SPOILERS FOR SEASON 1, EPISODE 8 FOLLOW!
By: Tyler Miller
Preacher this week was a better episode than last week’s somewhat lackluster one. Even though not too much happened, things were thoroughly entertaining and it was interesting to see Jesse deal with the realization that he’s been an ass lately, as well as the threat of Odin Quincannon.
Everything kicked off with a flashback to a Quincannon family skiing trip gone horribly wrong with their gondola falling and killing everyone inside. Odin has the bodies shipped to him, and later opens the boxes and kills a cow, clearly having lost his mind. This is when Jesse and his dad come so that his father can talk to Odin and try to help him, but it doesn’t work. Odin asks Jesse’s father to denounce God, but he refuses to. This is what caused Odin to have such a strong amount of hatred for God, church, and Jesse’s family.
Back in the present day, we’re continuing from where we were last week with Odin and his employees approaching the church to try and take it over by force. Some of the men go in and engage Jesse in combat, but end up getting asses handed to them and being forced to leave their guns behind as they leave.
With the church to himself now, Jesse tries to talk to God and says he’ll give up Genesis if he could return Eugene to him from Hell. Not long after he says this, he hears something moving underneath the church. He investigates the hole in the floor that he broke to try and get to Eugene last week and sees movement happening under it. By some crazy miracle, it’s Eugene digging his way out of Hell! Jesse helps him out and the two of them talk with each other for a bit before Jesse calls his dad and tells him that Eugene is at the church.
Jesse then realizes that Eugene was correct about how using his powers was cheating and that everything he’s done so far has been wrong. When Eugene asks if he’s going to return Genesis to DeBlanc and Fiore, Jesse gets suspicious as he realizes he never told Eugene about them. Turns out this isn’t really Eugene, it’s merely a hallucination that Jesse’s projecting.
After a quick pep talk, Odin’s men are ready to attack the church again. They approach the church, but Jesse’s an expert marksman with a sniper rifle so he picks off a good number of them before they can get close enough to the church, causing them to retreat. He even manages to shoot one guy’s dick clean off! The sheriff then shows up and asks what’s going on right when Jesse requests for DeBlanc and Fiore to come to the church.
The two angels come to the church and Jesse lets them in. He explains what happened to Eugene and asks them if there’s a way to bring someone back from Hell. They say there is, but they won’t try anything until they get Genesis back. He agrees to it and they proceed to go through the process of removing Genesis via song. It doesn’t work at first though because Jesse is resisting. He eventually gives in though and Genesis is removed from his body. It’s not for long though as Genesis leaves its container and returns back to Jesse’s body. With this failure, DeBlanc and Fiore give up on getting Genesis back and leave, deciding to resort to a different option.
Meanwhile outside the church, more and more of the townspeople are gathering to watch and see what’s going to happen between Quincannon’s men and Jesse. Donny’s watching Odin give his men a speech when he decides to go over to his car, put his head in the trunk, and seemingly kill himself. Shortly afterwards, Odin’s guys and Jesse are fighting each other again. As they’re fighting, someone quietly comes into the church and approaches Jesse. Turns out this person is Donny and he shot his gun with his head in the trunk so that he could make himself deaf, that way Jesse’s powers wouldn’t work on him.
He knocks Jesse out, allowing Odin and his men to take over the church and force the deal on Jesse. It’s then revealed that the god Odin’s been serving this whole time is the God of Meat, not the one that Jesse wanted him to. As he’s signing the paperwork to make the deal official, Jesse asks for one more chance to bring God to the town. If it doesn’t work, he’ll denounce God right there in front of everyone. Odin is okay with these terms and lets Jesse go, although he’s taken into custody by the sheriff.
All throughout the episode, we got a few random shots of Tulip buying a dog and playing with it. It all seemed random and unrelated to the overall story until the end of the episode where she takes the dog and puts it in a room and closes the door. What’s heard next is the sound of a creature tearing the dog to shreds and eating it up. That “creature” is without a doubt Cassidy feeding so that he can heal himself after damn near burning to death last week.
The final shot of the episode shows some sirens going off in a plant of some sort, as a guy goes to a terminal to try and fix whatever the problem is. What this has to do with anything is anyone’s guess, but with only two episodes left in the season, things are bound to become clear on this front soon.
Other thoughts:
- I can’t stress enough how funny the scene where Clive was talking about how Jesse shot his dick off was. It just may be the funniest scene in the series so far and it had me laughing much harder than I ever expected to from anything in this show.
- It’s kind of surprising that DeBlanc and Fiore just gave up on getting Genesis from Jesse so easily after all the trouble they’ve gone through just trying to get him to agree. One would think they’d try a bit harder, but I guess the only other option is killing Jesse and they’re not gonna do that.
- The people of Anneville are so weird and messed up. The fact that they all gathered around the church to watch and see Jesse fight with Odin’s men and get some sort of entertainment around it just shows how badly the people of this town need to be saved from theirselves.
- Although he was just a hallucination, all the scenes with Eugene in them were great this week. They just made him even more endearing than he already was and made me feel even worse about the fact that he’s stuck in Hell with no way out (or so we think?).
- All of Odin’s terrible pep speeches to his men were pretty funny and just make me want him to give a motivational speech to my school this coming school year.
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