Preacher‘s second episode finds Jesse making some difficult choices, his friends trying to bring back Jesse’s edge (or keep him from the edge of a chainsaw), and a saint taking his first steps on an endless journey. This review will have spoilers for the first two episodes and some mild comic spoilers.
1. Actions Are Stronger Than The Word of God
At the end of last episode, Jesse Custer (with the spirit of an otherworldly thing inside of him) decided to make up for his lack of effectiveness as a preacher and Make Annville Great Again help out more. To that end, he does everything a good priest does. He hears confession, he rebaptizes his followers. He and Emily even stand outside a grocery store with a suggestion box so they can hear how to improve the church from the townsfolk themselves. “There’s some great suggestions in here!” says Emily, a character I’ll probably talk about for more than two sentences at some point.
Unfortunately, words and casseroles aren’t enough to heal the town’s scars. Jesse meets with a bus driver for confession. The driver’s having indecent thoughts about one of the little girls on his bus and is looking to repent. At least he’s looking for forgiveness from Jesse. The driver, who keeps emphasizing how Jesse needs to keep the conversation confidential, keeps excusing his desires as involuntary thoughts and doesn’t seem to be seeking psychological help as much as a clear conscience. Jesse does what he can, reminding the driver not to act on his tendencies, but the sight of the school bus driving around town unsettles Jesse.
Jesse can’t find comfort in other good deeds too, since a meeting with a comatose teen and her mom — in which Dominic Cooper delivers a really beautiful speech about the Lord and how his light will find them — doesn’t do anything for the teen’s mom. Sure, Jesse brought a casserole and a nice speech, but words won’t bring her daughter back. It’s a tough conversation to have, especially since there was nothing that Jesse could’ve done to stop the girl, Tracy’s, accident. But it’s going to be a tougher conversation to have if he’s talking to a grieving mother whose daughter disappeared off the school bus one day. After a weird as hell encounter with Arseface, who has begun to think that God wants him to be who he is, Jesse dips back into the badass side of himself and breaks into the driver’s home. He punches the guy out in his bathroom (where he’s sniffing girl underwear or something? I didn’t catch that) and baptizes him again in the tub. Jesse keeps commanding the driver to forgot the girl he’s lusting after, until the Word of God kicks in and the guy actually does forget. Full Eternal Sunshine style (I haven’t seen Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind but I guess it’s something like this).
Surprised that his words can actually (seemingly) solve problems, Jesse goes back to Tracy’s bed, commands her to open her eyes aaaannnnnnddd . . . see you next week.
What I really love about Preacher and Dominic Cooper’s take on Custer is how it’s clear Jesse’s seeking some form of salvation and it’s really not clear what direction it’s going to save him. Being the nice guy with casserole doesn’t do anything, beating people up in bars and in their bathrooms is taking him back to a place he doesn’t necessarily want to be, and (as we saw with Ted and his open heart last week) The Word of God is not the most reliable power to wield. Sure, the driver (I am never looking up his name) forgot the little girl he was obsessed with, but what does that mean for the next time he drives the bus? As for the logistics of what’s going to happen when Jesse tells a comatose girl to open his eyes, I was on the edge of my seat waiting to see how that plan could either horribly wrong or horribly right. There’s a real desperation that’s fueling Jesse’s actions. He’s not just beating up a pedophile because the dude was a monster (dude was not looking for actual help), Jesse’s trying to beat some progress into his path as a priest and achieve some peace.
Continued belowUnfortunately (or fortunately depending on your view) some people don’t think Jesse deserves any peace.
2. With Friends Like These
This show’s Tulip is a thousand times crazier than the comic’s Tulip and I’m all for it. It’s kind of iffy how we’re two episodes in and this show’s primarily centered around the main white dude and most peoples’ reactions to him, but I think that’s less Tulip being a flat character and more her needing to get Jesse off his ass so we can go shoot some folk and steal some cash. It’s kind of better than the comic, where Tulip was like, “You can’t leave me out of your badass stuff, Jesse!” and Jesse was like, “But I’m going to.” At least here Tulip gets to wipe out some cronies at poker and rent a sex dungeon to motivate Jesse. Bonus: I love how Tulip came into the dungeon with some weird gas mask on and Jesse was like, “Ugh, not again.”
