In this week’s episode of Peacemaker, we meet actor Tim Meadows as ARGUS agent Langston Fleury. And while Fleury has plenty of quirks that drive John Economos (Steve Agee) up the wall, the one that really confuses him is when — and spoilers past this point — Fleury reveals he has bird blindness. And while that specific condition isn’t real, it’s just a joke, there are at least two medical diagnoses that come close.
In the episode, titled “A Man Is Only As Good As His Bird,” Fleury and Economos are monitoring Peacemaker (John Cena) at his home when Eagly exits the house through the front door. That’s when the following exchange occurs between Fleury and Economos:
“What’s the deal with the parrot?”
“It’s an eagle. It’s a bald eagle. It’s the symbol of America. Are you telling me you don’t recognize what kind of bird that is?”
“Okay you obviously have not read my dossier. I have bird blindness.”
“Bird blindness?”
“I can’t tell the difference between one type of bird and another.”
“Okay, but a duck and an eagle are totally different sizes.”
“Yeah, well, they look the same size to me, man.”
“What about, like, a hummingbird?”
“Tiny bird? Incredibly fast wings? Hovers?”
“Yeah, see?”
“Yeah, I only know about that because I read it. To me the look and move just like any other bird… Bird blindness. It’s my sole weakness.”
Look, this is obviously a joke… Though it’s also a set-up for later when Fleury leads an elite team into Peacemaker’s house, only for all of them to be ripped to shreds by Eagly. Trying to save a member of his team, Fleury doesn’t know where to shoot.
“I can’t tell how big this thing is,” Fleury says. “F**king bird blindness.”
Then later, after waking up to find his team was all taken down, Fleury tells an ARGUS agent that, “A f**king duck attacked me.”
Again, it’s a joke! We all love jokes here, don’t we folks? And while, again, “bird blindness” is not a real thing, there is a real condition called “Visual agnosia.” According to the Cleveland Clinic, it’s defined as “a condition that disrupts your brain’s ability to process and understand what you see with your eyes.” And there are actually multiple types of visual agnosia, though two come the closest to explaining Fleury’s bird blindness.
The first is “Form agnosia,” where you’re able to “see the parts of an object but can’t recognize the object itself.” So that might explain how Fleury knows a bird has wings and a beak, but doesn’t know what type of bird it is, or how large (or small) it is. Less likely, but he could have Prosopagnosia, which is popularly known as “face blindness.” There, you can recognize that someone is a person, but can’t recognize faces or facial expressions.
While that doesn’t seem to be a one-to-one with Fleury’s condition, there was a study done on developmental Prosopagnosia that included animal faces, as well as human ones. The short version of the study is they found that in 60% of the cases where patients had face blindness, it also applied to animals as well as humans.
Still, Fleury doesn’t seem to have a problem with bird faces, so much as the whole bird. Does he have the same problem with cooked birds like chickens and ducks? And how would he deal with a turducken? Only time — and Thanksgiving — will tell.
Peacemaker Season 2 Premiere Dates And Episode Guide:
Peacemaker season 2 premiered on HBO Max on Thursday, August 21. The season will be eight episodes long, with one episode premiering per week.
Here’s the full list of episodes in Peacemaker Season 2, with premiere dates:
- Thursday, August 21, 2025: Peacemaker, Season 2, Episode 1
- Thursday, August 28, 2025: Peacemaker, Season 2, Episode 2
- Thursday, September 4, 2025: Peacemaker, Season 2, Episode 3
- Thursday, September 11, 2025: Peacemaker, Season 2, Episode 4
- Thursday, September 18, 2025: Peacemaker, Season 2, Episode 5
- Thursday, September 25, 2025: Peacemaker, Season 2, Episode 6
- Thursday, October 2, 2025: Peacemaker, Season 2, Episode 7
- Thursday, October 9, 2025: Peacemaker, Season 2, Episode 8 *Season Finale*
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The bird-blindness gag was lifted from Norsemen, a Danish show that was filmed in both Danish and English.
Thanks for the comment! I’m guessing it’s parallel thinking vs joke theft, but wrote up a little thing about it here: https://comicbookclublive.com/2025/08/31/did-peacemaker-steal-bird-blindness-gag-netflix-norsemen/