As if including Frank Grillo’s Rick Flag Sr. wasn’t enough of a way to tie Peacemaker Season 2 to Superman, “Ignorance is Chris” featured a surprise appearance from Lex Luthor when Flag visited him in prison. Although that was the only time Nicholas Hoult reprised his character on the HBO Max subscription-exclusive series, some of Luthor’s minions also returned in the season’s final two episodes, most notably Stephen Blackehart’s Sydney Happersen. While it was initially left unclear why Sydney specifically agreed to help Rick Flag Sr., Blackehart has cleared up the matter thanks to a recent interview.
The actor addressed this while he was talking with Phase Hero host Brandon Davis alongside Bonnie Discepolo, who also appeared on Peacemaker to reprise fellow LuthorCorp employee Ali Jessop. When Davis asked Blackehart if Happersen complied with tracking down dimensional rifts for Flag because he feared punishment or disappointment from Lex Luthor, Blackehart first mentioned that he learned about a Reddit thread where fans debated that very topic, then said:
So there’s a bunch of things going on that I’m trying to play in like a moment, which is surprise that Lex is working with Flag. Because that’s not where we last left things. And Lex, like everybody at LuthorCorp, is my idol, as well as my friend. And no, I wouldn’t want him saying anything like that to my friend and him get the wrong idea.
While Lex Luthor is definitely the kind of person who would have one of his underlings killed if they didn’t comply with his demands, that’s not what was happening with Sydney Happersen. Rather, he was turned off at the prospect of letting Luthor down if Rick Flag Sr. told the bald baddie that Happersen hadn’t agreed to play ball. He still thinks highly enough of Luthor for his opinion of him to matter.
As for the second reason Sydney Happersen helped out Rick Flag Sr., that boiled down to him feeling a sense of responsibility to find a new dimensional rift after the one he and the rest of the LuthorCorp team opened up in Superman nearly destroyed Metropolis. As Stephen Blackehart explained:
And also the revelation that there’s portals out there. Because when I come into the scene, it’s out of maybe a little guilt. You see how Sydney feels about opening the rifts and he’s like, ‘You want me to find rifts? Like there’s some maybe residual rifts out there from what we did? So it would be my fault, maybe.’ And then it’s a portal. It’s a whole different [thing].
Indeed it is, because while the rifts created by Lex Luthor’s technology had a “wobble” and could only be kept open a few minutes at a time, the portal that John Cena’s Christopher Smith opened was stable since it was created by alien technology allowing passage into the Quantum Unfolding Chamber. But even taking that new obligation into account, Blackehart emphasized how important it was that Lex Luthor not get the wrong idea about Sydney Happersen, continuing:
So I’m trying to process a lot of things, but it’s mostly the surprise that they’re working together and, ‘Lex isn’t going to have anything done to me, but I would never want to let my best friend down.’ The same way you wouldn’t want your best friend to… like if somebody said you were with somebody’s girlfriend or whatever like that. It’s false, but you wouldn’t want somebody to say that.
Stephen Blackehart concluded this portion of the conversation by saying that, “The worst thing Lex could to do Sydney is ignore him.” Though Lex Luthor claims to have humanity’s best interest at heart, he’s ultimately a man driven by vanity and an inflated ego, hence why jealousy factors heavily into his hatred of Superman. So I don’t believe for a second that Luthor considers Sydney to be a friend, but only as someone who can help him achieve his goals. It’s a very one-sided relationship.
Working for Rick Flag Sr. on Lex Luthor’s behalf paid off big time for Sydney Happersen, Ali Jessop, Otis Berg and the rest of the LuthorCorp cronies. They scored big perks with overseeing the exploration of these other dimensions for A.R.G.U.S. (in Sydney’s case, that included cocaine), and this culminated in them finding Salvation, which is now the world where metahuman prisoners will be dumped. Since Peacemaker Season 3 isn’t in development, fingers crossed we’ll see more of Sydney in Man of Tomorrow, which comes out on July 9, 2027.