This post contains spoilers for Peacemaker season 2 episodes 1-3.“Best. Universe. Ever.”That’s how the Peacemaker Chris Smith describes the alternate reality he visits throughout the second season of the show that bears his name. While it was a cheering crowd—complete with a child moved to tears and a woman moved to bare her chest—that inspired Chris’s observation, it’s not just these base elements make the heretofore unnamed world better than the original. It’s the fact that, here, Chris’s dad Auggie is loving and supportive, not the hateful white supremacist who abused his boys and who directly caused, through Chris’s action, the death of his older son Keith. Moreover, Keith lives in this alternate reality, and he’s even cooler and more supportive than Chris could have imagined.cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});By giving Chris access to a different universe where everything he wanted already exists, Peacemaker takes a unique approach to the multiverse. Instead using this trip to another world to trot out cameos and wink at the audience, Peacemaker uses alternate realities to develop the central character to explore themes about redemption and improvement.This isn’t to say that other multiverse stories haven’t used the existence of other worlds to flesh out their characters. Spider-Man: No Way Home does see Peter Parker learn that with great power comes great responsibility. And even the dismal The Flash does send Barry Allen into a world where his beloved mother still lives and his father has not been imprisoned for the crime. It’s just that both films treat the character development as a bump on the road to return performances by actors from other, better movies: Tobey Maguire! Andrew Garfield! Michael Keaton! CGI nightmare version of Christopher Reeve!Even the mostly-excellent Spider-Verse movies can sometimes lose sight of Miles Morales’s struggle to find his place in the onslaught of wacky Spider-people. Who can think about what it means to belong when faced with Peter Parkedcar, the Spectacular Spider-Mobile.Thus far, Peacemaker hasn’t given into such temptations. Going into season two, most expected that the multiverse conceit would be a way for James Gunn to clean up the remainders left over from his reboot of the DCU. This way, everything from The Suicide Squad and even Peacemaker season 1 could be canon to Chris, even if the world around him was different.But Gunn has shown little interest in wasting time explaining canon, and his stories are all the better for it. Instead, he’s focused on Chris as a human being, albeit a human being in a fantastic situation.When we first met Chris in The Suicide Squad, he was a lunkhead idiot. He declared that he loved peace so much that he was willing to kill for it, a statement delivered without irony. Even more than his team’s mission to Corto Maltese, Chris was worried about proving that he was the best, resulting in a (very funny) sequence in which he and Bloodsport try to one-up each other by killing people in interesting ways—inadvertently wiping out the rebels they’re supposed to be helping. By the end of the film Chris blindly follows Amanda Waller’s orders and kills Rick Flag Jr., a man he claimed to respect.Throughout Peacemaker‘s first season, we see how Chris became that type of person. His father Auggie, a KKK leader who dons Iron Man-esque armor to become the White Dragon, instilled in Chris a deep sense of insecurity. Auggie taught Chris and Keith that they could only be accepted by being the best, and they could only be the best by violently beating up others. And yet, through his relationship with the misfits who call themselves the 11th Street Kids, Chris finds a different type of acceptance, one that stays even when he fails, one that stays even when the Justice LeagueJustice Gang refuses to acknowledge his role in stopping an alien invasion.By the end of season one, Chris has killed his father and found a new family in the form of the 11th Street Kids. A lesser writer would consider his arc closed. The hero beat the bad guy and got some friends. Story done.But Gunn is doing something interesting and, frankly, rare in the world of superhero storytelling. Chris may be a demonstrably better person at the start of Peacemaker season 2, but he left a whole trail of bodies and mistakes behind him. And his personal growth doesn’t simply erase all of the hurt he caused in the past. Most notably, those hurt include new A.R.G.U.S. director Rick Flag Sr., who plans to use his position atop the intelligence community to exact revenge on Chris for killing his son.Thus, the alternate reality doesn’t just present for Chris a chance to live the life he thought he should have had. It also offers to him the life he wants now, one where he can just be the good person he’s become and leave all of the messy stuff of life behind. The multiverse in Peacemaker offers not just an alternate reality, but an escape from reality, an evasion of the responsibility Chris still bares into a fantasy world.Of course, Gunn is too smart a writer to let it all be so simple. Already, we’re getting the sense that in the same way Auggie is inverted in the alternate reality, so is Chris. Passing comments from the alternate universe Keith and Harcourt have suggested that the other Chris has a whole host of problems (beyond just his terrible fashion sense) that his family had buffered.We’re still less than halfway through the season, so there’s lots of storytelling to be done. But already, it’s clear that Gunn is using the multiverse in a rich, compelling way. Here’s hoping other storytellers in our universe will follow his lead.Peacemaker season 2 airs new episodes every Thursday night at 9 p.m. ET on HBO Max.The post Why Peacemaker Season 2 Does the Multiverse Right appeared first on Den of Geek.