Warning: This article contains spoilers for Peacemaker episode seven.
Peacemaker reached its penultimate episode today, and it well and truly kicked the stakes up a gear for next week’s season finale. Team Peacemaker faced adversity from two sides as the butterfly-controlled police hunted down John Cena’s anti-hero and his teammates, all while his own dad tried to kill him. By the end of the episode, one of the group’s number had met their end.
Major spoilers incoming!
When the cops storm the motel the team is staying at, Clemson Murn (Chukwudi Iwuji) makes a stand against the butterfly queen (Annie Chang), who is angry with him for siding with humanity over his own people. And she takes her anger out on him by killing his human host and brutally crushing his natural butterfly form. Harcourt (Jennifer Holland) and Adebayo (Danielle Brooks) find him before Murn dies in Harcourt’s hands.
In a spoiler-y interview with Variety, Iwuji opened up on his Murn’s shocking death, which he described as a “surprisingly emotional” scene to film. Even though it wasn’t actually his last work on the series, it still came as a “punch in the gut” to the British actor.
“We shot the last couple of episodes out of sequence, so I knew I still had some more shooting to come back to. It wasn’t farewell; it was a bit of a punch in the gut,” Iwuji said. “This is where he goes down. It became a surprisingly emotional scene. There was a moment in it, where I said, “I’m proud to have had you on my team.” When we were doing it, it sort of choked out of me, which is always fun as an actor. You always want to be surprised by yourself and by what happens…. Let’s face it, in the world of extended universes and all that stuff, no one is ever really dead, are they? You never know.”
Even in the DC universe, it’s hard to imagine a way Murn can come back from being killed two times over, so his episode seven fate does seem pretty final. And if this is it for Murn, at least it brings his transformative arc, going from shifty puppetmaster to redeemed hero to a close in a meaningful way. Iwuji is teaming up with creator James Gunn again, though, for Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, in which he’s rumored to be playing the movie’s main villain.
Following its extremely shocking penultimate chapter, Peacemaker reaches what promises to be an action-packed finale next Thursday on HBO Max.
