It’s a double shot of Jesse Custer and his band of God hunters this week, as I play catch-up from a busy week.

Previously, on PREACHER

The seventh episode of the second season, “Pig,” gave us the origin story for soon-to-be antagonist Herr Starr while Jesse, Tulip and Cassidy all have to find a way to deal with their encounter with the Saint of Killers.

“Or role is to rid the world of competing narratives. Charlemagne. Lincoln. Belushi. You name it.”

We flip back between the present day and 2004, which is when The Grail recruited Herr Starr into the organization. We also learn that The Grail has, for generations, protected the lineage of Jesus Christ in preparation for the end of the world. They will bring about the End Times and unify the world under the Blood of Christ, who will be under their control. 

At the very least, Starr’s training and recruitment – a lot of which was taken from the comic book – got me excited for how they handle the Christ heir and to see how close they stick to the comic.

Also, this:

With Jesse’s attention focused on finding God, the focus of the present day shifts over to Tulip and Cassidy, who each have their own crucibles to attend to. Tulip is haunted by her encounter with The Saint and it gives her nightmares. Cassidy, on the other hand, has a more unique problem. His son, Denis – the old man whose apartment has become our HQ – is dying and he wants Cassidy to turn him into a vampire. Cassidy flat out refuses.

The eighth episode, “Holes,” takes us back to Hell to check back in with Eugene while Tulip continues to have nightmares about the Saint of Killers and Jesse keeps trying to follow clues toward God.

This episode really was meant to set up the pieces on the board as we head into the last arc of the season. Jesse spends most of the episode dealing with a couple of IT guys who he asks to get info off the video of the “God” audition. Cassidy’s resolve about not siring his dying son begins to fade. And Tulip buys a fridge to hide the hole left by the bullet shot from The Saint of Killer’s gun. And then she spackled all the apartments with holes from the bullet. This leads to her meeting Agent Featherstone, who set up shop in the apartment complex with her partner, Hoover.

“I’m probably the evilest person here. Other than you.”

Meanwhile, we spend a good amount of time in Hell, seeing how Eugene is doing. Hitler, who Eugene turned on a few episodes ago, figures out that Eugene doesn’t belong there – The Führer is a couple steps ahead of the warden of hell, who has just figured out that Hell has an extra person in it. Hitler then manipulates things to get Eugene sent into The Hole. So much for him having been reformed.

After a really great episode, keeping the momentum is important to turn a good run into a great run and to get people talking about your show. Unfortunately, Preacher doesn’t pull that off with these two episodes. While there were some fun moments in the last two episodes, the show instead felt like it was falling back on the bad habits of season one, just with more engaging characters and a better location.

Hopefully, the eighth episode was just a bump in the road, and we start on a better path as we head towards the end of the show’s sophomore season.

Next time, on PREACHER…