WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Peacemaker now streaming on HBO Max.
Peacemaker debuted its first three episodes on HBO Max on Jan. 13. Taking place five months after the events of The Suicide Squad, Christopher Smith, aka Peacemaker (John Cena), is discharged from the hospital, though not to freedom. Just as he makes it back to his home in Evergreen, Washington, he is tracked down by Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) who sends Clemson Murn (Chukwudi Iwuji), Emilia Harcourt (Jennifer Holland), John Economos (Steve Agee) and Leota Adebayo (Danielle Brooks) to recruit him for a new mission: Project Butterfly.
Just like with Project Starfish in The Suicide Squad, there's a lot Peacemaker is being kept in the dark about, despite being asked to literally stick his neck for the mission. All he knows about Project Butterfly is that he needs to kill "some really bad people," but doesn't know what that means. As far as he knows, anyone could be a "bad person" as there are a lot of them in the world that come in many shapes, sizes and colors. Oddly enough, Peacemaker encounters his first "butterfly" -- purely by accident -- on the first night on the job.
After being briefed on the mission during dinner and being given his case files to study, Peacemaker decides to follow Harcourt into a bar to drink with her and possibly have sex with her later. He does not succeed with Harcourt but does manage to pick up a random woman from the bar and goes back to her place for sex. After the one-night stand, Peacemaker catches the woman reading his case files for Project Butterfly, but thinks nothing of it at first. It's not until he checks out her record collection that the woman attacks him unprovoked.
During the fight, the woman proves to have superhuman strength, speed and agility. Not only does she prove to be an equal match for Peacemaker in terms of combat skills, but she doesn't injure nor tire easily. The only way Peacemaker is able to stop her is by getting to his new helmet and activating a forcefield on it that unleashes a massive shockwave within a small radius. Getting caught in the shockwave disintegrates the woman and kills her. When Peacemaker returns to her flat to take her record collection and other possessions he wants, he discovers a glowing alien object he takes.
Sometime later -- after another one-night stand with a different resident from the same flat building -- Peacemaker plays around with the glowing alien object, which transforms into a miniature UFO that only has enough room for one pilot. This is the first indication that the superhuman woman he fought earlier was possibly an alien. This would also explain why she attacked Peacemaker after reading his case files; she either found her own file and thought that he was there to kill her, or she identified the other butterflies in the case file and attempted to kill Peacemaker to keep them safe.
On their first official mission for Project Butterfly, Murn briefs Peacemaker's new Task Force X team on the first butterflies they need to kill, which are an actual U.S. senator and his entire family. Peacemaker has reservations about killing the children, even after learning they have strange tongues and eat strange meals. After Vigilante (Freddie Stroma) -- an ally of Peacemaker -- kills the senator's wife and children, he and Peacemaker are subsequently captured by the senator who proceeds to torture Vigilante for information.
Murn, Harcourt and Adebayo break into the senator's home to rescue Peacemaker and discover an alien room within the home they cannot easily break through; they only manage to do so after using an explosive. In the basement where Peacemaker and Vigilante are being held and tortured, Peacemaker breaks free and manages to kill the senator at point-blank range. An alien-looking butterfly then emerges from the senator's corpse and flies away, effectively identifying what the butterflies actually are: extraterrestrial parasites that are silently invading Earth by invading human hosts.
Peacemaker ends up keeping the butterfly that invaded the senator's body in a jar to interrogate it later and find out what it's really after. Named "Goff" after the senator it occupied, Peacemaker instructs the butterfly to knock once for "yes" and twice for "no" in response to his questions. He doesn't get very far before the Evergreen police show up at his door with an arrest warrant after his father, Auggie Smith aka the White Dragon (Robert Patrick), ratted him out.
While Peacemaker -- along with Vigilante -- end up escaping police capture, the Goff butterfly also escapes by invading the body of Detecive Sophie Song (Annie Chang). It does this by entering her mouth and burrowing into her brain, instantly killing her. When she returns to the Evergreen police station, she makes a quick call to other butterflies using alien technology from its home planet. Later that day, a bunch of other alien spaceships arrive, and the Sophie butterfly leads these newly arrived butterflies to invade the bodies of both police and prisoners.
Unbeknownst to Peacemaker and Vigilante, Clemson Murn's Task Force X team isn't just looking to stop an alien invasion; they are specifically trying to stop the Sophie butterfly -- who is revealed to be the butterflies' female leader -- from further executing her plans. The only member of the Task Force X team who knows the specifics of her plan is Murn, who is himself a butterfly. The other Task Force X members -- Harcourt, Economos and now Adebayo -- are aware of Murn's secret but are still learning the specifics of the butterfly invasion on a day-by-day basis.
As Murn explained to Adebayo, Harcourt and Economos, the butterflies originally arrived on Earth because their home planet had died off. Originally, the butterflies intended to live peacefully on Earth, completely unnoticed. When their leader decided to actually invade the Earth by overthrowing the human race, that's when the butterflies started invading human bodies as hosts. That's also what motivated Murn's butterfly to invade his body, rationalizing that Murn was a cold-blooded murderer who most likely would not have changed. While Murn's butterfly is aware he stole Murn's life and his ability to change, he also knows his leader is a much bigger threat that needs to be stopped.
The Murn butterfly's plan of attack is to destroy the butterflies' food source. To sustain their lives, the butterflies feed off of the raw amber fluid they mass-produce at a mysterious factory known as Glan-Tai. This is the same company that employed Annie Sturphausen, the butterfly Peacemaker had sex with in Episode 1. When Murn's team visited Glan-Tai earlier, they discovered that all of the factory's employees were butterflies, but hadn't identified the "cow" or the location of the "cow" that's actually producing the fluid. After some CCTV trailing by Economos, they managed to trace the location of the "cow" to a barn, which they now plan to kill.
To find out more about the butterflies, Peacemaker is streaming now on HBO Max.