PEACEMAKER Reveals the Quantum Unfolding Chamber’s Origin

The fourth episode of Peacemaker season two finally clarifies one of the lingering mysteries from season one. And it also corrects one of its thematic errors. In the pre-credits prologue to the newest episode, we flashback to 35 years earlier. We follow Robert Patrick as Auggie Smith, sporting a black mullet wig, and his two young sons, Christopher and Keith, on a hunting trip in the woods near his home. Auggie shoots what he clearly thinks is an animal. Quickly, he discovers it’s some kind of tiny alien, and one clearly very injured.

Despite a traumatized young Chris asking him not to shoot it again, Auggie backhands him and tells him not to tell him what to do. He then blows the poor, injured alien’s head clean off. It’s then that we discover the door of the Quantum Unfolding Chamber waiting in the woods. He also left behind the mysterious metal object later used to make the Peacemaker equipment. It’s obviously how the alien arrived on Earth. And this is how dimwitted and racist Auggie Smith discovered this highly advanced technology. A tech that every government agency in the world would love to get its hands on decades later.

In season one, Gunn never explained how the White Dragon, a low-rent criminal white supremacist who lives in an unassuming house, was smart enough to create a fantastically advanced doorway to other dimensions in his bedroom closet. James Gunn played the whole thing off as a joke, so it didn’t bother us that much. He clearly did not want us to think about it too hard. The high-tech chamber was simply for plot reasons. But as the show continued, it would have been a hard thing to hand-wave away.

We still have a few questions, however. For starters, how did the other Auggie Smith from the alt-universe find his version of the Quantum Unfolding Chamber? While he seems (on the surface) to be a nicer, gentler version of the character, he doesn’t seem nearly smart enough to have built one on his own. Was there a similar fateful hunting trip in his universe? Or was the Quantum Unfolding Chamber discovered in some other way? Did that dead alien build it, or was he just using it like so many others? We hope we find out.

Here’s why we’re really glad James Gunn explained this plot device in this episode. Season one of Peacemaker established Auggie Smith as a hateful, uneducated bigot. To suggest that he was somehow also secretly a brilliant scientist who could build a portal to other dimensions and keep it in his house was actually a terrible message. No, people like that don’t actually have some kind of higher understanding of anything. Chris Smith himself scoffs when Leota Adebayo (Danielle Brooks) suggests that his dad built it. He reminds her that his father had a sixth-grade education at best. People like Auggie Smith aren’t functioning on some higher level, they are hateful bigots who barely have an understanding of reading and writing, much less quantum physics. They’re not secretly brilliant. And we’re glad Peacemaker made it a point to say so.

Peacemaker season two drops new episodes every Thursday on HBO Max.