The following contains spoilers for Peacemaker Episode 2, “Best Friends, For Never.”Picking up exactly where Episode 1 of Peacemaker left off, Episode 2 brings fans right back into the action. It kicks off with Peacemaker having to make an escape from the apartment of a “butterfly” and John Economos having to find a solution for Peacemaker’s car being at the scene of a seemingly massive explosion.
While fans won’t get many answers about Project Butterfly in Episode 2, it does offer the chance to see the team in action. It also doesn’t offer up very many Easter eggs for fans, but does provide references to the wider DCEU and two interesting references to some DC comic book characters.
Weasel
Early in the episode, John Economos gets fed up with the way Chris Smith is treating him. He even tells Peacemaker that he would rather be on a mission with Weasel instead. As far as the audience knows, the last time Amanda Waller’s team saw Weasel, he was left for dead at a failed mission in The Suicide Squad.
Economos referencing the character here, however, is a good indication that Waller and her team are aware that Weasel survived. The question is whether he’s actually back in custody at Belle Reve (which gets name-checked by the police along with Arkham Asylum later in the episode) or if he’s still roaming free until Waller decides to bring him back in.
Bat-Mite
When Peacemaker and John Economos get into an argument while the former is getting stitches, Economos lists all the heroes and villains who he would rather work with instead. While he lists Harley Quinn and Weasel, both who appeared in The Suicide Squad, he also lists Bat-Mite, someone Peacemaker hasn’t heard of.
Bat-Mite is right out of the comics, and a surprising character to exist in the DCEU. He’s described as an “interdimensional imp who stans Batman,” which is a pretty accurate description of the character. Bat-Mite dresses like the caped crusader and follows him into battle, often offering more commentary on his fights than actually contributing to them. While it’s a fun Easter egg, it’s unlikely fans will ever see the character in the DC Extended Universe in the flesh.
A Familiar Rabbit
Eagle-eyed fans will catch a familiar mouse design on the t-shirt that Amber’s boyfriend is wearing when the two are stopped in the hallway on their way to the police station.
It’s the same design worn by Rick Flagg in The Suicide Squad movie, who gets another nod when Chris Smith is crying alone, admitting he feels bad for killing him.
White Dragon
In order to keep Peacemaker out of the hands of the local police force, Economos changes the registration of Chris Smith’s car to belong to his father. That leads to the police in charge of the investigation to Auggie Smith’s door. After witnesses are bribed into identifying Auggie at the building, he finds himself in lockup in Evergreen, but a good number of the inmates recognize him and refer to him as the White Dragon.
White Dragon is a comic book villain. Several people have held that particular villainous moniker in the comics, and they all tend to spread racist ideology, not unlike Auggie here. The name of the villain itself is a reference to the Ku Klux Klan. While Auggie Smith wasn’t one of the people to take up the mantle in the comics, he was, at one point, a Nazi Commander in a concentration camp, so James Gunn using the character as the White Dragon isn’t a huge stretch, but an interesting Easter egg for fans all the same.
The first three episodes of Peacemaker are currently available to stream on HBO Max.