Welcome to the weekly TV thread.
The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is Clint Mansell and Kevin Kiner’s “Sonic Boom Helmet”—no relation to “Sonic Boom Boy” by Westworld—from “It’s Cow or Never,” Peacemaker’s first-season finale.
(Spoilers ahead for people who haven’t watched last week’s pivotal and darkly funny “Ignorance Is Chris,” the sixth episode of Peacemaker’s second season.)
Since the third episode of Peacemaker’s current season, I knew there was something fishy about the alternate dimension where Chris Smith wants a fresh start (so that he can hang out with both his brother and his racist dad, who are still alive over there): Nobody in that dimension has the same skin color as Adebayo, Fleury, or the Vietnamese American assassin known as Judomaster. But I never expected the dimension to be Earth-X, the Nazi-led alternate universe from the pages of DC Comics. I’m no DC expert like Sasha from Casually Comics or Jenna from Go Read Some Comics with Jenna, whose overviews of obscure DC characters James Gunn has turned to for research. My only familiarity with Earth-X was the Arrowverse’s four-part “Crisis on Earth-X” crossover event in 2017. I sort of forgot about that crossover event.
The shooting death of Legends of Tomorrow’s sagacious Professor Martin Stein (due to Victor Garber wanting to go back to Broadway) was a more memorable moment than the Arrowverse heroes’ subsequent defeat of their Nazi counterparts. (I can’t even remember how they were defeated.) Because they were made for prime-time network TV, the Earth-X episodes were a bloodless affair. But in Gunn’s TV-MA-rated hands, the 11th Street Kids’ confrontations with Earth-X are going to be a bloodbath. Gunn [Harrison Ford voice from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade’s castle sequence] hates these guys. Nazis are going to be stabbed, impaled, decapitated, and liquefied. I can’t wait for that shit. Here’s a clip of me watching a Nazi getting murked.
I wasn’t paying enough attention to the other hints Gunn threw in about Earth-X prior to the Nazi flag reveal at the end of “Ignorance Is Chris.” The meat in the hot dogs Chris and Earth-X Harcourt bought in the park in “Another Rick Up My Sleeve” is weisswurst, a.k.a. white sausage, an example of how dominant German culture is in a world where the Nazis won WWII. When Chris assumes the identity of his Earth-X doppleganger, whom he accidentally killed at the end of “The Ties That Grind,” and compares Earth-X Chris’s wardrobe to the Kardashians’ furniture, the Earth-X version of Keith, Chris’s brother, says, “Who are the Kardashians?” It makes sense that socialites who are Armenian American would never become celebrities in a Nazi-led world.
But the biggest hint was right in front of my face the whole time, and I never noticed it until a couple of outlets pointed it out right after the release of “Ignorance Is Chris.” It can be glimpsed during this season’s opening titles. Chris’s dance moves briefly simulate a swastika.
This isn’t the first time choreographer Charissa Barton foreshadowed the season’s events in her choreography for Peacemaker’s opening titles. The robotic dance moves she got the cast to perform during the Season 1 opening titles were meant to evoke the Butterflies, the aliens who invaded Earth that season. Today’s prompt is: Do you have a favorite Easter egg from a show’s opening titles like the dance moves from Peacemaker’s opening titles? Only Murders in the Building also has fun with its opening titles: It changes those animated opening titles every week to foreshadow some of the events that are to come in the episode. Meanwhile, the silly messages on Jim’s answering machine at the start of The Rockford Files, the detention chalkboard writings and couch gags at the start of The Simpsons, and the absurd phone calls that woke up Jay at the start of The Critic weren’t there to foreshadow any plot twists. They weren’t related to any episodes. They were just there to make us chuckle.