Four episodes into this season of Preacher, and we haven’t spent a whole lot of time outside of Angelville. Even though we get to visit Hell for a bit in “The Tombs,” Jesse and crew still haven’t figured out how to leave his family’s estate – and just about everyone seems the worse for it (with the possible exception of Tulip, who – let’s face it – is always awesome, geography be damned).
Jesse has reprised his role as the ringmaster of The Tombs, a kind of redneck fight club that nearly always ends with someone dead at Jody’s hands. We get a lot of flashbacks to Jesse’s original stint in Angelville, and it is in one of those flashbacks that T.C. mentions a pretty girl that Jesse is seeing that he doesn’t want Gran’ma to find out about. Is it Tulip?
Nope. As it turns out, it’s Madame Boyd (first name Sabina), who is driving around the back roads of Louisiana WITH Tulip (after Tulip shot a big hole in the floor so they could escape from the Boyd henchmen – trust me, it was very rad, even though my description doesn’t adequately convey that). Sabina tells Tulip that Jesse was the worst person she ever loved – apparently, not only did Jesse break her heart by calling her trash RIGHT BEFORE THEY WERE ABOUT TO GET DOWN, but he also killed her brother when he came to The Tombs to confront Jesse about it. Tulip calls bullshit and points a gun at her, telling her to get out of the car just as they approach Angelville, where cars are lined up around the block.
While Tulip has been out, Cassidy has been fighting. He won his first fight (with vice principal pedophile dude), which means that he has to fight Jody next – but not before Jody and Jesse go out to get more beer. What Jody doesn’t know is that Jesse chopped Cassidy up into pieces and snuck him into the truck, so when they get to the keg store (yup, they just sell kegs), Jesse hauls Cassidy into the shipping center next door and literally tries to ship him to New Orleans. It is a hysterical scene, with Cassidy mouthing off as he’s being cushioned with Styrofoam packing peanuts. Jesse is nice enough to stick a couple of bags of blood in there with Cassidy, but no sooner does Jesse leave than Cassidy pulls himself together – literally – and goes back to Angelville. Jesse decides that enough is enough, so HE fights Cassidy. Tulip enters just in time to see Jesse stab Cassidy with what looked to me like a giant stake.
Tulip somehow gets Cassidy out of The Tombs and brings him to a bus bound for New Orleans. Cassidy reaches for the love potion and tells Tulip that he loves her and isn’t leaving without her. She tells him that she does not love him. Cassidy’s hand lingers over the vial, but he puts it back in his pocket. It’s a subtle, quiet, sad moment in an otherwise chaotic and action-packed episode. As the bus pulls away, who is sitting a few rows behind Cassidy? None other than Grail operative Featherstone. Hmmmm…
Tulip confronts Jesse about Sabina and her brother, and Jesse insists that it was self-defense. Tulip seems to accept this, but she lays into Jesse for not trusting her. It seems that if they are to ever leave Angelville, they are going to have to do it as a team – and that looks like what they’re prepared to do, especially now that Tulip knows (thanks to Sabina) that killing Gran’ma will release Jesse from the blood compact.
We DO spend a few moments during the episode in another location – Hell. The Saint of Killers is summoned to the Ninth Circle (hilariously represented by an elevator going to the “-9” floor, complete with awkward elevator attendant), where Satan tells him that the Saint’s antics weren’t exactly good PR for the devil. However, it is even worse that Arseface and Hitler have escaped, so Satan tells the Saint that if he rounds those two knuckleheads back up, he can have his weapons back and kill the preacher. Before he goes, though, he has to take a whipping from the Angel of Death – and the CGI for how he looks afterward is quite striking. The whole Hell sequence is hilarious and horrifying at the same time, and it makes me excited to see the action move away from Jesse’s family and onto the bigger themes that this season has mostly ignored.
Oh…and what the heck was going on with God (and his woman) speeding past Tulip on his motorcycle while she was lost? Let me know if you’ve figured that one out….
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