‘Preacher’ Episode 1.5 “South Will Rise Again” (8 out of 10) Developed by Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg & Sam Catlin; Starring Dominic Cooper, Joseph Gilgun & Ruth Negga; Sundays on AMC.
After last week’s lukewarm episode, tonight was a bit more reassuring. It didn’t quite match the intensity of the pilot, but there were some pivotal moments that made me stop and say, “Whaaaat?” It will probably get more spoilery than usual since some major stuff went down—consider yourselves warned.
The Return of the Cowboy
It’s possible that opening the episode with a flashback to Ratwater, circa 1881, set the right tone for the episode for me. We got to see the conclusion of the Cowboy’s (Graham McTavish) journey tonight, and it’s about time since it kicked off back in episode two. It’s a tragic tale, gruesomely adapted from the comics to capture the precise moment when the Saint of Killers is born.
While the death of his family is enough to push anyone over the edge, there was something desperate and hopeless about the way these first few scenes portrayed the evil of humanity. Ironically, it’s the town’s preacher (Justice Leak) that seems to be the lynchpin of the Cowboy’s misfortune. Leak’s preacher is a dark shadow of what our Jesse Custer (Dominic Cooper) could become—he’s charismatic and the town of Ratwater seems to love him, but he’s an evil sumbitch.
Watching the Cowboy resist his darker nature to help a family that he believes to be walking into extreme danger only to see that they’re part of the nastiness that has infected Ratwater reiterates one of the show’s primary themes, and it’s something that we’ve seen Custer himself deal with early on in the show. While it’s pretty clear that Custer will cross paths with the Cowboy after he has become the Saint of Killers, the potential for these two characters to work together is intriguing—although there’s no way that’s going to happen right off the bat.
The Church of Custer
Back in the present town of Annville—which could be the modern resting place of Ratwater, as we see Custer standing next to Ratwater’s hanging tree—things are going pretty well for our preacher. He’s got the youths bickering about which book of the New Testament is the best, and he’s helping folks get over their insecurities and become better people. Again, the implications of a preacher who is forcing his congregation to walk the straight and narrow are very tongue in cheek, and this episode makes Custer’s acceptance of this gift more convincing than it did last week.
Particularly powerful is the subplot involving Eugene “Arseface” Root (Ian Colletti), a character who I have foolishly failed to mention. Arseface is at the center of a slowly unraveling tragedy that involves his own botched suicide and the current catatonic state of Tracy Loach (Gianna LePera), and we get a bit more insight into that situation tonight. First of all, Colletti deserves some serious credit for delivering emotional performances with a butthole-shaped prosthetic attached to the bottom half of his face. He brings this sense of pitiful innocence to every scene that he’s in, and the less we know about his backstory, the more painful it all seems.
Tulip and Cassidy
These two were a mixed bag tonight. The show fast-tracked the love triangle among Jesse, Tulip (Ruth Negga) and Cassidy (Joseph Gilgun), and it didn’t quite work. For starters, in the comics, Tulip and Cassidy hook up during an extremely emotional period in which she thinks that Jesse has been killed, and the whole thing becomes a painful mess that never quite gets sorted out. Tonight, Tulip hooks up with Cassidy to what, make Jesse jealous? And Cassidy’s pitch about falling for Tulip, charming as it was, came way too far out of left field to be believable. This was something that needed to happen much later in the series, and I’m a bit pissed that they went there halfway through the first season.
Verdict
Honestly, I was freaking out a bit too much about that opening scene. It’s essentially the origin story of a spectacularly imagined villain, and I can’t wait to see him wreak terrible vengeance across the heavens. Jesse’s plans appear to be working—except the part when Odin Quincannon (Jackie Earle Haley) murders the executive team of an environmentally friendly company that the mayor has brought in. Did Quincannon do this because he thought he was serving God? If so, does that mean that Jesse is indirectly responsible for the murder of four innocent people? Or were these people also evil? It was a hell of a way to end the episode, regardless of the reason.