Speaking of sex dungeons, Cassidy continues to be a pure delight in this episode as he avoids actually fixing the church’s air conditioning to low-key give out his entire origin story while drinking with Jesse, who gets knock out drunk after sipping some of Cass’s homemade swill (it includes rubbing alcohol and air conditioner run-off). It’s this scene that begins to really establish the friendship between Jesse and Cass that made so many elements of the comic series compelling. Well, it’s this scene and the one where Cass slaughters the angels Fiore and DeBlanc who are about to cut an unconcious Jesse open with a chainsaw so they can get to Genesis. Both are pretty vital.
Aside from Cass’s fight with the angels being rad because, well, he takes a bullet to the chest before cutting off someone’s arm and stuffing everyone’s bodies into a box, he’s really out to protect Jesse. There’s a fakeout where Cass takes Jesse’s keys and wallets to seemingly drive off to the next town but he was just making a booze run. Cass is in it for the longhaul with Jesse and something that Joseph Gilgun said at the Q&A I was at stuck with me. Cass is a lonely being who has lived for over a century and keeps losing people. All of a sudden he meets this crazy preacher dude he can hang out, shittalk The Big Lebowski in front of, and most importantly fight with, and he’s going to make sure he sticks around. If the show turns out anything like the comic, that’s going to make it all much worse when everything goes to hell.
Sadly for Cassidy, he’s still got his aversion to sunlight keeping him confined to the indoors (there’s even a nice scene in the beginning where he’s casually avoiding standing in front of an open window). This keeps him from burying the angels at first, but he’s eventually able to do so under a certain tree.
3. All Saint’s Day
This probably has more to do with me being an embarrassing fanboy but I let out an audible “oh shit yes” when the show opened with a flashback to 1881. I’m sure most of the people reading this know who the guy in the duster riding out to get medicine for his daughter was, but I’m just going to go ahead and call him The Cowboy for the sake of non-comic fans. There’s not a lot to say here since not a ton happens, but introducing this long-term sort of flashback to flesh out someone who’s going to be a major player in Jesse’s life is not a bad idea, especially if it expands on the history of Annville (or Ratwater as it used to be called).
I could, however, super do without the shot of the scalped and lynched Native Americans hanging from a tree that The Cowboy just trots past. It’s a gruesome image that, for better or for worse, fits Preacher‘s aesthetic, but considering the comic (and so far the show) has a significant lack of Native American characters, I wonder if the creators will do something to make Native Americans more than a background to white peoples’ shenanigans. It’s especially apparent in this show since Annville’s mascot in the first episode was a significant shoutdown to the Cleveland Indians fetishizing Native Americans in their mascot. The second episode, meanwhile, started out with a much more violent kind of fetishization.
Continued below4. EFF BEE AYE
While we’re dealing with white people shenanigans, I’d love to take this moment to say how excited I am for Sheriff Hugo Root to deal with Federal Agents Fiore and DeBlanc. After the angels get themselves back together after Cass kills them, they tell Root, who’s interrogating them because they pulled a gun on their maid, they’re with the FBI. While I’m obviously happy to see the angels’ war on Custer continue (especially when it leads them to a certain shrine in the ground), I’m more excited by the idea of Root obsessing over these crazy EFF BEE AYE conspiracies and turning more into the comic version of the character who is capital letters INSANE. Like, I can’t even reprint his rants here level of insane. They’re like what he said about the Japanese letting a man marry his pillow turned up to twelve.
Though I’m a huge fan of Conspiracy Theory Hugo, I have to say that I’m really impressed with where W.Earl Brown is taking the Sheriff. Like I said, the Root in the comic is a crazy guy it is impossible to sympathize with. Here, he’s an angry dude who isn’t entirely all there, except for when it comes to his son. He’s definitely not the Father of the Year or anything, but he’s at least aware of where his son must be emotionally after he tried to kill himself. In the comics, Arseface’s adulation of his dad is super exaggerated, but here their relationship feels organic. It’s not perfect, but it’s two people who are really trying to keep their family together.
5. Odin Quincannon The Mannon
The other big piece of white nonsense this episode comes in the introduction of Jackie Earle Harley’s Odin Quincannon, seen here paying out a family to move from their home so he can immediately demolish it for his meatpacking business. Just like in the comics, Quincannon here is an absolute wildcard. Especially since he doesn’t show up until 2/3 of the way in the comic in a very specific role. I have no clue what he’s going to do on this show. All I do know is that you should rinse out any meat you buy from his factory.
