If you thought, "G.I. Robot would have a field day here" while watching this week's episode of Peacemaker, you weren't the only one.
Major spoilers for Peacemaker season 2, episode 6 follow.
In the aptly titled "Ignorance is Chris," we finally learn exactly what is "off" about the seemingly perfect alternate dimension Peacemaker has been spending so much time in, as Harcourt points out that she hasn't seen a single person of color since she and the rest of the 11th Street Kids arrived. An American Flag with a swastika leaves little doubt: This is a version of the Nazi-ruled Earth X from DC Comics.
The episode concludes with Adebayo discovering the terrifying truth when Chris' brother Keith and a group of furious neighbours begin chasing her after noticing that "one got out."
"Honest to God, it's not from the comics," Gunn explains to EW. "It's from Philip K. Dick's Man in The High Castle, which is a book I've always really liked. I'm a huge Phil K. Dick fan, and that was the first book of his I ever read. It's about an alternate Earth where the Nazis won World War II, and that was more what inspired me for this. It just seemed to be a natural outcome of Chris dealing with his personal journey. He goes and he gets everything he desires, but it is a monkey's paw because there are a lot of things about this place that are — and even though people think he went to our Earth, it really is worse than our Earth. It is. He's finding out the complexity of all that. Everybody thinks that means everybody there is a Nazi, everybody there is bad, but you find out that things are not that simple in the next episode."
It just so happens that the DCU has previously introduced a Nazi-hunting robot that could come in very handy in this situation. Gunn confirms that Creature Commandos' G.I. Robot will make his live-action debut at some point - but not necessarily in Peacemaker.
"The answer to that question, which, this is going to be all anybody talks about from this interview, is yes, but not necessarily when you think you're going to see him," Gunn replied when asked if the mechanical menace will appear in live-action form. "So not necessarily in Peacemaker season 2.
For now, it seems Chris and his friends will have to face what's ahead without any super-powered back-up. However, Gunn has hinted that some crazy stuff is still to come in the final two episodes, so there might well be a few more surprises in store.
"Creature Commandos is an animated series, I've written all the episodes, something we're going to do that's a little bit different at DC is gonna have characters move into animation, out of animation, usually having the same actor play their voice as who plays them in live-action," Gunn said last year.