PREACHER - Ep. 10, SEASON FINALE - Call and Response - A TV Review

Preacher's season finale closes the door on a lot of things, including my patience. Let's wrap this charlie foxtrot up, yeah?

SPOILER WARNING - Spoilers for the TV show and the comic book. Like, for serious. Spoilery-ass spoilers. 

I really don't know what to say to that. Everything I feared about the first season of 'Preacher' was realized in the season finale.

Sometime after I watched the pilot, an idea formed in the back of my head. I dismissed it as stupid - nobody could be that stupid - and it faded into the distance of my mind. Then about four weeks ago, the idea popped back up, and I thought "well...maybe." But again, I thought, nobody could do something so idiotic. And then, two weeks ago, when Jesse told Quincannon he wanted one more sermon to help bring God to the people, I thought, "holy shit, they're actually going to do it.They're going to kill everybody in the season finale."

But I held out hope throughout "Call and Response" that at the last minute, I'd be proven wrong. And when I saw Jesse's parishioners file out of the church after the exposure of the impostor God (while Emily hilariously trolled them with some ? and the Mysterians), I breathed a sigh of relief. The town made it. They got out of the church alive. Thank god!

And then they all were all killed when the entire town exploded.

Why? Because somewhere several months ago, when constructing their idea of what this show should be, Sam Catlin, Seth Rogen, and Evan Goldberg decided to take what happened in the first issue of "Preacher" and instead of having it happen in the pilot, or 3-5 episodes in, they'd wait until the end of the first season to wipe out most of the cast, save the three leads. Now, why did they decide to do that? Who the fuck knows. There is no "why" that serves this story, and even more damning, there is no story that is served by this ending.

Oh sure, we have the story from the comic book - Jesse, Tulip and Cassidy riding around America searching for God with the Saint of Killers on their ass, but Catlin/Rogen/Goldberg didn't tell us that story for the entire season. It only just came up. They wasted our time for ten episodes half-assedly investing us in Jesse's desire to save Annville, investing us in the lives of the townspeople and their relationships - Emily, Sheriff Root, Donny and Betsy, Odin Quincannon. And killing them all now serves no obvious purpose beyond what I hope wasn't the case - that it'd be funny.

In a way, the season finale was a microcosm of everything wrong with this failed first season. Some part of it were good - very good, even - but in the end, a lot of it was just plain unnecessary and didn't really accomplish much.

There were several good laughs. The intro of Jesse running past Mabel as the cops chased him in a car got a pretty good one from me - it was very Wile E. Coyote. Donny and Betsy exuberantly engaging in some spanking play, only to have it interrupted by Tulip's unwanted violence was a clever twist. And Emily's wicked grin when she started playing "96 Tears" as the congregation filed out really made me laugh.

There were some really great dramatic scenes, too; Sheriff Root (Jesus Christ, can W. Earl Brown just win all the awards for his overall amazing body of work?) questioning Cassidy was an amazing sequence, both for Brown and Joseph Gilgun. The Angel Impostor's impression of Jesus was very well executed - he came across with just the right amount of "is this for fucking real? this IS real!...this can't be real" to keep the suspense going for as long as it did. And the brief reveal of Quincannon's meat daughter, along with finally and clearly showing us that he is a man crippled by grief and hate, was especially poignant.

All that good stuff wiped away by an inexplicable underground bunker of cowshit that made no sense at all.

But for all of the good stuff, there was Jesse's decision that murdering Carlos was ok now. Keep in mind, this happened prior to the revelation that God was missing, so the town's nihilism hadn't taken root yet. Why the sudden change of heart? "Yes, I'm intending to call God tomorrow, but today? Murder!"

There was the revelation that Tulip lost a baby to the aftermath of Carlos' envy - which should have had more impact than it did. Because Jesse and Tulip spent the entire season bickering, and all we ever saw was her childish and stubborn pining of him, I never felt any sort of connection to them as a couple, and therefore the fact that they suffered a miscarriage carried all the weight of two complete strangers having to deal with a tragedy. Yes, we pity them, but we don't really have an emotional stake in their sadness.

There's the teaser for what's undoubtedly a major part of next season's story, the Cowboy is on their ass now. And though we only spent maybe twenty minutes with the Cowboy throughout the entire season, it wasn't necessary that we spend any time with him at all. We didn't need his origin right now. We didn't need to know that he was in hell, or why. We didn't even need to see him before the final shot of the episode. If they'd wanted to hold back on the Saint for the entire season and only show him in those closing seconds, the show would not have been affected much. In fact, I think that would have actually been a hell of a lot cooler, and I guarantee the comic fans would have lost their shit when they got a surprise entrance from the Saint of Killers.

And once again, we saw Cassidy essentially defending the showrunners by invoking the Coens again, in another of own his Anti-Lebowski tirades. Now, here's the thing guys: 'The Big Lebowski' was silly and surreal and zany, but it still told a pretty simple story. And it told it well. It didn't waste a large portion of time with unnecessary stuff, and even when it stopped for a hallucination sequence, it still fit within the context of the characters. And it was funny! So if you're going to compare yourselves to anyone, don't compare yourselves to the fucking Coen Brothers. You've not earned that right yet. Not by a long shot.

Overall, I have to call this first season a pretty big failure. I'm pretty bummed about that. I love the comic - a lot. I had my doubts about the creative crew behind this series, and I fear that my doubts were well founded. It wasn't a complete failure; when it succeeded, it did so pretty admirably. But when it fell short, it fell way fucking short. And the first season is too early to start deliberately fucking with your audience, which is the only reason I can see for making the decisions they made to wrap up the finale.

Sam Catlin, Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg: you have good actors and good source material. Fix this mess, or I won't be back for next season.



FINAL SCORES - Episode - 6/10
                               Season - 5/10