Monday 18 July 2016

Preacher 1.8 Review: El Valero


With Odin Quinncannon coming to collect on his bet, a drunken Jesse finds himself trapped in his church as the businessman attempts to bulldoze it to make way for a bigger and better Quinncannon Meat & Power.

This should have been an interesting showdown but Jesse being the marksmen that he is and assumedly the power of Genesis on his side he easily bests Quinncannon's men not one, not two, but three times throughout the episode as they try to charge the church - and it all happened off-screen as well avoiding any potentially exciting action sequences as well. Not only that, but the oddly-timed attacks ensured that is was made painfully obvious in this episode that the writers were stalling. There was no reason for Quinncannon and his men to sit around and wait to attack Jesse again but they did so twice, obvious that the writers were trying to give time to Jesse's going-ons in the church.

Eugene's return was a welcome surprise but Jesse soon realised that it wasn't actually Eugene that had crawled his way back from hell, but rather an hallucination. His presence was odd, sure Jesse felt guilty about what he had done but the hallucination didn't seem represent of Jesse's conscious at all but rather the spirit of Eugene himself - which also randomly departed at the end of the episode and very much felt like they just needed to put actor in the episode for contractual reasons. It also seemed like that was happening with Tulip for majority of the episode as her few short scenes showed her adopting a dog - only for her to later push it into a dark room assumedly feeding a severely injured Cassidy.

Fiore and DeBlanc's visit to the church, as least, was somewhat more interesting. Realising his inability to control Genesis - with Quinncannon on his doorstep with a bulldozer and a hallucination of Eugene messed with his head while the real one was in hell - Jesse called upon the angels to finally remove it from him with their song. While they were annoyingly tight-lipped with information this episode they revealed that Eugene could in fact come back from hell. Jesse wanted them to bring him back in return for giving back Genesis - but it had other ideas - popping straight back into his body before the angles left in a huff (maybe to get their chainsaws?).

The church siege ended due to yet another loophole with Jesse's powers. Donny, desperate not to be coerced by Genesis again, but also desperate to to prove himself to his wife and Quinncannon shot himself in the ear enabling him to go into the church and pistol-whip Jesse without a problem. He awoke with Quinncannon and go serving him with the papers to sign over the church. Jesse didn't understand how Odin hadn't followed God - yet he had. Again with those loopholes, as the flashback at the beginning of the episode told us in which Quinncannon lost his entire family in a skiing accident - he has only followed the God of Meat for a long time. Jesse asked Quinncannon for one more week to prove that God was tangible, and that he could bring him to Texas. Assumably Odin refused to listen to Jesse anymore as the episode ended with him been taken away in a police car by Sheriff Root.

Rating: 3/5

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