As I sat down to watch Preacher episode 10, the season finale, I prepared myself for a cliffhanger. Well, we certainly got one. Even though this episode probably raised more questions than it answered, I really, really enjoyed it.
I think the episode got off to a great start with the flashback – younger Jesse is very torn between good and bad, wanting simultaneously to smash Gran’ma’s skull with a baseball bat AND to avoid eternal damnation. As the present-day Jesse passes younger Jesse on the long driveway to the plantation, the elder version tells his teenaged self, essentially, “You should have killed her when you had the chance.” Something tells me he won’t pass up the next opportunity to take out the matriarch.
But, first…there’s T.C. and Jody. The former, well, isn’t such a match for our hero – all Jesse has to do to dispatch our favorite lover of barnyard animals is whip out his Genesis powers and tell T.C. to shoot himself (which he does, in the foot). Jody, on the other hand, is more complicated. Sure, Jesse could (and does) use Genesis to get him to drop his weapons. But the two men agree that ending their relationship (and one of their lives, presumably) any way other than with hand-to-hand combat would be ill-fitting of their long history.
They go to the Tombs, with T.C. limping along to screech the opening lines like he has always wanted to do. Jesse and Jody hurl everything they have at one another, and Jesse even (unsuccessfully) tries to bring Jody down with a nail-ridden two-by-four. Eventually, Jesse gets the upper hand and slams Jody’s skull into the concrete wall over and over and over again until he collapses. But, in a powerful moment, Jody musters up the strength to stand up and say that he’s proud of Jesse before he dies. Jesse is willing to let T.C. go before he torches the place, but T.C. stays to die with Jody. I nearly wept when he explains: “I got nowhere else to go.” I know we’re not supposed to root for the bad guys (well, not THESE bad guys, anyway), but Colin Cunningham and Jeremy Childs have been SO DAMN GOOD that I hate to see them go.
All that’s left for Jesse to do is take down Gran’ma. He has Genesis, so it should be easy.Sure enough, he gets her to release him from his debt AND undo the spell that binds Tulip’s life to hers in about 5 seconds flat. But wait, Gran’ma says. She has made a deal with the devil himself that states that if Jesse kills her, he (and Genesis) will go straight to hell when he dies. For a moment, it seems that the larger consequence of Satan having Genesis might once again cause Jesse to leave Gran’ma alive. The moment passes, though, and he rationalizes it by saying that he’s not dying TODAY. So, he straps his grandmother into her soul-sucking torture device, and that’s all she wrote. Bye bye, Betty Buckley…
What are our other friends doing while Jesse is singlehandedly burning Angelville to the ground? Well, Cassidy seems to be mending fences with Eccarius, and they decide to have a blood ceremony to celebrate. They’re going to turn the little old lady who owns the house, but all of a sudden Eccarius notices that she already has bite marks on her neck. It turns out that she DID try to call all of the vampires that Eccarius allegedly sent out into the world, and when none of them answered, she and the other Enfants joined forces with Cass. He turned them all, and they in turn feed on Eccarius, killing him.
Hoover comes back into the fold, too! He brings Cassidy an umbrella as a gift, which turns out to be necessary as the Grail lifts the house off its foundation and burns all of the other vampires to death. Too bad Cass couldn’t spend time getting high and blasting Nickelback as he originally planned. We find out later that the house and Cassidy have been airlifted to Masada, where Starr is holding the vampire hostage as a way to lure Jesse back. But not to be the Messiah – that ship has sailed. Now Starr wants nothing more than to destroy Jesse and probably a bunch of other people and things, too. He even gets so tired of Hoover that he removes his umbrella hat so he can be killed by the sunlight. Way harsh!
Tulip’s finale story was probably the weirdest and least interesting of them all. She emerges from the bus accident and fights some Nazis (in a very cool narrow-frame fight sequence inside the overturned bus), but then God appears and freezes the frame in order to extract her from the danger that would otherwise kill her. She once again mouths off and calls bullshit when God asks her to tell Jesse to stop looking for him, but then she goes looking for Cassidy (and shows up right after the house gets taken by the Grail). I’m not sure what that all means for the O’Hare curse in the long run, but I DID like the end sequence where she goes to pick up Jesse and the two share a couple of quiet moments before speeding off on their next adventure.
Finally, what happens to the rest of the bus passengers? Well, the Angel of Death makes one too many jokes about the Saint’s daughter and wife (which is to say, one joke), so the Saint rips out her eyes, and the whole bunch (minus Tulip) head down to Hell. Satan gives the Saint his weapons back, but the Saint wants to know whose idea it was to have crows peck out his loved ones’ eyes. Satan tries to blame it on God, but the Saint still shoots Satan in the head. Which, wow. Those really are some powerful weapons. The Saint leaves to find Jesse, but he takes Eugene with him because he now knows the kid does not belong in hell (side note: Eugene now appears to be pretty pissed at Jesse for sending him to hell, so I wonder how that will play out). Who is left to run things? That’s right – Hitler is now in charge of hell. I’m still not sure that payoff is enough to justify all of the screen time that Hitler got (at the expense of T.C. and Jody, for instance), but at least it feels like there was some kind of point.
So…some interesting setup for next season. What did everyone else think?
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