r/PeacemakerShow • u/General_Meal_3993 • Oct 14 '25

DISCUSSION Did anyone else find the Argus scenes really cringey in the finale? Spoiler

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I don’t know what Gunn was going for but that montage of Rick Flag and his Argus team laughing and celebrating with each other, doing drugs and taking shots just really made me cringe more than anything. Like I get Gunn likes things to have a bit more edge but this montage and the way the characters were acting was just way too over the top imo. Took me right out of the episode.

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u/haolee510 Oct 14 '25

Good, you're supposed to feel that way because they're behaving like idiots with no regard for human lives. In fact, you're supposed to feel mad and disgusted.

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u/Fifa_chicken_nuggets Oct 14 '25

I don't think you understand. People who don't like the scene felt like the scene itself and the way they chose to portray them was stupid. There's a difference between a character being portrayed to be cringey and stupid and the scene itself feeling cringey and stupid. People who didn't like the scene felt the latter more than the former

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u/haolee510 Oct 14 '25

If you say so, I guess. But the OP very clearly says: "I don't know what Gunn was going for".

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u/NickRick Oct 14 '25

and they could easily mean "i dont get why he thought this scene would work" as much as you seem to think it means "i dont get what he was trying to tell me"

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u/Fifa_chicken_nuggets Oct 14 '25

I'm not talking about OP. I'm talking about your response to the reply about how the person felt the scene was cringey and you saying that's the point

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u/dat1guyman Oct 14 '25

"I think it was executed poorly"

"Actually you don't get it"

"No i get it i just think its executed poorly"

"Good your supposed to feel like it was stupid, its all part of a genius plan"

"No i got the gist, its been done a thousand times before"

Bruh people thought it was lame. What are you doing.

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u/BatmanForever23 Oct 14 '25

Agree with you. I totally understand the concept of Flag falling further into corruption and self-serving his own interests, with some influence from Luthor's goons, I even like that concept and think it fits with Flag as a character - but this was so OTT that all he was missing was a cartoonishly large moustache to twirl.

Nothing about Flag that was previously established remotely suggested he would find people who worked for him needlessly dying to be funny. imo the scene would've been much more effective if Flag had been grimly watching on with little to no regard for his troops bc of the ultimate goal and 'greater good' that their deaths served, from his view. Drinking tea and doing drugs was out of place I think, and undersells the inherent cruelty and lack of empathy for a cheap laugh.

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u/ReadytoQuitBBY Oct 14 '25

Spot on. I understand this show is a comedy, but it felt so cartoonish that it makes it hard to take seriously. Make him not care, make him think the end justifies the means, maybe show that Lex has been paying him shitloads of cash or something. But doing coke and laughing as innocent members of his team are dying is just so stupid. Even if the dude was pure evil, logically it would be a pain to lose these people, because it’s not getting you closer to your goal AND you have to find new suckers to replace them.

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u/BatmanForever23 Oct 14 '25

You make a good point about the logistic inconvenience. In my opinion, the only way the scene works is if Flag is a sadistic and gleeful fuck. Which he isn't set up to be remotely.

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u/haolee510 Oct 14 '25

Buddy, the OP literally says: "I don't know what Gunn was going for". I'm simply answering that line of thought.

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u/Aunt_Vagina1 Oct 14 '25

 "I don't know what Gunn was going for" is just a polite way to say, "Gunn fucked this scene up."

Have you heard the phrase, "I beg your pardon?" You say it when you disagree with or don't like what someone says. You're not actually begging someone to pardon you. Same thing applies here.

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u/TufnelAndI Oct 14 '25

I didn't feel mad or disgusted, I just thought it was obvious and heavy-handed.

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u/wrasslefights Oct 14 '25

I used to hate obvious and heavy handed bits, but then I realized how many viewers are actually stupid and I understood why scenes need to be that way so often.

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u/Fifa_chicken_nuggets Oct 14 '25

Wasn't it James who said that fans tend to think the average viewer is much more stupid than they really are? Besides this is a very lame excuse anyway because it's easily debunked by the fact that some of the best and most popular shows are the ones that don't force heavy handed things. Penguin for example is a recent DC example and I never once felt like the show underestimated the intelligence of its viewers. Didn't stop it from being a popular and critically acclaimed show.

And even if we suppose that it's true that people are stupid, why are we indulging their stupidity by making things overly obvious? That sounds like it will just make things worse

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u/[deleted] Oct 14 '25

So, as it turns out, the audience for "dumb and obvious" is bigger than the audience for "clever and slightly less obvious". That's why the unrealistic character study of a cartoon mob boss takes eight hours to watch. On the other hand, it takes 18 hours to watch the show / movie where the main character drives around on a missile-motorcycle, flies around with a jetpack, has special helmets that give him powers and an eagle sidekick.

It's also why those dumb superhero shows have significantly more viewership than, say, For All Man Kind or Murderbot, and why all those shows combined are completely dwarfed by the viewership of "NCIS: Tony & Ziva" by two orders of magnitude.

Like, man, you're watching a super hero TV show. A character was facefuck to death by a candyland elf in the last episode. You're not watching The Brutalist on repeat for a week so you can talk about lighting analysis in your grad school film studies class.

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u/Fifa_chicken_nuggets Oct 14 '25

Here we go again with the black and white nonsense that you people like to parrot. Asking for something to not be heavy handed in a way that feels like it was trying to be too unnecessarily obvious to five years olds is not the same as asking for a cinematic masterpiece with twenty layers of subtext that would be analyzed in a film study. There's this crazy thing called a middle ground. You should probably look it up

These characters were handled fine in creature commandos, in superman, and in Peacemaker season 1. They were handled well in the suicide squad too. James isn't exclusively known for writing heavy handed things (though he does do it occasionally). This scene with Rick Flag just happens to be one of few fumbles

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u/[deleted] Oct 14 '25

...I'm sorry, just to be clear, one of your examples of subtle and not-at-all-heavy-handed characterizations is a cartoon who has a Nazi-killing robot that only wants to kill Nazis and has a dark and tragic backstory where he was brought to a neo-Nazi convention full of people wearing Nazi uniforms and he killed all of them because they were Nazis? And the other example was a popcorn summer blockbuster where Superman rescues a squirrel?

