“You seem like a nice young man. Sweet, kind, loyal. That kind of behavior won’t be tolerated here, you understand? This is hell. Act accordingly.”
Previously, on PREACHER…
After what I thought was a pretty eventful episode last week that saw the debut of Herr Starr and his top agent in The Grail, Featherstone, the show dips back into its own non-comics continuity with the fourth episode. I’m not sure anything that happened in this episode had any real ties to the comics.
The latest installment was broken up into three different plots, each adding its own substance to Jesse, Tulip and Cassidy’s ongoing search for God.
When we left Tulip last week, she was being surrounded by men who work for Viktor, who also sent someone after Tulip when she was in the casino in the season’s second episode. We start where we left off last week, and the men take Tulip back to Viktor’s home/headquarters/compound so the two can have a conversation. Tulip, who wanted nothing to do with coming to New Orleans last week, doesn’t really seem interested in talking to Viktor, either. In a rare show of emotion, Tulip cries as she apologizes to Viktor, who is nonplussed.
“Crying isn’t gonna fix this. I brought you in, I trusted you, made you a part of my family. And in return, you made a fool out of me.”
Viktor leaves Tulip to consider her course of action. Of course, this means violence. She beats up one of Viktor’s guards, steals a gun and heads up to Viktor’s room, where she pulls a gun on him. She can’t pull the trigger, though, and ends up being taken down by the boss’ thugs.
Tulip’s adventure goes largely ignored by Jesse, who is still on his kick of trying to find God by visiting Jazz Clubs in New Orleans. Before getting captured, Tulip told Cassidy not to tell Jesse where she was, and the vampire stays true to his word for most of the episode. Instead, Cassidy spots something on an infomercial hosted by MALCOLM IN THE MIDDLE star Frankie Muniz – the guy who played God in the first season finale was acting as a homeless person!
The discovery sends Jesse and Cassidy on a quest to find the actor, which leads to the casting agency that represented Mark Harelik (played spectacularly by actor Mark Harelik). While agent Teddy Gunth isn’t interested in giving Jesse and Cass information on Mark, he does try and pitch other actors to them. Finally, Teddy admits that he hasn’t heard from Mark since getting him a job as God. But he gives Jesse Mark’s God audition tape. The tape reveals Harelik practicing the lines he repeated to the people of Annville and then, when he accepts the role, being shot and killed. Because it was the only way to get him into heaven.
Once Jesse finishes his wild goose chase, it finally occurs to him to listen to Cass’ little hints about Tulip’s whereabouts. Jesse storms through the compound, battles a torturer loudly playing Billy Joel’s Uptown Girl on his headphones to avoid Genesis and then confronts Tulip and Viktor talking upstairs.
Before Jesse gets a chance to put a hurt on Viktor, Tulip stops him, admitting to Jesse that Viktor is, in fact, her husband.
Well, that explains why she wouldn’t get married to Jesse in the second episode…
The episode’s third plot revolved around Eugene in Hell and forming a bond with the guy in the cell next to him.
Yep, Adolf Hitler himself. The Führer saves Eugene from a bully named Tyler and then brings the proto-Arseface into his cell, where Eugene experiences Adolf’s own personal Hell… which doesn’t seem that bad. He’s with a woman named Elsa, in a cafe in Munich in 1919, and she wants him to show his art to a gallery owner, but he hesitates. Maybe if he hadn’t… The what if’s are strong in that segment.
Hitler and Eugene continue to bond throughout the episode, until the final scene in Hell, where Eugene gets sent to GenPop while his cell is being worked on. Eugene questions if Hitler was really as bad as his reputation suggests when Tyler returns and starts to beat the snot out of Hitler. Eugene stops the group shitkicking, but then remembers the quote the started this column, from the Hell prison superintendent, and joins in on the Hitler beatdown.
And to close out the episode, the Saint of Killers is comin’ – not a surprise given how much Jesse used Genesis in this episode.
I was excited about having Starr, Featherstone and Hoover last week, and to not have almost any mention of The Grail to follow it up (Hoover was watching Jesse this week, but that’s about it) was a little disappointing, but there were a lot of new threads to pull at here next week. And again, I assume there will be minimal dealings with Herr Starr again. I’m preparing for my disappointment.