PREACHER - Ep. 7 - He Gone - A TV Review

As season one begins it's final four episodes, my feelings of hesitant concern have become not-so-hesitant, as we have another episode that meanders around before teasing a confrontation I've little doubt will underwhelm. But that's next week. Let's discuss this week.

Spoiler Warning: I'd say that this article contains spoilers for the episode, but that would imply something of note happened. It does, however, contain spoilers for the comic series. Just FYI.

There's a problem with 'Preacher'. True, not much really happened in this episode - DeBlanc and Fiore were not featured, but Quincannon returned, and is now apparently looking for a war. A lot of personal of relationships were explored, and some backstory was revealed. But a lack of action isn't the biggest problem. No, the problem I speak of is that it is unclear what, among those various, slowly sauntering plots of the episode, is relevant?

"He Gone" featured numerous flashbacks to Jesse's youth with his father, establishing the root of Jesse's compulsion to be a preacher, and his need to protect the church. It also featured another divergence from the comics - a young Tulip. In the comic, Jesse and Tulip did not meet each other until adulthood, however the series shows them not only being close friends, but Tulip living in Jesse's home for a time. And when social services takes her away, and John Custer does nothing to stop it, we get the revelation that Jesse angrily prayed to God that his father die, and was subsequently gunned down, creating a sense of guilt in Young Jesse's character.

I'm hesitant to even use the word "revelation", though, because we already saw John murdered* before Jesse's eyes in a previous episode. Being presented with the knowledge that Jesse was in the midst of a temper tantrum and prayed in a way that every child prays whenever they're angry with their parents doesn't make it particularly moving or relevant. Jesse may have felt guilt when he was nine years old, but does he still feel it as an adult? We haven't been shown anything that would indicate Adult Jesse is acting out of guilt or familial obligation. And if he is, it's pretty foolish to think that Adult Jesse would still believe his childish prayer was to blame for John's death. Yet apparently, this guilt is tremendously important to establishing who Jesse truly is.

*In the comics, John was murdered by a couple of goons named Jody and TC at the behest of Jesse's vile and wicked maternal grandmother. While the identity of the gunmen wasn't explicitly established in this episode, the triggerman sports a tattoo like the one Jesse's got on his back, given to him by a "mean old lady," as per last episode. I'm guessing Grandma. 

In contrast to the guilt he felt over his father is Jesse's reaction to Eugene's apparent banishment to Hell. The episode's opening shot is of the missing boy's church missal floating to the ground. Jesse looks back over his shoulder, and for a moment, displays a smug look of satisfaction with his new power. He doesn't know that Cassidy has witnessed the event, and when Cassidy calls him on it, Jesse shows not a shred of guilt. He argues that Eugene wasn't innocent, that he deserved it, and he gives the details of how Eugene got his face, and how Tracy Loach ended up in a vegetative state - for a moment, Jesse shows that tendency toward judgment that his father possessed ("She's an O'hare!" spat out by John in a flashback, like an insult). Cassidy calls bullshit, and while pushing Jesse to admit Eugene doesn't deserve hell, throws down a final gambit with the fire extinguisher that makes both his survival and Jesse's state of mind purposefully (and kind of dickishly, writers, if I'm being honest) ambiguous. It is a strong moment for Cassidy though, who is surprisingly becoming the debauched little moral compass of the show.

Back to Tulip for a moment. By diverging from the comic and bringing Tulip into Jesse's life at such a young age, it creates more of a sense that their relationship is what I've been calling it since the beginning: childish. As kids, Tulip makes Jesse use the line they use in the comic to profess their love: "till the end of the world". As adults, Tulip is arguing with Cassidy and shouts "he's my boyfriend" so that it sounds like the stubborn claim of the same child who held Young Jesse down and tried to lick his eyeball.

And while Emily has been presented as a pretty sharp contrast to Tulip, she is revealed to have a fairly immature attraction to Jesse as well. During their weird, quasi-family dinner, she more or less admits to having a crush on Jesse from the moment she laid eyes on him. "The moment I laid eyes on you" is one of those cliched phrases you usually only hear in movies and TV shows, and it makes it seem as though Emily is viewing Jesse through a romantic filter, rather than seeing him for the man he truly is. But both Emily and Tulip have a skewed perception of the Preacher, and both fail to notice how much the man is changing before them, until it becomes painfully obvious as he harshly insults them both. So really, by the end of the episode, the biggest development in the plot is that we're starting to see more clearly that Jesse is heading down a dark and dangerous road.


As I said before, I'm not sure what Jesse wants to do in Annville. He says he wants to save it, and now we kind of see why. But, "save it" is extraordinarily vague. And how he intends to do that, when he elects not to use the word on the congregation or a Quincannon who is demanding the church grounds is yet another mystery in a series that seems content to keep posing questions without answers. But the scarier problem is that I don't really care. There doesn't seem to be any urgency to his desire, so why should I? And I get annoyed that Catlin/Rogen/Goldberg are seeming to address this in Cassidy's anti-Lebowski** monologue when his diatribe reaches a climax with "plot matters!" Plot does matter, especially when you're dealing with a show of this nature.

**These jokers do not need to be comparing themselves to the Coen Brothers. The Coens have earned a ton of goodwill by telling wacky, crazy, meandering stories that still have interesting plots, 'Lebowski' among them. It's an arrogant comparison to draw.

Plot isn't just a series of scenes, or character explorations. Something has to actually happen or those characters you've spent all this time developing are not compelling enough to keep people watching. It has to go somewhere. We have a ton of questions and very few answers: what is Quincannon doing? Why does Tulip have such a hard-on for Carlos that she can't just let it go? Who killed John and why? The non-comic-reader has to be wondering what the fuck the Cowboy or the man in the white suit have to do with anything. Look, I'm ok with leaving questions out there to be answered in later episodes. I'm ok with setting up future storylines now. What I'm not ok with is focusing so much on setting up the future, that the present is rendered nearly pointless.

I'll be writing about last week's 'Outcast' soon, and for everything that 'Preacher' is doing wrong, that show is doing right. They're moving the plot along, leaving enough mysteries to keep you guessing, and still showing you who the characters are without beating you over the head with it.

Three episodes to go, and I'll stick with it through the end of this season. But I'm starting to feel like this final arc of episodes will prove to be just as meandering and ultimately pointless as much of the episodes that preceded it.

FINAL SCORE - 5.5/10

Preacher airs Sunday nights at 9/8c on AMC, if you care anymore.