Fortunately, Warner Bros. doesn\u2019t feel the same way. In\u00a0One Battle After Another<\/a>, which opens in thousands of American movie theaters today, a racist Army colonel played by Sean Penn executes left-wing radicals in cold blood and refers to a biracial teenager as a \u201cmutt.\u201d And Thursday night on HBO Max, James Gunn\u2019s\u00a0Peacemaker<\/a> revealed that the alternate dimension into which the show\u2019s violent antihero has tried to escape is a neo-Nazi utopia where people of color have been rounded up and imprisoned, and the stars on the American flag have been replaced by a swastika.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \n Sam Adams <\/a><\/p>\n Sharp-eyed viewers\u00a0noticed weeks ago<\/a>\u00a0that the world Christopher Smith (John Cena) had entered through a dimensional portal in his late father\u2019s closet was suspiciously devoid of nonwhite faces. But Chris, who ended the previous season by shooting his father, a white supremacist vigilante called the White Dragon, in the head, was too overwhelmed by how much better this parallel dimension seemed to be to notice any of its shortcomings. Here, his father, Auggie (Robert Patrick), was a loving dad, and Chris\u2019 brother, Keith (David Denman), was still very much alive\u2014a second chance that Chris, who accidentally killed his brother in a fistfight orchestrated by their own father, never expected to get. Rather than being orphaned and alone, the alternate-universe Chris is part of a happy, close-knit family, who fight crime together to the cheers of an adoring public.<\/p>\n Peacemaker\u2019s alternate dimension boasts just enough differences with our own\u2014there, Def Leppard spells its name correctly, and Mick Jagger was the lead singer in the Beatles\u2014to leave open the possibility that Auggie might simply have turned out differently in another timeline. But it turns out that he\u2019s just a happy racist, at peace with the world he and his kind have created.<\/p>\n The Nazi rug pull is a well-worn trope in science fiction, but what\u2019s noteworthy about the way Gunn, who wrote and directed the twist-revealing episode, stages it is that we\u2019ve had little overt reason to suspect just how awry this parallel dimension was. Sure, there were the occasional attacks by a group of militants who call themselves the Sons of Liberty\u2014a name cannily chosen to convey the appearance of ideology without any of its substance\u2014but our dimension has its own problems with political violence, right? And everyone in this other universe just seemed so\u00a0nice, at least until Chris\u2019 Black teammate, Leota (Danielle Brooks), decides to go for a walk in his family\u2019s suburban development, and the neighbors start sprinting after her like they\u2019re reenacting\u00a0Invasion of the Body Snatchers.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \n David Mack <\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The 25 Greatest Picture Books of the Century Everyone Was Waiting for the First South Park Episode Post\u2013Charlie Kirk. Well \u2026 <\/p>\n A New Show Argues That a Man Behind One of the Butchest Brands in Beer Was Gay. But Did His Affairs Really Almost Ruin the Company? <\/p>\n Romance\u2019s Hottest Pairing? An Impossible Couple From a Decades-Old Publishing Sensation. I Think I Know Why. Peacemaker\u00a0is less narrowly topical than\u00a0The Savant, in the sense that it\u2019s set in a fantasy world where broad-shouldered men from alien planets can hold down a day job at a daily newspaper. And, given the way\u00a0Gunn\u2019s Superman<\/a>\u00a0dealt with beings who felt like it was their right to suppress a population they considered to be inferior, it feels safe to surmise he\u2019ll find some way to set his fictional Fourth Reich right. But the fact that the series\u2019 hero didn\u2019t notice that he was living in a Nazi paradise\u2014that despite repudiating his father\u2019s beliefs, he could still feel most at home in an all-white world\u2014is something the show will have to take head-on going forward. While Gunn\u2019s comic-book fascism doesn\u2019t reflect as directly on our world as his\u00a0Superman, with its villainous tech-bro billionaires, did, it touches at least implicitly on how easy, even comfortable, it can be to\u00a0live in a world<\/a>\u00a0ruled by fascism<\/a>, as long as you don\u2019t belong to any of the groups it targets.<\/p>\n Neo-Nazis have been to popular culture what Arab terrorists were to the 2000s and Russians to the 1980s: all-purpose villains that the audience can be counted on to despise without further explanation. And indeed, even many white supremacists take care to underline that they\u2019re not\u00a0that\u00a0kind of white supremacist. But Gunn cannily suggests that may be a distinction without a difference, or at least that the Nazis next door can still pass themselves off as nice white people<\/a>. It\u2019s as timely a note as any in 2025. We haven\u2019t passed through a portal into another dimension, but that doesn\u2019t mean the whole world hasn\u2019t changed.<\/p>\n Get the best of movies, TV, books, music, and more.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This article contains spoilers for\u00a0Peacemaker\u00a0Season 2, Episode 6, \u201cIgnorance Is Chris.\u201d A few days ago, Apple indefinitely postponed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":183502,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[517,88,1035,111,7412,92],"class_list":{"0":"post-183501","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-apple","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-hbo","11":"tag-politics","12":"tag-superheroes","13":"tag-tv"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183501","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=183501"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183501\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/183502"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=183501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=183501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=183501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/a27ecda9-b995-4d70-8b7f-b16a4ad599e3.jpeg\")
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\n Everyone Was Waiting for the First South Park Episode Post\u2013Charlie Kirk. Well \u2026
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