Preacher - 'El Valero' and 'Finish the Song'

I really don't know if anointing oil is that combustible...

Jesse Custer comes to the end of his long, dark night of the soul as Quincannon's men lay siege to his church.

'El Valero' gives us a little background on Quincannon, whose family were killed in an accident which left him determined that God and the soul were nothing but a lie. This was what caused him to reject God and created the rift with Custer Snr. Now he has come to lay siege to the church, but Jesse is a challenging obstacle. Even three sheets to the wind and confronting a returned Eugene, he takes out the initial team sent to extract him, then holds off a frontal assault from the bell tower before demanding to see 'the agents'.

He soon realises that 'Eugene' is an hallucination, Hell being harder to escape than to enter, hence his desire to see the two angels and have Genesis removed from him. Despite some last minute doubts that maybe God did have a plan, he allows them to replace the entity in the coffee can, but when Deblanc and Fiore prove less than eager to restore Eugene, his anger seems to call to Genesis, which bursts the can apart and returns to him.

"Who's insecure?"

As the town turns out to enjoy the siege, including Mayor Miles, who has convinced himself that given the existence of a 'verbal contract', Quincannon is in the legal right, Donnie goes to his car and seems to put a bullet in his head, but it turns out that he is wilier than we might have thought. Deafened by the gunshot, he is able to approach Jesse without fear of the voice and capture him.

Jesse signs over the church, as Quincannon affirms that he 'resisted' the Voice because his God is not Jesse's, but 'the god of meat', a pseudodeity of matter and manifest destiny. Jesse however makes one last bargain: One more Sunday, and he will call on God to appear, and if He doesn't, then Jesse will denounce Him as false in front of the entire congregation.

This episode has little of Tulip or Cassidy, save the former adopting an adorable bloodhound from the pound's death row, which she regretfully feeds to the latter after one last good day.

He's back!

In 'Finish the Song', we see the end of the Cowboy's story, as he returns to Ratwater and savagely executes about 93% of the adult population as a storm begins to sweep over the town.

Jesse jumps out of a moving police car and flees into the night. The sheriff is keen to catch him, but Quincannon is unconcerned, sure that he will be there on Sunday to lose his bet and denounce the Lord. Deblanc and Fiore try to decide between two courses of action: Call Heaven and face their inevitable separation, or use a dodgy travel agent to go to Hell in search of another means of resolving their problems. The matter is forced, however, when it turns out that their phone is missing, stolen by Jesse.

Ouch.

Tulip heads to Albuquerque - where we briefly see her sitting before her bound enemy with a table full of tools - leaving Emily to look after Cassidy, with money enough to keep him in donors. "Don't go to Pet Centre though; they're onto me." The recognition of the truth of Cassidy's nature is a major rug pull for Emily, and nudged by the discussion of traps in Psycho, she decides to be free of part of hers, luring Miles to the O'Hare house and locking him in with the vampire before releasing the remaining animals and heading off to pick up her kids, which is straight up not a development I saw coming for that character.

Jesse is reunited with Cassidy and apologises for being a dick. To make it up to him, he agrees to help dispose of Miles' body. When Jesse mentions that he needs an angel hand to make the phone work, Cassidy has a brain wave, and as they are burying the mayor beneath the tree, takes the opportunity to grab a paw from one of the 'clones' he killed earlier.

Angels are not nice people in this series. Neither are people, if we're being
honest.

Deblanc and Fiore, whose mutual affection is increasingly to the fore, leave their motel room and take a bus. The Sheriff is called after the mess is discovered, including a limbless woman in a bathtub full of ice, who begs him to kill her. Of course, when he does she reappears behind him, then leaves him to struggle with his conscience.

We get a series of increasingly swift repeats of the Cowboy's story, seeing his failure to save his daughter and his bloody revenge over and over again, until finally Fiore and Deblanc join him and the place caption flashes up: HELL. They offer to get him out of this recurring nightmare, if he kills the Preacher for them.

Despite ongoing complaints about the pacing of the series who feel that it should have long-since left Annville behind, I continue to find Preacher a compelling, dark and quirky show, with a slow-burning tension as its lead character crashes from nadir to nadir in a rambling tumult of absurdity that marks it out as something entirely unique. It's long, slow scenes never drag, and it mixes close-up camerawork and wider shots to great effect, as when Jesse calls to apologise to Tulip. We see her listening as he records a message, face bloodied and expression bleak, as though she is unable to answer due to a gun to her head, but then pull back to reveal that it is Carlos who is bound, while she is just waiting to start work.

These two episodes pretty much get us caught up on the backgrounds and motivations of all our characters, so the finale is presumably going to be all go, and Season 2... Well, it should be different, is my thinking. I look forward to seeing how that goes.