Warning: Contains spoilers for Peacemaker episode 3.
Christopher Smith’s dad, Auggie, was revealed as White Dragon in Peacemaker, but he might secretly be the real target of Amanda Waller’s plan. Peacemaker serves as a sequel TV series to James Gunn’s DCEU installment The Suicide Squad. While John Cena’s Peacemaker received some mixed reactions, the show is giving him new depth while embroiling him in some high-level threats.
In Peacemaker episode 1, “A Whole New Whirled,” Peacemaker returns home to pick up Eagly from his cantankerous and racist father, Auggie Smith (Robert Patrick). It becomes clear there is more to the old man than first meets the eye, as he reveals a high-tech closet filled with inventions and Peacemaker helmets that he personally created. After Peacemaker’s antics at an apartment complex, the team implicates his father instead, leading Detective Song (Annie Chang) to arrest him. When Auggie is put into jail at the end of Peacemaker episode 2, “Best Friend, For Never,” several white supremacist inmates kneel before him and call him White Dragon.
Auggie Smith only appears fairly incidentally in the first few episodes, seeming to be a part of Peacemaker’s characterization or as a joke. However, it is made clear in the chilling prison scene—complete with Nazi salutes—that he will play a bigger, more nefarious part in the ongoing series. Here’s all the evidence that supports Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) secretly wanting to recruit Smith’s dad into the Suicide Squad.
Waller Has A Secret Plan
Original reports suggested that Amanda Waller would not be a part of the Peacemaker DCEU TV show. Instead, trailers indicated that the leadership of the new ARGUS team would be passed to Clemson Murn (Chukwudi Iwuji) as a splinter group from Task Force X, carrying out their own project. However, in Peacemaker episode 1 it is revealed that Amanda Waller still has a presence in the HBO Max series and is keeping tabs on the group through Leota Adebayo (Danielle Brooks) who, unbeknownst to the team, is Waller’s daughter.
The fact that Waller is still secretly involved in Peacemaker's plot is extremely on-brand for the controlling character. That she has clearly strongarmed her own daughter into being her mole in the team as part of potentially convincing Leota to follow in her footsteps similarly follows Waller’s purely pragmatic and manipulative character. But Waller reveals two things in conversation with Leota. First, the identity of Peacemaker’s racist father as White Dragon is known to both of them, and second, Waller is using Leota as part of a plan that the rest of the team is not aware of, as Waller feels that Leota is the only one she can trust. While the plan isn’t clear yet, it involves planting a forged Peacemaker diary in Christopher Smith’s trailer for an unknown end goal, which is likely to be forcing the recruitment of White Dragon.
John And Leota Both Implicate White Dragon
In Peacemaker episode 2, the team have to cover up the fact that Peacemaker was at the apartment building and the cause of a large amount of destruction as it could jeopardize the clandestine nature of their mission. John Economos (Steve Agee) changes the vehicle registration for Peacemaker’s car so that it can’t be traced to him, but in doing so changes it to identify Auggie Smith instead. When Murn returns and John tells him what he has done he is angry, as it is likely to cause more problems for the Peacemaker team down the line and John defends it as being a quick decision that was the result of panic.
When the team discovers that Amber (Alison Araya) and Evan (Lenny Jacobson) were briefly held hostage by Peacemaker, Leota is sent to bribe them. They happily accept the bribe to not identify Peacemaker, and instead, they both individually identify his father, leading to Auggie's arrest. Leota’s actions, given her connection to her mother, suggest that Waller wants White Dragon in jail so that she can get to him and recruit him into the Suicide Squad. With this context, it seems unlikely that John’s actions were purely accidental and that he is not in some way being pressured by Waller to also aid in her secret plan.
Murn Is Being Set Up By Waller
Very little is known about James Gunn’s original Peacemaker character, Clemson Murn. He plays things close to his chest and in Peacemaker episode 3, “Better Goff Dead,” he mentions that he has previously avoided showing any emotion as he sees it as a sign of weakness. Throughout the first three episodes, it is hinted that he has done some bad things in his past and is now working for ARGUS as some form of atonement.
Both John Economos and Leota Adebayo have been instructed to take actions that will lead to White Dragon’s incarceration, seemingly under Waller’s instruction and without the prior knowledge of Murn. While Harcourt and Economos believe they’ve been assigned to Peacemaker as revenge for their The Suicide Squad betrayal, Murn’s presence on the team is unexplained. All of this makes it seem likely that Clemson Murn is being set up as Waller’s fall guy for any fallout from her White Dragon recruitment plan.
White Dragon Joins The Suicide Squad In The Comics
The final point that suggests that Amanda Waller is secretly trying to recruit White Dragon to Task Force X, possibly creating Peacemaker’s real antagonist, is based on the original DC comics. James Gunn’s Peacemaker TV show is combining two original comic characters: the most famous White Dragon, William Heller (AKA William Hell), and Peacemaker’s racist and abusive father, Wolfgang Schmidt. While this creates a new character, he might be expected to follow some of the original storylines for William Heller, given the ending of Peacemaker episode 2, and these include forming the Aryan Empire, joining the Fourth Reich, and being recruited to an iteration of Amanda Waller’s Suicide Squad.
In the DC comics, when White Dragon was recruited by Amanda Waller, he unsurprisingly tried to fight back against her leadership. This extended to his attempt to kill Waller at one point, but she had his armor equipped with an electric shock device to keep him in line in a similar way to the bombs implanted into other members. One storyline saw a character called the General seeking to claim control of the Suicide Squad from Waller and he was able to enlist White Dragon’s support. However, White Dragon was eventually killed in the process. While Peacemaker looks on track to reveal Amanda Waller’s secret plan to recruit Whtie Dragon to the Suicide Squad within this season, it is unclear whether that plot will reach a conclusion or be part of a larger setup for a third installment of The Suicide Squad or for Peacemaker season 2.
Peacemaker releases new episodes Thursdays on HBO Max.
