Did James Gunn Just Turn the DCU’s Nick Fury Into a Villain?

There will be spoilers for James Gunn’s DCU so far, which includes Creature Commandos, Superman, and Peacemaker.

We’re pretty deep into James Gunn’s DC Universe, and it is connected as hell. The man had mentioned that it was a goal, and made good on it. Actors from Superman have popped up often in the second season of Peacemaker, which has dealt directly with the fallout from Gunn’s big summer film, which contained a cameo from Peacemaker himself. Meanwhile, Nicholas Holt’s Lex Luthor dropped by Peacemaker to chop it up with the character who has gotten around the most: Rick Flag Sr.

Flag Sr. is played by Frank Grillo, and the implications of his casting were significant from the beginning. He’s the father of Rick Flag, played by Joel Kinnaman, who was murdered by John Cena’s Peacemaker in Gunn’s first DCU entry, The Suicide Squad. While many aspects of that film are not canon, plenty are. There was a giant starfish (Starro) that menaced a small country, Emilia Harcourt and John Economos (played by Jennifer Holland and Steve Agee) continue to have adventures with Peacemaker, and Rick Flag Jr. was killed.

So, it was exciting to see Grillo’s Flag Sr. join the cast for Peacemaker season two. But first, we saw him in Creature Commandos. The animated show revealed that Flag had been leading a squad of metahuman monsters sent to another country by Amanda Waller to protect the country’s leader. When Waller changes her mind and requests that the leader be killed, Flag has a crisis of conscience. However, the leader is revealed to be secretly plotting evil doings and is killed by The Bride (of Frankenstein).

The point is that Flag is presented as a little more morally sound in Creature Commandos, while admitting to having gotten into some less-than-flattering shenanigans in the past. Fast forward to Superman, and Grillo shows up clad in a suit and playing the part of a bureaucrat being pitched a defense against metahumans by Lex Luthor. We don’t get much out of Flag in the film, but he appears, again, to be on the morally gray side of things. But by the end of the movie, he seems bothered by the potential of metahuman threats.

Peacemaker season two sees the wheels come off for the character. Now, we see a Rick Flag who is more eager to break the rules. He’s obsessed with getting revenge on the man who killed his son. So much so that he pulls Lex Luthor out of a maximum security prison to help, then even takes on some of Luthor’s goons as employees. By the finale, we see him in similar circumstances to how we saw Luthor as the villain in Superman, and then things get worse!

Flag’s arc gets pushed over the edge when he begins sending mostly nameless employees to their deaths in an attempt to find a particular dimension. We see people suffer and die as Flag and the other suits laugh and laugh, and then, because Gunn, I guess, needed to pad time in the finale, we see it again. Then, we find out that the dimension Flag was looking for needed to be inhabitable for Earthly residents because he wants to turn it into a metahuman prison! Pretty bad!

To top things all off, Flag traps Peacemaker on that alien prison to end the season (and maybe even the show). Presumably, we’ll see the prison and some of its other inhabitants in Man of Tomorrow, the sequel to Superman. Gunn has said that Peacemaker season two would set up the film. With Holt set to return as Luthor for the sequel, and having been directly involved in Flag’s plans, it’s safe to assume we’ll learn more about this new dimension. But what about Flag?

Gunn took the man with the most screentime so far and basically stopped short of having him twirl his mustache. He went from a man with a troubled past to an upset father, to a straight-up villain, and I’m pretty surprised by that. It makes sense, given that Peacemaker has also had such a central role in Gunn’s universe, serving as a Nick Fury type, but I expected things to maybe get dragged out a little longer. Instead, Grillo’s Flag went on a bit of a speed run into villainy. While not the most interesting choice, it’s fun to see that arc play out over three very different projects.