This week on Preacher Jesse takes a final stand at his church, Odin Quincannon serves his lord, and Tulip gets a dog. It’s a chaotic beautiful mess of an episode and we’re going to talk about all its spoilers below.
1. The God of Meat
This week opens with a delightful flashback to the 80’s ski resort episode of It’s Always Sunny as the Quincannon famly hits the slopes. Tragically, they all die after their cable car’s cable snaps and they crash land into the snow. Their bodies are then shipped to Odin’s office, where he proceeds to disembowel their corpses alongside a cow and compares their organs. “Which is my daughter and which is the cow?” Odin asks Jesse Sr., holding a pair of intestines in his hands. Jesse’s dad can’t answer and leaves with his son, who catches a glimpse of the distraught father with blood and meat on his hands.
We’ve talked about how Jesse’s word doesn’t work on Odin either because he doesn’t believe in God or because his views mean he won’t “serve the Lord” as Jesse told him to because his idea of the Lord is different. Turns out it’s a little bit of both, mostly the latter, as Odin later tells Jesse he serves the God of Meat. It’s a disturbing revelation and one that frames Odin as yet another character that’s been let down by God’s seeming indifference to their suffering (Saint of Killers is one, Arseface another, everyone else to some degree). We’ll talk more about that later, but my biggest takeaway from this whole scene is that I hope we don’t end up with the scene from the comic where Odin, uh, loves the God of Meat.
2. The Battle of Annville
The meat (ugh) of this episode is the stand-off between Odin’s army of Meat Men and Jesse who’s defending his church after Odin screwed him over on their deal. A lot of the fighting between the two parties happens off-screen, which kind of makes Jesse look overpowered as hell considering he takes out six mooks off-camera like he’s Batman. He also shoots off some guy’s dick, adding that man to the large collection of men in Garth Ennis stories who somehow lose their wee wees.
The actual battle itself kind of takes a backseat to how Jesse’s latest breaking point, an honest to god shootout, affects the other townspeople. That Woman Whose Name I Will Never Look Up is obviously hurt, not just by Jesse’s actions but by everyone losing faith in him. And Mayor Miles tries to take advantage of that in a “See, he actually kind of sucks way.” He also talks about how Jesse’s land needs to be handed over to Quincannon so Annville can generate more revenue to help build the schools The Woman’s kids go to. This is incredible with a capital hypocrisy because earlier in the episode Miles passive aggressively poured spoiled milk in one of her kid’s cereal. I know I talk a lot about how Sheriff Root is the underrated MVP of this show, but Miles is a close second.
3. Arseface Still in Hell(?)
Speaking of Sheriff Root, he has a small but significant role to play here as he shows up to the church after Jesse says Arseface has come back. And Arseface has come back just not, uh, in very helpful way. They make it clear that the actual Eugene is still in hell and whatever climbed out of the ground beneath Jesse’s church isn’t. There’s a couple of possibilities and I like how the show leaves the door open for a couple interpretations. The major two are thus: either the Eugene we see in this episode is a hallucination that represents Jesse’s desperation to fix the whole sending a child to hell thing or it’s an actual demon from hell disguised as Eugene. That exchange about digging out of hell where Eugene says “it’s not that far” makes me think it’s the latter. Fiore and DeBlanc can’t see it, which points to Eugene being Jesse’s ugly Tyler Durden, but its disappearance after Genesis gets exorcised and subsequently brought back into Jesse’s body suggests its something else. John Wayne isn’t showing up as Jesse’s conscience like he did in the comic. Maybe that role will go to Arseface’s ghost?
Continued belowAs I briefly mentioned, the Angels also come back on Jesse’s behalf to exorcise Genesis in exchange for saving Eugene. They quickly go back on the deal, which leads to Genesis escaping again and taking refuge in Jesse. They then walk out, mumbling about the other option which could involve trying to chainsaw Genesis out of Jesse or it could involve the bloodthirsty cowboy we keep seeing flashbacks of.
