Preacher - 'See'

Those two guys.

As much of the big season TV closes down, Amazon Prime continues to provide alternatives, most recently with Preacher.

We open in 1881, with a cowboy travelling to fetch medicine for his sick daughter. He tells a hopeful family of homesteaders that the west is not paradise, before riding under a tree full of hanging corpses into the town of Ratwater.

In the now-now time, Jesse Custer performing tin bath baptisms for his flock, and I find myself wondering how many of them were getting rechristened Ernest. This is observed by the two mystery men who have been tracking the entity which has entered Jesse, and who seem very surprised at his failure to asplode. Tulip horns in on the baptisms in a thoroughly unsuitable baptismal robe, and afterwards Jesse hears the confession of the local school bus driver, who has indecent thoughts about one of his passengers and seems to want a pass instead of actually repenting.

We meet the thuggish Donnie's employer, a real estate magnate and owner of 'QM&P' who talks an elderly couple out of their house in a scene which triggered a reminiscence in my brain that took a while to crystalise.

This is a friendship that basically only makes sense when they're very drunk.

Jesse gets drunk with Cassie, eventually passing out after drinking some of the vampire's special reserve, and following a disagreement on the virtues of The Big Lebowski* which crystalised that sense of familiarity. In a lot of ways, Preacher - espeically in this episode - is playing out very like a Cohen brothers film, and perhaps more so like the Fargo TV series. I don't reckon that's a bad thing, although the leisurely, decompressed pace is apparently turning some people off. Before the unconsciousness, they have a rambling conversation about their pasts, in which Jesse is evasive about who taught him to fight and Cassidy confesses to being a vampire and over a century old.

I find it hard to hate any show with an honest to goodness chainsaw fight.

Cassidy goes for more booze, and returns to find the mystery men, having failed to lure out the entity with a weird rendition of 'Winken, Blinken and Nod' (one of my daughter's favourites,) trying to chop it free of the unconscious Jesse with a chainsaw. Taking them for vampire hunters he gets lairy with them, and after a long struggle kills them both, dismembers them with their own saw and packs them into a trunk, getting everything in the church nice and tidy just in time for daybreak.

We see some more of Jesse's day to day life as a Preacher, dealing with lost congregants with no time for fine words, poor souls like the hapless Arseface who are finding that baptism does not instantly make them a better person, and getting tasered in the neck by Tulip, who still wants him to join her for her big score, and is determined to bring out 'her' Jesse Custer. Frustrated, Jesse confronts the bus driver and tells him to forget the girl, which he instantly and absolutely does.

Cassidy buries the bodies beneath a tree (possibly the same tree from the prologue,) only for the two men to visit the Sheriff's office the next day, claiming to be from the Government. Then Jesse visits a girl in a coma and commands her to open her eyes.

'See' is a strong follow-up to the pilot, although I'm itching to get some backstory filled in on the main characters, all of whom are to some degree ciphers. Overall though, I'm quite enjoying the pace, and am interested to see where we go from here.

* I'm with Jesse in that I like The Big Lebowski, although I suspect that Cassidy has a point that it's overrated, simply because its cult following rate it so absurdly high.