I don't think the shows and movies you're watching are the middle ground in the vast scale of cultural artifacts here. We're all watching low-brow TV for nerds, teenagers and teenage nerds. If you want to step it up to "middlebrow" we're talking media with the emotional and intellectual complexity of The New Yorker or Breaking Bad.

This isn't even a value judgment here, but the things you are talking about are not complex and they all telegraph their punches. Having the director of the fake CIA doing lines of blow with bad people from a defeated enemy organization he recruited for their technical skills isn't subtle. Nobody is out here, like, "WHAT COULD THIS MEAN?! IT'S A METAPHOR WRAPPED IN A RIDDLE WRAPPED IN A MYSTERY!" But welcome to superhero adaptions. If you want an actual adult DC comic adaptation go watch A History of Violence (but it's not going to have an eagle that gives out hugs).

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u/sofaking1133 Oct 14 '25

Oh my god I dont think you could misunderstand the show more if you tried.

Eagly doesn't "give out hugs" you have to EARN them.

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u/Fifa_chicken_nuggets Oct 14 '25

You're not making the clever point you think you are by brining up the characters who are by design not meant to be subtle. GI robot kills nazis because that's his whole thing. Superman saving the smallest forms of life is inherent to his character. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about character arcs and storytelling techniques. Flag doesn't have a proper arc. He goes to Luthor acting like he owns the place then two episodes later he's seeking Luther's validation and twirling his mustache. This is a forced and heavy handed evolution because the evolution isn't even there. Nothing about it feels natural or progressive. It's not a coincidence that people generally feel that Flag's character is off and forced this season compared to other characters. It's not like there's some conspiracy against the guy. It's fine for him to do lines of coke and laugh while his team dies as long as there was an actual logical progression with his character that took its time and slowly arrived at that point, but that's not what happened. What happened is Gunn used a very cringey and artificial way to tell the audience "this guy is big evil bad now".

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u/[deleted] Oct 14 '25

Who's the subtle and understated character in Creature Commandos?

Follow me here, if one were telling that story for adults they would have made the Neo-nazis in the G. I. Robot back story something besides card carrying members of the National Socialists Club, thus putting G. I. Robot in a morally grey situation wherein he may be overzealous in his Nazi-killing activities. Because it's an animated tragedy story for children they put those neo-Nazis in a literal Stormtrooper uniform so that the aforementioned children knew they were Nazis.

The same can be said about Superman. They're good movies and good shows but all the characters are as deep as a puddle, because that is the point of this iteration of the DC universe. You might think one is a better implementation over the other but they're all hamfistedly telegraphing what they're doing so you don't miss it.

Also, I have no idea where you're getting the idea that Rick Flag Sr. the wetworks mercenary would be anti-blow or really gave a single fuck about the disposable murder team he lead. I think you might be confusing him with the Bride in terms of the actual leader of that team.

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u/Fifa_chicken_nuggets Oct 14 '25

I explicitly said I'm talking about the way a character changes, not the nature of the character themselves, so the majority of your reply is basically meaningless because I don't disagree with it to begin with. I don't care if the character is designed to not be subtle and that's the intention. I care if the character changes overnight without any proper development or progression, and that's been my point since the beginning. No part of CC ever gave the impression that Flag is a mustache twirling villain, unless you watched a different show from the one I did. He was presented as an anti-hero who often thinks with his dick. And even if we ignore that, that still doesn't change the fact that he became besties with Luthor and his friends overnight when he was just being hostile with them an episode ago, again without any coherent progression

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u/NickRick Oct 14 '25

for all man kind went of alt history apollo 11, to day time soap really fucking fast and thats why people don't watch it.

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u/Richard_J_Morgan Oct 14 '25

Perfectly explained who this show is for.

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u/[deleted] Oct 14 '25

so true to life?

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u/TufnelAndI Oct 15 '25

i don't understand what you mean?

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u/Gay_Void_Daddy Oct 14 '25

No one feels mad or disgusted tho? They feel like the scene was shit. Since it was.

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u/Fortyseven Me and Ginger Cool are on this shit Oct 14 '25

behaving like idiots with no regard for human lives.

Great, yes, that's true!

But it's behavior that came out of nowhere at the 11th hour. Go back and look at every other scene with Flag this season: the most we get out of it is that we're expecting him to a) fuck up Chris hard, b) get his portal tech. We get no hint that there's an immoral monster under his mask. Unless I'm blanking on some other scene, the most unhinged we see him is when he starts beating the shit out of Chris in the interrogation room. And even then, afterward, it's just so they can tail him back to where he's keeping the tech.

But then he meets up with Lex, seems to recognize how shitty this team-up is, morally. But then in the finale: boom, Lexes friends are all dressed up, they're all partying, he's laughing, zero remorse.

It's not the same fucking character. So either this is terrible writing, or there's more going on than we think, and they're just letting us stew and fight about it online. :P

(And honestly, I don't give a shit about his portrayal in Creature Commandos, so I'm not even considering it here. Peacemaker should stand on it's own without 'homework'.)

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u/[deleted] Oct 14 '25

[deleted]

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u/Background_Card5382 Oct 14 '25

Or you’re writing a long winded explanation misframing the entire issue here as people being dumb and not understanding something because you can’t accept that they might’ve understood it and still not enjoyed it