Before I begin my review, I want to address one thing I didn’t do when reviewing the first three episodes. The reason I didn’t rate each episode is that I want to review the series as a whole. When I get to the season finale, I’ll give each episode a rating & then average it out to the entire season, now onto the episode.
This is the first episode of the show not directed by Showrunner James Gunn. Granted, it was still written by him, so the material given to a different director still made it an excellent episode. Not as much humor as the previous episode, but when there is humor, it still sticks the landing. As did Cena’s Variant on “the superhero landing.” Director Jody Hill did Gunn justice.
Most of episodes plot is stopping Smith’s father for confessing his innocent to the authorities & get his own son arrested. There’s also a subplot of Judomaster escaping which…doesn’t really go anywhere other than were know Economonos has Asthma. Will that come into play later in the show or perhaps that was to emphasize the Team’s mortality?
This is by far the best episode with Adrian Chase/Vigilante thus far. He is constantly complaining about his injury on his toe from the previous episode and does a not-so-subtle job trying to convince the team he’s not Vigilante.
Generally speaking this episode is full of character development. It’s like Oprah wrote the episode. “You get character development! And You get character character development! Everybody gets character development!” Don’t get me wrong while I am being facetious here the development on the characters in this episode are pretty well done. In addition to learning about Peacemaker through conversations, we learn more about Harcourt & Adebayo’s backstories in how they joined Project Butterfly.
There were alot of highlighted moments when it comes to foreshadowing in the DCEU. Auggie Smith’s neighbor seems to be a really big Batman fan as he believes Batman never kills & this is going to be interesting where this fits contextually after The Flash movie comes out. Because Keaton’s Batman and Affleck’s Batman haven’t simply “indirectly” killed people. To be fair it is self-defense when they do but it did get me thinking: Whether it’s our world or the DC Extended Universe not everyone is going to unilaterally share the same opinion.
In the real world we have debates about whether or not Batman kills or should kill. I’m theorizing here, but perhaps in the DCEU, much like mainstream media Propaganda, it’s a regional thing. Maybe in some parts of the world they believe in the news that says he doesn’t kill but people who live in Gotham will tell you otherwise. Maybe I’m reading too much into this but Peacemaker’s response was that there’s nothing wrong with killing in self-defense so it really does remind me of those geek conversations.
I don’t think I’ve seen such a funny & tense scene in a superhero TV show than when Chase gets himself arrested as he was trying to stop Auggie from giving out information. It was a dramatic & hilarious scene talking to Smith’s father & his white supremacist gang about Black people’s contributions to society.
One character I didn’t mention in the previous article was Murn. I wasn’t entirely sure how to feel about him as he just felt like a diet version of Amanda Waller. I got a better insight of him in the last episode but I still couldn’t quite getting a read on the guy. Maybe he had a secret maybe he didn’t. This episode…!? No that is now no longer the case or if it is it is now entirely for a different reason. They went M.Night at the end of the episode & gave the plot twist that Murn is a Butterfly.
It’s not a perfect episode, but I think it set up the next episodes pretty well & I personally can’t wait for the next one.
