This post contains spoilers for Peacemaker Season 2 Episode 8.In the final moments of Peacemaker‘s Season 2 finale, Adebayo and the 11th Street Kids find new purpose. No longer content to do the bidding of Amanda Waller or Rick Flag Sr., the gang—along with new additions Langston Fleury, Sasha Bordeaux, and Judomaster—form a new group called Checkmate.To comic readers, the name Checkmate raises eyebrows, as the organization has long existed as DC‘s version of SHIELD, complete with all the moral ambiguities that the comparison implies.However, James Gunn sees no ambiguity in their mission. In his mind, they are a force for good, especially for former ARGUS agents Harcourt and Economos. “They’re worker bees,” Gunn said of the pair in a press conference following the Peacemaker finale. “They’ve worked for intelligence organizations their whole lives. They’ve basically done what they said. They’ve broken out a couple of times, like at the end of The Suicide Squad, but basically they’re worker bees.”According to Gunn, Harcourt and Economos started to change after hearing a speech that the Auggie of Earth-X gave earlier in the season, in which he presented himself as a guy trying to do his best. “Some people saw that as evil and others saw that as good, and that’s not it,” Gunn insists. “He’s trying to do something, and maybe for Harcourt and Economos, it’s not enough.” Further, Gunn says that the new Checkmate finds its inspiration in an even more unlikely place, their friend Chris. “For all of Peacemaker’s flaws, he’s always been brash and done, you know, whatever he thought the right thing was,” Gunn points out. So Auggie’s speech “leads into this desire to create an organization using some of Adrian’s ‘blood money’ truly for the good. And to create an organization that is going to be separate from the other institutions in the DCU, which is the government and corporations and the Justice Gang, the typical metahuman gangs. I think it’s the real culmination of the 11th Street Kids and their desire to be good.”cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});That’s quite different from the comic book world, where Checkmate not only competes with ARGUS, but completely overshadows it. First introduced in 1988’s Action Comics #598, written by John Byrne and Paul Kupperberg and penciled by Byrne, Checkmate quickly became a massive intelligence and espionage organization with ties across the world. In the comics, Checkmate and not ARGUS employs Waller, Bordeaux, and Rick Flag, and its Checkmate that oversees Task Force X, better known as the Suicide Squad.Obviously, Gunn has something different in mind for his Checkmate. He’s also quite clear that both Checkmate and Salvation, the prison planet introduced in Peacemaker finale and a key part of the upcoming Superman sequel Man of Tomorrow, have huge implications for the future of the DCU. “Even before I sat down with the writer’s room in DC, I had sort of mapped out what I thought the general story was and two important aspects to that were Checkmate and especially Salvation,” Gunn reveals. However, he’s not yet willing to explain how the organization will operate in the universe.Of the various versions of the organization that have existed over the years, Gunn specifically points to the one from the second Checkmate ongoing series from 2006, as imagined by writer Greg Rucka. That series featured Checkmate at its most complex, a UN-sanctioned group with two distinct halves. The white side, overseen by the White King (Green Lantern Alan Scott) and White Queen (Waller), focused on intelligence, while the black side, overseen by the Black King (Taleb Beni Khalid) and the Black Queen (Bordeaux), performed operations.“We’re taking elements of comic book series and putting them into our films.,” Gunn says of his approach to adaptation. “I’ve always liked Checkmate. Those Greg Rucka stories are just comics I really love, so I always wanted to build Checkmate into the DCU somehow.” In fact, when asked about how Bordeaux might connect to the new DCU version of Bruce Wayne, given that the character started out as a security agent at Wayne Enterprises, Gunn admits, “Frankly, I know Sasha mostly from Checkmate. That’s why she came into the story.”In Checkmate, Rucka explored the moral complexities of a world with superheroes, something that has been a key part of Gunn’s approach to the DCU. From the moral crisis that Economos and Harcourt undergo in The Suicide Squad to Superman’s speech about doing your best to Flag’s vendetta against Peacemaker, Gunn’s DCU is filled with people who try to do what they think is right. And just as often, those attempts involve a back and forth between metahumans and organizations like ARGUS.Will Checkmate change the dynamics of that push and pull? Or will they too become as compromised as ARGUS? We’ll have to wait until Man of Tomorrow to find out, but Gunn sure sounds hopeful that Checkmate will be a good thing for the DCU.Every episode of Peacemaker is now streaming on HBO Max.The post Peacemaker: James Gunn on the DCU’s Newest Organization appeared first on Den of Geek.