Peacemaker (2025) - “Ignorance Is Chris” Review
We’ve long suspected that the “Best. Dimension. Ever.” wasn’t what it seemed – and in “Ignorance Is Chris,” that suspicion becomes stark, unsettling reality. The alternate universe Chris has wandered into is revealed to be a white supremacist version of the U.S. – a world where Nazis won World War II, and nonwhite people barely exist. The twist is brutal, both narratively and morally, and forces Christopher Smith to reckon not only with the illusion he’s found, but with the father whose sins echo in every warped corner of this world.
From the earliest scenes, the show balances the grotesque reveal with the dark humor that has made Peacemaker feel like a mirror held up to our worst impulses since it first premiered five weeks ago. The 11th Street Kids – Harcourt, Adebayo, Economos, Adrian – step through the portal to join Chris, and by the end of the episode, hostility cracks the veneer. Adebayo, walking alone, is confronted by a mob screaming “One got out!” The air shudders with the violence of racism made manifest. The show doesn’t hide its darkness. It drags it into the open.
Harcourt gets a difficult moment of vulnerability when she and Chris at last talk about their feelings. She confesses she has long known of his love, but cannot fully embrace it. The tension between them is messy and complex – and Harcourt’s sense of guilt and duty become central to the emotional core of the episode.
Lex Luthor also makes a chilling return. Rick Flag, desperate to locate Chris’s portal, strikes a deal: Luthor will help track the chamber’s location if Flag helps secure him a more favorable prison, a pact that will no doubt influence further entries in the DC Universe yet to come.
The title, “Ignorance Is Chris,” suggests a pun on “ignorance is bliss,” and Chris’s initial hope that he’s found a world where he’s loved, admired, and whole. But in that world, ignorance is death. The revelation of an America dominated by a racist, fascist regime is disturbingly timely considering current events, and turns Chris’s utopia into dystopia. His confrontation with that reality will define the season’s final two episodes.
This episode doesn’t pull its punches, and yet it keeps Peacemaker’s heart. There is resilience, there is pain, there is love. Chris is no innocent, but he has grown enough that we know he cannot abide this perversion. The world he has found is too broken to stay in, and he must choose whether to fight, or flee again.
If the turn feels darker than expected, that is precisely the point. This is not just a multiverse adventure. It is a moral reckoning: there is no escape from the real world’s impurities. In “Ignorance Is Chris,” we see that the worst lies are the kind we tell ourselves. Peacemaker dares Chris – and us – to face the truth: there is no perfect world. We must fix this one, flaws and all.