Peacemaker Is Making The Suicide Squad’s Best Villain Irrelevant

Warning: Contains spoilers for Peacemaker.

Peacemaker has an excellent cast of new and returning characters, but it’s still wasting the best villain from The Suicide Squad—Amanda Waller. Every story only has so much time it can give to its characters, so someone always ends up getting the short end of screentime. Waller is one of those characters, and after how good a showing she had in The Suicide Squad, it’s a shame that more isn’t being done with her.

James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad improved on 2016’s Suicide Squad in a lot of ways, and one of those was the handling of Amanda Waller in the DC Extended Universe. Originally, Waller was given very few chances to be shown as the unscrupulous, manipulative monster she was known to be in the comics, and she was even made out to be rather incompetent with how much of the plot revolved around her own mistakes. The Suicide Squad fixed that by making her far more competent and menacing with how she handles the mission, which not only made her closer to how the character is usually depicted, but also worked to make her a standout villain in the movie.

Despite all of that, Peacemaker is making Waller completely irrelevant. Waller is the one overseeing Operation Butterfly, and she even has a personal connection to the team with Leota Adebayo being her daughter, but Waller, herself, has been notably absent from the show outside of a quick appearance near the end of episode 1. For a character who’s usually heavily involved in her mission, even if it’s only behind the scenes, it’s odd that the DCEU’s Peacemaker has gone out of its way to do little with her.

To Peacemaker’s benefit, there’s more than enough in-universe justification for Waller’s lack of presence in the show, most of it established from the very beginning. As previously stated, Waller is usually only involved in mission control, so there’s technically no reason for her to be seen throughout the show. Not only that, her being Adebayo’s mother is clearly a secret, so her being around them could lead to one of them slipping and doing something to reveal the true nature of their relationship. Harcourt and Economos are also part of the mission as punishment for turning against Waller in the climax of The Suicide Squad, so that also provides a good excuse for Waller to not personally involve herself with the characters.

However, even if there are good reasons for Viola Davis’ Waller to not be involved in the story, it’s still a waste of her character, either way. The Suicide Squad had a good showing of how entertaining someone as terrible as Waller can be, but Peacemaker is doing nothing to capitalize and expand on that. There are a few episodes left in the show, so Waller could still easily make an appearance before the end, but even if she does, it would probably be hard for the show to make up for lost time.

Peacemaker releases new episodes Thursdays on HBO Max.