SPOILERS FOR SEASON 1, EPISODE 2 FOLLOW!
By: Tyler Miller
The first episode of Preacher knocked my socks off to say the least. It came out of nowhere and impressed me with its characters, action, and crazy plot. All of that carries over to its second episode, but it’s an overall weaker episode than the premiere was.
Just like in the premiere, this episode starts off in a weird way. It takes place in 1881 and follows a mysterious man who has a sick family. Because of this, he goes on a journey to get some medicine for them from a town. During his journey he comes across a caravan of people and has dinner with them, only to continue his journey alone the next morning. He passes a tree with scalped Indians hanging from it as he rides into a town called Ratwater, and that’s the last we see of him in the episode.
Things come back to the present day and Jesse is being a good preacher. He’s performing baptisms on the townspeople and trying to help everyone. In the distance though are the two shady guys that are tracking whatever’s inside Jesse, and they’re watching everything that’s going on. After the baptisms, there’s a reception of sorts at a nearby house. It’s here where Cassidy meets Emily, the church organist, and she doesn’t like him at all. She even tells Jesse to try and stay away from him because he’s trouble. Right after this happens, Cassidy meets Eugene (A.K.A. Arseface) and finds out from Jesse that Eugene looks the way he does because of a failed shotgun suicide attempt.
He tells Cassidy that he can’t be causing trouble, although he does like having him around, and then goes to listen to another parishioner confess his sins. This guy is pretty bad though, as he’s been having some bad thoughts about a little girl that rides on his school bus. Jesse clearly wants to do bad things to this guy, but he restrains himself since he’s trying to be a good person and preacher.
The next day we see a company called QM&P driving in a convoy to the house of a husband and wife. What are they there for? To move them out and demolish their house. They do this the second the family signs a contract and steps out the building. The company is about to leave, when Donny (who turns out to work for them) smashes the nose of his driver against the steering wheel for no reason at all. Someone clearly has issues.
Back in town, Jesse and Emily are in front of a store trying to advertise the church when he sees a school bus drive by. He tries to go after it in his truck, but the steering wheel is gone, courtesy of Tulip who drives by and taunts Jesse some. He gets the wheel from a streetlamp and drives back to the church where he meets Cassidy and the two of them have some drink and chat about life and The Big Lebowski. Cassidy also reveals that he’s a 119-year old vampire from Dubin city that’s being hunted by religious vigilantes. Jesse passes out because he has too much to drink, giving Cassidy the chance to take his wallet and truck keys and head out of town.
It’s at this moment when the people tracking whatever’s inside Jesse decide to go after him. They arrive at the church and perform a ritual to try and remove the entity, but it fails, leading them to try a different method involving cutting him open with a chainsaw. Luckily, Cassidy returns just in time to stop them. The three of them get into a fight that’s bloody as hell and results in both of the weird guys being killed (and one of them missing an arm). Cassidy then drinks some blood to heal himself up and uses the chainsaw to cut the guys up and puts them inside a big trunk that they brought. He even cleans up the church as well since there was blood everywhere.
Meanwhile, Tulip is at a whorehouse playing poker with some of the guys from that QM&P company and winning. She talks with the owner some before she gets a phone call from someone and then orders a room. The following morning, Jesse is woken up by Emily who has a casserole for him to give to a family that he has to visit that day. The family is a mother and daughter, but the daughter is in a coma of sorts, most likely the result of her head being partially bashed in. He tries to make the mother feel better, but nothing he says helps. He leaves their house and later that night, he comes across something on the road. He gets out of his truck to investigate it, but gets knocked out and kidnapped by someone.
When he wakes up, he’s chained to the floor and finds out that his captor is actually Tulip. She tells him what the map she has is for and tries to entice Jesse into joining her, but he doesn’t budge. Tulip knows him better though, saying that eventually he’ll say yes and the bad man that Jesse really is will come back out when he does. Jesse manages to leave, although he still has the chain on his ankle, and goes to the house the baptism reception was at to try and saw the chain off. Eugene pops in unexpectedly and tells Jesse that although he’s been baptized, he doesn’t feel changed although he really wants to be changed.
This leads to Jesse going to the house of the bus driver who’s having creepy thoughts about the little girl on his bus. He gets there and looks for him, eventually finding him in the bathroom. Jesse punches him a few times and then turns the tub water on, while the guy pleads with Jesse and tells him that he’s not going to do anything, although he keeps getting the urge to. Once the tub is full enough, Jesse takes him and dumps his head in the water face first over and over, telling him to forget about her each time. The final time though, his powers kick in and the man forgets instantly. Jesse realizes that something odd happened and backs off in a panic. The guy even knows that he can’t remember something and questions what the hell Jesse just did to him while Jesse rushes out of the house.
In the final scenes of the episode, we see Cassidy burying the trunk that has the two men he killed in it. It just happens that he’s burying it right under the tree that had all the Indians hanging from it in 1881. It also just so happens that the two men he killed are still alive somehow, as they’re being interrogated by the sheriff. The next morning, Jesse returns to the mother and daughter he visited before and asks to see the daughter. He goes up to her room and begins talking to her before he finally uses his powers to tell her to open her eyes. Will she do it? Gotta wait until next week to find out!
Other thoughts:
- The opening with the cowboy in 1881 is confusing to those of us that have never read the comics, but comic fans know who he is and are extremely excited for his story. After doing some research on him myself, I’m one of those people who’s excited about him.
- Cassidy’s fight with the two guys in the church was yet again, an awesome fight. The way it was shot just allowed us to see everything that happened clearly (minus the arm being cut off). I’m just loving how all the fights in the show are shot, and look forward to more of them.
- Those two guys that are hunting Jesse are really mysterious, especially with their return from the dead. Are they aliens as well?
This episode was a bit weaker than the premiere for me, and that’s probably because it was a bit slower and didn’t really progress too much of the plot for me. It’s not a bad thing to have a slow episode at all, but after coming off of the insane premiere, I guess I expected a follow-up that was a bit more like that. That’s not to say that this was a bad episode though. This show is still keeping me thoroughly entertained, even if I have no idea what’s going on with the story. For me that’s okay, because everything else is great enough to keep me on board and discover what’s going on as the show reveals it to us.
TheComfySpot 