Peacemaker Season 2 Features A Captain Triumph Twist Only Hardcore Comic Fans Noticed

Peacemaker's (John Cena) brother Keith (David Denman as an adult, Liam Hughes and Bryson Haney as a child) has inadvertently caused much of his mental trauma. While he's a cool and supportive big bro to young Chris Smith, the Keith of the prime DC Universe dimension died when Chris accidentally punched him too hard after their monstrous father Auggie (Robert Patrick) forced them to fight. Meanwhile, the adult Keith of the twisty alternate reality Earth-X (aka Captain Triumph) remains a decent big brother. Unfortunately, he's also a virulent racist who has internalized the Nazi dimension's white supremacist ideology — unlike the show's best villain Auggie, whose alternate-dimension version turns out to be a comparatively good guy.   

While that's plenty of complications for one character, it turns out that Keith's existence is even twistier and messier than that, and chances are you only notice the full irony of the character's "Peacemaker" version unless you're a big-time comic book aficionado. The thing is, the DC Comics version of the character is far from a Nazi — he's actually a staunch anti-fascist. He's also a superhero who's powered by his dead brother's ghost, which is a particularly strange twist when you remember that on "Peacemaker," it's Captain Triumph's brother who's haunted (but rather specifically not powered) by his death instead. 

In the comics, Captain Triumph isn't called Keith Smith and bears no relation to either Peacemaker or White/Blue Dragon. Instead, he's a WWII-era writer called Lance Gallant, whose brave twin brother Michael is an Air Corps pilot who dies in an explosion caused by a Nazi saboteur. Lance witnesses Michael's death and supernatural creatures called the Fates sense his desire for revenge. They bond Michael's ghost to Lance, which enables the twins to join into a single entity who has a combination of classic flying brick powers and ghostly stealth abilities. 

Though his comic book connection to Peacemaker is tenuous at best, it's understandable that James Gunn opted to use Captain Triumph as Keith's superhero alias for the trauma-tackling "Peacemaker" season 2. After all, Lance Gallant is an obscure enough character that he was always unlikely to be adapted in the DCU as-is, but his backstory as a person literally haunted by his dead brother fits the themes of Chris Smith's tragic life to a tee.

"Peacemaker" season 2 is streaming on HBO Max.