Peacemaker has taken all of us on a wild ride so far. We’re more than halfway through the show’s second season, with the remaining three episodes being so massive that James Gunn is essentially keeping them a secret.
That is telling, especially when the episodes we’ve already gotten have delivered some genuine surprises. The latest arrived in the show’s fifth episode… and it was something that even left diehard DC fans shook.
**Spoilers for Peacemaker season 2**
Episode 5 opens with A.R.G.U.S.’ sting operation at Kupperberg Park, attempting to use Emilia Harcourt (Jennifer Holland) to draw out Christopher Smith / Peacemaker (John Cena) and apprehend him. Even as Emilia warns Chris that the meeting in the park is a trap, he still shows up anyway, because he is desperate to know how she feels about him before he makes the decision to permanently escape over to Earth-2.
The sting operation quickly goes horribly wrong: a tranquilizing sniper dart meant for Chris gets shot into Agent Kline/”Kewpie Doll” (Brandon Stanley), and A.R.G.U.S. agents quickly have Chris surrounded. As the agents and Rick Flag Sr. (Frank Grillo) weigh their next moves, Sasha Bordeaux (Sol Rodriguez) enters the circle brandishing her gun, and determining that she has a way to fatally shoot Chris. We see a close-up on her right eye, which deploys cybernetic enhancements that let her make the calculation.
Flag tells Sasha to take the fatal shot, which ultimately motivates Emilia to knock Chris unconscious in an effort to save his life. But either way, we now know that Sasha Bordeaux is a cyborg, just like she is in a lot of DC’s comics.
Deus Ex Machina
Later in the episode, we also get an inkling of Sasha’s origin story, as John Economos (Steve Agee) tells Emilia that Sasha was mangled in a plane crash and A.R.G.U.S. replaced half of her body with machinery. This is an interesting sort of amalgam of what happens to her in the comics, without exactly retreading the same ground (a level of adaptation that this DCU has excelled at, so far).
When Sasha was first introduced by Greg Rucka and Shawn Martinbrough in 2000’s Detective Comics #751, she was just a human Secret Service Agent brought on to be Bruce Wayne’s personal bodyguard. After being suspicious of Wayne’s aloof rich-boy demeanor, she discovered his secret identity as Batman, and decided to shadow him as a sort of proto-vigilante. This became complicated for two reasons: Bruce and Sasha began to develop romantic feelings for each other, and they both were soon framed for the murder of his ex-girlfriend, journalist Vesper Fairchild.
Sasha refused to let Bruce get implicated (or unmasked as Batman), and remains in prison, where she is soon attacked by another inmate. She would’ve died from those injuries if not for the secret spy organization Checkmate (which fans have been hoping to see in the DCU somewhere), who were already eyeing her to join their ranks. They offer to heal her injuries, fake her death, and give her plastic surgery and a new identity in exchange for her loyalty to the organization… and she accepts.
After spending some time in Checkmate, Sasha gets put through the wringer again during the events of Infinite Crisis. After Maxwell Lord made a massive heel turn and unleashed an army of evil OMAC robots on the world, Sasha was stabbed by one, and injected with nanites. This quickly transformed her into a cyborg, not only armed with a metal exterior, but with impressive calculating abilities in her mind.
Gods and Monsters and Cyborgs
The second that Rodriguez was cast as Sasha on Peacemaker, I was hopeful that we would get to the cyborg of it all… eventually. But I had honestly expected, given the supporting role that she’s had in the season so far, that she would probably be a human for a while. Maybe she would get injured in the Season 2 finale and need to be upgraded into a cyborg, or maybe that arc would be saved entirely for another DCU project.
I don’t know why I thought that: maybe because I’ve endured years of DC projects slow-burning core elements of their characters. Multiple heroes in both the MCU and the DCEU have never actually been called their superhero names, it took several seasons for Arrow to put its titular character in an even-remotely vibrant shade of green, and The Flash had an entire arc of Barry “earning” his gold boots. I’ve gotten too used to the “Surf Dracula” meme that has become a part of Internet lexicon.
But the DCU has been anything but that. We’re only three official projects in, and we’ve gotten countless fully-formed costumed heroes and monsters, to the point of even having background art confirm some of the 300 years of metahuman history. So, why not have Sasha be a cyborg already?
(featured image: HBO Max)
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