4. Everyone Else
Over the past two episodes, I really enjoyed how much of Cass’s fate was left up in the air. After he was burned in the sun following Jesse turning his back on him last week, Tulip has him taking refuge in her house. We don’t find that out until the end of the episode, after Tulip spends most of it adopting and befriending the biggest dog she could find at the animal shelter, trying to give it some really happy moments before she feeds it to Cass who’s getting his strength back. It’s a relatively small scene compared to everything else going on in this episode, but it speaks a lot to how much Tulip has to clean up and to how horrible Cass’s powers really are.
Also I don’t know where else to put it in this review, but Odin promising his men a food court in the factory cafeteria in exchange for getting Jesse, which results in one guy chanting “Food court. Food court. Food court.” as he approaches the church might be my favorite bit of the episode. That and everyone in Annville showing up to barbecue and watch their preacher get the snuff kicked out of him.
5. The God of Silence
One of the other brutal scenes in this episode is Donny looking at his wife, going over to his car and sticking his head in the trunk, and firing a gun at himself. It’s set up to make it look like he’s leaving the show for good, but he appears again behind Jesse in the church, dried blood in his ears. Unable to hear Jesse’s Word, Donny knocks him out and brings him to Quincannon. Donny started out as a character who could’ve been really flat but I appreciate how he’s becoming a whole lot smarter than he appears to be, and how much he’s willing to sacrifice in his blood feud with Jesse.
With Jesse at his feat, Odin tells Jesse all about the God of Meat and how Jesse’s god is a God of Silence. It’s a harsh burn, and one that’s been building with Arseface mentioning how he doesn’t hear God’s voice in his head anymore. God really isn’t responding to anyone’s suffering and it’s become a question of whether he not he moves in mysterious ways or if he’s practicing willful negligence. Jesse uses this opportunity to buy his church another week, claiming he’ll bring God to Annville instead of bringing Annville to God. If Jesse can’t get some real answers out of God, he’ll denounce him in front of the whole town, something Odin wanted Jesse Sr. to do after the whole Quincannon clan bit the snow. That sets us up for next week’s episode and it potentially brings us closer to the events of the first volume of the comic. If God acts anything like he does there, I don’t expect Jesse’s going to be very pleased.
Bonus: The Machine
This episode ends with some rando walking over to a machine and fixing it. There’s almost no explanation as to what it is, but I imagine it’s going to be the crux of season two. Uh, major spoilers for the comics and what might happen in the next few episodes, by the way.
If Jesse’s looking for answers from God, he’s really not going to get them next episode. Either because God is out of heaven right now and isn’t accepting any callers or because something bad is going to happen to the church. Something bad that causes it to explode and leave most of Annville dead. Maybe it’s God, maybe it’s the Saint of Killers, maybe it’s Ted’s ghost. Whatever happens, I feel like we’re going to lose the church since it’s what’s been tying Jesse to Annville and we’re going to have to leave this town sometime. If Jesse does leave, he’s going to need to go in search of something and “God” feels too vague. So what’s he going to search for?
In the comics, there’s an organization called The Grail that we’ve only caught glimpses of. Remember the cold open with the bald guy watching a snuff film in a private screening room? That’s more than likely one of their leaders: Herr Starr, who turns out to be one of the comic’s Big Bads. The Grail also holds a very special prisoner: the Seraphi angel who conceived Genesis with a demon. So maybe the machine that we saw at the end of this episode, and which has been featured in the opening credits all season long, controls the cell The Grail keeps Genesis’s dad in. Finding Genesis’s poppa and getting answers from it about Heaven and Hell seems like a huge mission for Jesse to undertake in season two and one that’ll bring him closer to his archnemesis.
That’s all we have for this week. We’ve only got two episodes left and we’ll be covering whatever they bring us right here on Multiversity Comics.
