PEACEMAKER Season 2 Rewrites David Ayer’s SUICIDE SQUAD History with Rick Flag Flashback

Peacemaker Season 2 just pulled off a major shake-up to DCU continuity. Episode 3 dives into Rick Flag Jr.’s past, and in doing so, it rewrites key elements from David Ayer’s 2016 Suicide Squad. The result is a retcon that effectively wipes Ayer’s movie out of canon or at least reframes it in a way that makes it incompatible with the current timeline.

The episode flashes back to a moment between Rick Flag Jr. and Emilia Harcourt, where Rick opens up about his girlfriend, June Moone. He casually mentions, “she’s a sorceress who might burrow a hole in the planet if we broke up.”

In Ayer’s Suicide Squad, June was freed from the Enchantress by the end of the movie and was seemingly powerless. Peacemaker reveals that she still had her magical abilities, which completely contradicts the events of the 2016 film.

The timeline placement of this flashback makes it even more significant. Harcourt tells Rick he’s shipping out to Corto Maltese within hours, placing the scene right before the mission seen in James Gunn’s 2021 The Suicide Squad.

The episode even replays footage from that movie, showing Peacemaker’s fatal betrayal of Rick. This firmly ties Gunn’s film into the DCU while reshaping what came before.

What makes the retcon interesting is how it reframes Rick and June’s relationship. In Ayer’s version, Rick struggled with June’s possession by the Enchantress, but her powers were supposedly gone by the finale.

By having Rick acknowledge her as a still-active sorceress in Peacemaker, it suggests the 2016 storyline either never happened or played out very differently than what we saw on screen.

This isn’t the first time Peacemaker has bent DCU continuity for laughs or storytelling freedom. Season 1 had that notorious Justice League gag, which already hinted at a looser approach to past films.

Now with Season 2, Episode 3, the show seems to be outright retconning parts of the old DCEU as Gunn’s new DCU takes shape.

It’s becoming clearer that Gunn and company aren’t beholden to the Ayer Cut or the 2016 Suicide Squad. Instead, they’re using Peacemaker to clean up continuity and align everything closer to Gunn’s vision of the DCU.

Whether fans see this as a necessary course correction or a dismissal of Ayer’s work, it’s a big moment that reshapes how we look at the Suicide Squad’s history on screen.