Open your holes to God y’all, Preacher is back! After season one literally ended in an explosion of bullshit, the Sam Catlin, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg adaptation of the Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon comic is back. Join me today and tomorrow as we embark on a bloody mission through the great state of Texas. Hope y’all is ready, ’cause here be spoilers!
1. THE SEARCH FOR GOD: DAY ONE
“Come on Eileen,” our heroes claim, is a shite song, though everyone loves it. The cold open was the perfect thing to get you back in the Preacher swing of things. Our cast makes being bad look so good as they run from the cops, get involved in some antics and make a daring escape from our big villain. By the end of things, Tulip has to siphon gas from a cop car with a human intestine. Then she washes the taste out of her mouth with hot sauce and Yoohoo. Her blood-covered mouth makes her look like a Walking Dead zombie. Yeah, Preacher is definitely back.
2. Based on the comic by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon
The Saint of Killers is picture perfect, like he walked right off a Steve Dillon panel. This thrilled me. Graham McTavish (recently of Outlander) completely transforms into the cowboy angel of death, and he totally does the trick. The show has played pretty fast and loose with the story of the comic, but imagery like that gets me totally excited to see what they do with Herr Starr or the inbred Jesus family. The TV adaptation does excellent things with light and sound, like the ominous spurs clinking announcing the Saint’s arrival.
On the other hand, I hope the Cassidy/Tulip story goes in a different direction than the comics. There was a lot of toxic masculinity in the original Preacher that was icky at the time, but is icky and dated now. For the most part, the main trio has managed to step out of their 90s gender roles with a more modern and nuanced take on the themes of the comic. “We all got sides,” Tulip assures Cassidy, and I hope that the characters never devolve into one-dimensional caricatures, because they are all played with such charisma by the leads.
3. A Covered cage works best
Goodbye Jesse’s friend, who was weird and quickly murdered. Quickly killing off a character is unsurprising at this point, but I question if some of the weirdness is just for the sake of weirdness. Like that woman in the cage in the garage. Was there any point to that? I’m kind of worried about her now that there’s no one to let her out. In one sense, putting her in a cage and unable to see the outside world could be a metaphor for the cage that God put humans in. On the other hand, maybe it amounts to nothing. Preacher is good at delivering some genuinely shocking imagery, but I hope that this season makes the gang’s adventure a little more substantive. The mystery has good momentum, and I’m left feeling optimistic about the season.
4. God didn’t come for the girls, He came for the jazz
Also goodbye Tammy, who was also sort of weird, and quickly murdered. I felt bad for Tammy, who was offed because Cassidy couldn’t keep his damned hands to himself. She ultimately served little purpose, except to die for comic relief, and to drop a tiny nugget of plot. I guess the death toll in Preacher knows no bounds in terms of race or sex, but offhandedly killing off sex workers (or administrators of sex-selling establishments) is played out. Why did it have to be a strip club? Why did any of that scene have to happen the way it did? The only worthwhile revelation was that God didn’t turn mortal and become a sex fiend, He just really likes jazz. That’s at least somewhat interesting.
5. Abuses of power: The Yellow Rose of Texas edition
I think I’m going to make this a weekly thought: tracking Jesse’s abuses of power. After all, Genesis is a big deal, and how Jesse reconciles the Word of God is a big part of the show. That’s especially true given how much of this episode was devoted to Tulip questioning Jesse’s morality when it comes to the Word.
There were a lot of contenders for this episode. Jesse telling Mike to “break something” hardly counts, as Mike asked him to use the power. Even Tulip agreed that Tammy was being really annoying, so Jesse gets a pass for that one. Telling those guys at the end to “move” was certainly an abuse, but not the worst by a long shot.
Now, Jesse telling the gas station attendant to “pretend” they were never there was pretty bad, especially because it ended with his brutal de-tounguing. But nothing beats Jesse tormenting those cops in the beginning. He made two of them stand there holding hands, he even made that one dude mace his own balls (which was admittedly pretty funny). The worst for me though was that poor guy he made sing “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” mostly because the image of him trying to sing with half his face blown off was just so extra.
As a final word, the epitaph “For Steve” at the end of the episode was in regards to Steve Dillon who passed away last October. A lot has already been said of Dillon since his passing, but I like to think he’d enjoy this gonzo adaptation of one of his most famous comics.
