting boring. If his character survives, they really need to find something else for him to do.

“Stop Drogon My Head Around” is the best episode of Peacemaker so far

I’ll end on a positive note: I laughed. I laughed at a joke: when Eagly pecks Econs in the butt and he yells out, “Ah, my asshole!” I laughed for a solid five seconds. Sometimes it’s the most juvenile things that do it for me.

And that’s Peacemaker Episode 7. I know I focused on story issues a lot, but details aside, it was a much better episode than the ones that came before. Fewer jokes, more conflict, more actions of consequence, I dig it.

But it does leave me to wonder: I’ve seen articles here and there hinting that the show could get a second season, but with so many main characters dropping like flies, I’m wondering if that’s true. Peacemaker’s intro makes it look like all the characters will be staples, but boy howdy have they brought out the destapler, yanking them out one by one. Who will be left by the end of this season? Only one way to find out.

Grade: C+

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