This post contains spoilers for Peacemaker season 2.Big cameos! Crazy visuals! A set up for Superman 2!That’s what many people expected when they tuned into the season two finale of Peacemaker. What they got was a very small scale story about Chris Smith making up with his friends, those friends starting their own business, and Harcourt learning how to love. cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});To put it mildly, those people are very disappointed. And they shouldn’t be, because Peacemaker is more interested in telling a story about a person than it is interested in building a franchise.“I always thought the first season’s about Peacemaker and the second season is about Chris Smith,” Gunn said in a press conference after the show’s finale. “By the end of season one, Chris is aware of his trauma. In season two, he’s aware of it and it actually makes his life a little bit hard… So this second season is about that internal journey of Christopher Smith. It was always about the way he relates to himself and the way he relates to the rest of the 11th Street kids from a perspective of the potential for healing.”That character-first approach really differs from the superhero storytelling popularized by Marvel. Thanks to its world-building strategy, Marvel movies tend to treat cameos and post-credit teases as character building. Thus, in Spider-Man: No Way Home, Peter Parker learns how to cope with Aunt May’s death when Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield show up to refer to their movies. The final shots of that movie show Peter creating his own suit and swinging out of a dingy New York apartment, showing that he’s no longer the well-adjusted scion of Tony Stark we’ve seen in the previous films. We’re finally going to get the Spider-Man we know and love… in the next movie.Worse yet are the story beats that don’t happen on screen at all. Avengers: Infinity War tells us that the Hulk has been so scarred from his battle with Thanos that he won’t let Banner transform. But the next time we see them in Avengers: Endgame, not only is Banner the Hulk, but he’s figured out how to live with his monstrous side! The entire conflict of his character has been resolved—off-screen.Because it relies so much on cameos and events between movies, Marvel seems to tell the viewers that they need to watch everything in order to properly appreciate their films. That may have been fun for a while, but now it too often feels like homework, which is exactly what Gunn wants to avoid.“I really want to make it so that you can watch anything by itself,” Gunn explained. “So, for instance, I’m not expecting people to go into Man of Tomorrow and know what Salvation is. We will say it in the movie and you’ll find out anything you need to know about metahumans disappearing.” He admits that it is “a very delicate balance,” and that he needs to tell the story in a way that “people who already know the information are not going to be bored.”As Gunn’s reference to Salvation indicates, the Peacemaker finale does set up the future of the DCU. Salvation gets introduced in the episode, and it will be further explored in Man of Tomorrow. And at the end of the episode, Adebayo and the 11th Street Kids form Checkmate, an intelligence organization that will be a going concern in the DCU.But Peacemaker isn’t about how Checkmate came to be or about how Rick Flag Sr. discovered Salvation. It’s about a guy named Chris, a fundamentally good man who had a terrible past and has done some really horrific things. And it’s about how that guy learned that he could be loved and how he can love others.So if you went into the Peacemaker finale expecting to see David Corenswet as Overman, doing battle with a live-action G.I. Robot, while Detective Chimp solves a crossword puzzle and Catherine Cobert looks for Power Girl’s cat, then, yeah. The episode is a bummer and the full-length numbers by Nelson and Foxy Shazam were pointless.But if you went into the episode hoping to see how Chris emotionally grows from his experience on Earth-X, then Peacemaker’s finale paid off in a way that few live-action superhero movies and shows ever do, power ballads and all.Every episode of Peacemaker season two is now streaming on HBO Max. So are all the other DCU movies and shows, but you don’t have to watch them to enjoy Peacemaker season two.The post Peacemaker Season 2 Finale Wasn’t Homework…And That’s a Good Thing appeared first on Den of Geek.