Peacemaker Season 2 Episode 4 review — Need I Say Door — Betrayal forced, portals shifting, and a cliffhanger that cuts deep

Peacemaker keeps playing with fire, and this week the blaze hit straight at Chris Smith’s heart. The episode balances action and lore with raw emotional weight, pushing the team into fractures that hurt to watch.

What begins as a chase turns into a test of loyalty, identity, and survival, closing this episode of Peacemaker with a cliffhanger that feels like the floor giving way.

Harcourt black-booked, Chris cornered

The choice to place Emilia Harcourt in a black-book bind in the second season of Peacemaker is cruel and brilliant at once. She isn’t betraying Chris out of malice but because Amanda Waller’s machinery stripped her of options.

To see Harcourt, who once fought at his side with dignity and grit, being maneuvered into becoming bait against him is like watching a friend’s strength twisted into a weapon.

The scene lands with the gravitas of someone forced to turn her back, even as her eyes still carry care. For Chris, the suspicion that the one ally who mattered might now be compromised cuts deeper than bullets. It adds yet another wound to the story of Peacemaker, who is always trying to redefine himself while being pulled into the shadows of betrayal.

Adebayo’s clarity and Economos’s struggle

Leota Adebayo emerges here as the moral backbone, the one refusing to abandon Chris even when the system would rather see him erased. Her line about the grass not always being greener comes across like a shard of truth in a show obsessed with deception and illusion.

Economos, on the other hand, is caught in the crossfire. It’s painful to watch him cornered, pressed to give Chris up, yet doing everything he can to resist. He stammers, he stalls, he tries to find another way.

His hesitation is his loyalty showing. Instead of betrayal, what we see is the agony of a man who knows the cost of giving in and chooses, however imperfectly, to hold the line. That tension reflects what Peacemaker as a series does best: putting flawed characters into impossible choices and showing where their humanity shines through.

The portal that moves and the ritual that binds

The revelation that the Unfolding Chamber isn’t fixed but can shift locations adds a strange and mythic flavor to the episode. It’s not just a door to elsewhere, it’s a mirror of instability, power that refuses to stay still, destiny that cannot be pinned down.

Layer that with the unsettling ritual of the old man and the eagle, and the episode starts to hum with the rhythm of folk horror, where ordinary spaces suddenly bloom into nightmare.

The portal becomes less of a sci-fi object and more of a metaphor for choices that can change position depending on who controls them, thus making the mythology inside Peacemaker expand in unexpected ways, while still staying rooted in personal stakes.

The eerie ritual that closes the fourth episode of Peacemaker

The final minutes of the fourth episode of Peacemaker are marked by a scene that feels almost detached from the rest, yet carries a symbolic charge. The old man obsessed with killing eagles stands at the center, performing a ritual that unsettles more than it explains. His gestures are strange, his intent feels cruel, and the atmosphere is heavy with menace. There are gestures, sounds, and a strange tension in the air, as if power is being invoked from somewhere beyond comprehension. And he finds Eagly.

This eerie performance leaves us uneasy. It suggests that forces larger than the characters are moving, shaping destiny in ways that the team cannot control. By ending with such ambiguity, Peacemaker plants a seed of dread that will linger long after the screen cuts to black.

The ritual functions as a reminder that violence and manipulation are not the only dangers in play. There are deeper currents, rituals of belief and control that may bend the story into darker shapes as the season unfolds.

Chris facing betrayal and the cliffhanger ahead

The final act, with Chris heading toward Harcourt, is devastating. He knows it may be a trap, but he goes anyway, because some ties are too strong to sever by suspicion alone.

That’s the tragedy of Chris Smith. He wants to believe in bonds, even as the world punishes him for it. Ending here, on the edge of betrayal and hope, leaves us with a sick weight in the stomach.

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It’s the kind of cliffhanger that doesn’t just tease what’s next but forces us to sit with dread until the next chapter arrives, and that’s why Peacemaker works so well: it knows how to balance absurdity, pain, and sincerity until it becomes unbearable not to come back.

Rating with a touch of flair: 5 out of 5 shattered bonds glowing under a false green light.

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