Get yourself a book on tape, it’s time for a new Preacher y’all! After last week’s more introspective episode, Jesse is back matching wits with the Saint of Killers himself. So hide your six-shooters and buy yourself 15% of a soul, because here be spoilers for season two, episode six, “Sokosha.”
1. Soul Happy Go Go
Preacher sometimes likes to lean on its unique tone, but when it turns to its own irreverence for world-building mythology stuff, the results are usually thrilling. Soul Happy Go Go is a Japanese company buying and selling percentages of souls through enforceable, legal documents. Somehow. The episode starts out keeping us in the dark on almost all the details, and presents us with some familiar imagery. A proud couple, moved to desperation. A slick corporate stooge, with a little bit too much reassurance. An armored car. A sketchy medical practice. In an absurd concept, Preacher created something believable.
2. American Psychopaths, Chapter 67: The Saint of Killers
Jesse, Tulip and Cassidy know they’re dealing with an immortal cowboy monster, so they pull a Buffy and head to the library to do research. Of course, Jesse is the only one willing to studiously approach the topic. Tulip needs her research in audiobook form (“it’s a book!”) and Cassidy does his research in comic book form. The jokes on them though, because Cassidy got himself a copy of “Peacher: Saint of Killers” miniseries, so he went right to the source.
If you think about it, the show didn’t really need to do an exposition dump. We know a lot about the Saint from his time in Hell in the first season. The whole sequence really serves as a gag to show how silly the world of Preacher is. If you’re being stalked by a supernatural gunman, not only is there a book about him in the library, not only are there multiple books about him in the library, there are multiple formats of media. Including a Mad Libs book.
Also, the next chapter in “American Psychopaths” is about Dick Cheney. Easy joke. Still made me laugh.
3. Jesse L’Angell, the Car Jacking Soul Collector
After lots of teasing, Jesse finally uses his mother’s maiden name. If you look back through my reviews, or look at any Preacher reviews from someone familiar with the comics, we’ve been following this development with manic anticipation. That’s because the L’Angell clan is so scary; anyone who read the Preacher comics at a formative age was messed up from reading about them. We’re all dealing with some borderline trauma, and Jesse throwing their name out to impress a soul collector is… an interesting twist on things.
Tulip also acquits herself nicely here. Every so often, the show likes to remind us why each member of the adventuring party is useful, and Tulip is a master thief. After an entire episode about how unhealthy their relationship is, it was really nice seeing Jesse and Tulip communicate well, even if it was so she could guide him through a hardware store to help him jack an armored car. The fact that Preacher just breezed through the bomb-making sequence is a testament to how well drawn its characters are. With minimal details, we understood exactly what was happening, and believed it would work.
4. Cassidy never learned French
The mystery of Dennis’s identity has been driving me a little nuts. The reveal was between so many shocking turns that it’s impact felt minimal, but Dennis is Cassidy’s son. That’s some good set up for a vampire story. The son-older-than-his-dad trope is ripe for drama and comedy, and it retroactively explains all the weirdness between Cassidy and Dennis. Also, the line about living so long and never learning French had some real pathos behind it. It also says a lot about how much Cassidy sucks that he doesn’t speak the same language as his own son. Before the end of the episode, Cassidy sacrifices some fingers to hold off the Saint, which is equally gross, funny, and touching. Cassidy’s various mutilations are a running gag in the comic, and it’s good (but gross) to see it on the screen!
5. Abuse of Power: “I need it” edition
This week really started to pull back the curtain on Jesse’s relationship with his power. When Tulip suggests he doesn’t use it, that’s not even an option to him. He needs it to find God. Once he was working with the Saint, he was able to use the Voice freely, and use it he did, to great effect in his quest to find the Saint a soul. It made a weird sort of sense that the Saint’s soulessness was his reason for being able to resist the power of the Voice, and Jesse’s machinations were top-notch. John Constantine would have been proud.
As the Preacher watched the screaming Saint crash into the New Orleans swamp, he smiled. The good guys won, the bad guys lost. But… something about the way Dominic Cooper played the scene had just a twinge of menace. The Saint is unrepentantly Evil, and deserves to be stranded in a locked car at the bottom of a bog. Jesse wants to believe that he’s a Good Man, but judging by how excited he was to hurt his enemy, it’s clear that he’s not.
