SPOILERS FOR THE SEASON FINALE OF PREACHER FOLLOW!
By: Tyler Miller
Preacher hasn’t had the most graceful season, with it meandering a lot along the way to the end. But I’d be lying if I didn’t say that the season finale totally made up for all of that and was an episode that fired on every cylinder.
The episode started in Annville with 17 hours and 22 minutes to go before God himself arrives in town, and everyone’s getting themselves ready for the big day. Meanwhile, the cops are still on the lookout for Jesse and Tulip is arriving back in town after going to get Carlos at the end of last week’s episode. She meets with a woman who informs her that Donny is holding Jesse at his house. This prompts her to storm over to their house and break her way in, demanding to know where Jesse is. Turns out he’s there and perfectly okay.
A few hours later, Tulip is still at Donny’s house with his wife and Jesse, and Donny reveals that he let Jesse stay there because Jesse was merciful to him in the bathroom stall a few episodes back, so he decided to merciful to Jesse in return. Jesse and Tulip then go outside to talk, and he apologizes for what he did to her. He goes on to say that he’d do anything for her, to which she opens her car trunk and instructs him to kill Carlos who’s tied up in the trunk.
We then get a flashback of the day that Carlos screwed the two of them over and it’s revealed that he betrayed them because he was jealous of their relationship. On top of that, his betrayal caused Tulip to lose her baby as she was pregnant at the time. This is why Tulip has been so adamant about her and Jesse getting revenge on Carlos for what happened.
Jesse then closes the trunk and gets into an argument with Tulip about whether or not it’s right for him to kill Carlos. He eventually decides to do it because he’ll be going to Hell anyway, but Tulip stops him right before he gets ready to do it because she realized he’s right and that killing Carlos won’t change what happened all those years ago. Instead, the two of them proceed to beat Carlos so bad that he looks like a walker from The Walking Dead.
At the same time as all of this, Cassidy’s sharing a jail cell with a guy dressed up as an indian when the sheriff comes and let’s the guy go. He then starts reading off Cassidy’s criminal record and reveals that he knows Cassidy is a vampire. Cassidy goes to attack him, but the sheriff shoots him and then offers him some blood from a cooler full of it, saying that it’s gonna be a long day of torture until he finds out what happened to Eugene.
They proceed to do this over and over throughout the day, with the sheriff getting no closer to the truth than he was at the start. As the day wears on, Cassidy starts to really push his buttons as he suggests that the sheriff would actually be happy that Eugene is gone. This causes him to flip out and unload every single bullet he has in Cassidy, before deciding to let him go free.
The following morning, Donny, his wife, Tulip, and Jesse are at the church getting it cleaned up for God’s arrival later that day. Everybody in the town shows up too, so no one is going to be missing this event. Right when Jesse begins, Quincannon interrupts him and goes on about how the only real God is the God of Meat, but then sits down when he realizes no one cares. Finally the show can really begin. Jesse uses a severed angel and to activate the phone, and after a couple button presses to get the phone working, the lights go out and the one and only God himself shows up!
And everyone is happy as fuck.
He starts to address everyone and people start asking him questions, something that he totally doesn’t appreciate at all, but he allows it. All of the responses God gives though just makes the people happy and restores their faith in God. Things go awry when God is confused by Jesse’s comment about Eugene being sent to Hell and his possession of Genesis, causing Jesse to become skeptical of the God in front of him. He calls out that God is an imposter and uses his power to ask where God is. The answer? No one knows where God is.
This causes everyone to immediately become depressed and lose all their faith in God just as fast as they got it. The phone call ends, and Jesse leaves with Tulip and Cassidy to go and get some food from a diner. After they leave, all hell breaks loose in Annville as the townspeople start killing each other and just generally doing things without a care in the world because God doesn’t matter to them anymore. It all culminates with a methane plant exploding and destroying the town and everyone inside of it. Bye bye Annville! It was nice knowing you!
We then see our main trio in a diner and continuing to debate about The Big Lebowski as they munch on some food. Tulip then asks just what the hell their plan is now, to which Jesse responds that the plan is to find God and help him if he wants it. If he doesn’t want help, they’ll kick his ass. And just like that, the three of them agree to go on a road trip that’ll consist of getting wasted, killing people, and doing drugs amongst other things.
Before they head off, Jesse sees a hallucination of Eugene and promises that he hasn’t forgotten about him and will get him out of Hell. Tulip then asks Jesse to show her what Genesis can do, so he uses the power to have her kiss him. She doesn’t like this though and punches him right in the face, telling him to never do that again. And with that, our gang is off on the road to find God.
Just before the episode ends, we go back over to Annville and see the remains of the explosion that destroyed the town. Walking through it is the Seraphim that Jesse, DeBlanc and Fiore fought, when all of a sudden she gets shot right through the chest and dies. Who killed her? None other than the cowboy from Hell, also known to comic fans as the Saint of Killers. He’s on Earth now and he’s coming for Jesse.
Other thoughts:
- The shuttle that took DeBlanc and Fiore to Hell returns, except it only drops off Fiore, which raises a pretty important question: Is DeBlanc truly dead forever? We never saw him come back to life, and we never saw a flash of blue light appear when the Saint killed him or the Seraphim at the end of the episode. Perhaps he’s really gone forever?
- The shots of everyone in Annville just losing their shit and being reckless with the knowledge that God is missing was just hilarious. Seeing the little girls kill the pedophile bus driver, or watching Tracy’s brother take a selfie of himself in front of his mom as she kills her daughter were moments that were hilarious in a dark and twisted way.
- Tom Cruise had his remains sent into space… ‘Nuff said right there.
- The way the show went about revealing that the God everyone saw was fake was just perfect. I really believed it was him at first and thought he was just a straight ass that was not like the God we’ve been led to believe he would be. The reveal that he was fake though just made the whole thing even funnier.
- It’s a shame that everyone in the town died after the explosion. Most of them weren’t interesting anyway, but I would’ve liked for Quincannon, Emily, and the sheriff to survive since I liked them the most. Perhaps we’ll see them in some form in season two?
Preacher started off the season on a high note, and it ended on a high note. Having made it to the end of the season, I completely feel that the season as a whole would’ve been stronger had there only been 6-8 episodes. That way we could’ve had less filler and the story would’ve been a lot tighter. Overall though, I’m satisfied with this season of Preacher and am really excited for season two next year.
TheComfySpot 