Jesse Custer’s on the run from the law, and Fiore and DeBlanc are on their way to Hell in this episode of Preacher, “Finish the Song.” Meanwhile, Emily is roped in to help Tulip with her little problem, and we finally learn the mystery of Ratwater.
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On the Run
While driving Jesse to prison, the Sheriff asks once again what happened to his son, Eugene. All Jesse will say is that he sent him to Hell, and the Sheriff takes that to mean he killed him. He tells him a story taken from his buddy who’s a warden at the penitentiary where Jesse is likely to end up, entailing the suicidal demise of a child murderer there, to highlight the sort of experience he should come to expect there. It’s clear that he’s pissed and trying to freak out the preacher in his backseat.
But Jesse uses the storytelling time to somehow break out of the car, and he disappears when the Sheriff stops to look for him. The next day, presumably, we see him hiding out under a bridge with two homeless townspeople. One of them, Jackie, manages to help him get out of his handcuffs, and they give him food while questioning his plan to bring God down to Annville on Sunday. He won’t go into details but still claims he’ll be able to do it. I’ll believe it when I see it.
Jesse manages to evade the Sheriff and the rest of the Annville police department during the entire episode, but since the next episode is the finale, it appears we won’t have to wait long to see their showdown.
The New Plan
Since the plan to capture Genesis backfired in their last meeting with Jesse, Fiore and DeBlanc have to turn to new means to get it back before Heaven punishes them. They determine that they have to go to Hell in order to proceed with their new plan, and a woman at a travel agency called Distant Vistas is apparently the local hook-up for all trips Hell-bound.
After some bantering, and a back-and-forth in which both sides threaten to report the other for what they’re doing, DeBlanc and Fiore get their tickets to Hell and make their way back to their hotel room to prepare. There, they contemplate just calling Heaven and telling them what’s going on, as they really don’t want to go to Hell (can’t imagine why!), but they’re worried about taking that course of action as they’ll likely be separated forever. They seem very distraught by this possibility. Hmm.
In the end, the two use two coin tosses to determine whether they’ll go up or down, and the second double-or-nothing toss results in the Heaven option. But when Fiore goes to retrieve the Heaven phone from under one of the beds, it’s not there. So, Hell it is after all.
When the pair goes to the pick-up spot for their Hell shuttle, the driver who arrives informs them that they aren’t allowed carry-ons. Fiore, dragging a trunk, is especially upset because that means she has to leave his comics behind. I have just enough time to be sad for him before DeBlanc calls him “my dear” and reassures him — and wait, what? Are they a couple? Because if so, I ship that. I am all for that. Talk about emotional whiplash.
So the angels get on the Distant Vistas shuttle and make their way to Hell. Should be an interesting trip.
Healing Cassidy
Tulip, apparently tired of waiting, has decided to go to Albuquerque to get Carlos on her own, so she calls in her new friend Emily to help her with her little Cassidy problem. When Emily shows up at her uncle’s, where she’s been “feeding” Cassidy, Tulip very quickly relays the information that, yes, the Irishman who was living in Emily’s church is in fact a vampire.
She also explains that after being burned, Cassidy isn’t healing. And the hospital blood she initially tried to give him didn’t work, so she had to resort to giving him live prey instead. Hence, the bloodhound in the previous episode. Brewski! You deserved better!
Tulip tells Emily to just throw one of the animals she has collected in the house into the room Cassidy is in every now and then, and when Emily questions why she’s leaving and if she’s aware that Jesse is in trouble, Tulip washes her hands of the preacher and tells Emily she can have him for a boyfriend now. Emily awkwardly claims that Miles is her boyfriend, so she doesn’t need Jesse, but Tulip is not exactly moved by this and makes her way to New Mexico.
The first critter Emily gives to Cassidy is a guinea pig, and after the vampire has taken care of the poor creature, Emily sneaks a peek in the room and sees him with his kill, a grotesque picture in the back corner of the room. She appears to wait a while after that to feed him because the next time we see her, she’s watching a movie in the other room and Cassidy is pleading out of hunger from the bedroom.
Next thing we know, Miles, who is watching some sort of fight between Quincannon Meat and Power fighters in Odin’s office, receives a call from Emily, whom he had just recently called to talk about staying over that evening. She’s terrified because apparently Cassidy got out, and she pleads with Miles to come save her. Miles, having no idea what he’s in for, makes his way to her house.
But it’s a trap. Cassidy is still closed in the room, and when Miles goes in and finds him there, Emily suddenly slams the door shut behind him and locks him in. So Miles ends up as Cassidy’s next kill, and Emily proves that she can be just as ruthless as the other characters on Preacher.
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Return of the Bromance
When Jesse makes his way to Tulip’s uncle’s house, he finds Emily in the backyard, letting some of the guinea pigs free. She tells him his “mate” is inside, and Jesse goes in to find Cassidy half-healed in the bedroom, surrounded by bodies, most notably Miles’. Cassidy demands that he go away, that he told Jesse what he was and now he can see for himself, but Jesse responds that Cassidy saw him too, at his worst, and says he’s very sorry for letting Cassidy burn.
Cassidy replies that apparently Jesse actually “put him out” when he was burning, and that’s what matters to the vampire. When they talk about what to do next, Jesse asks what Cassidy would do if it had been Jesse who killed the mayor. The vampire says he’d help him hide the body, and Jesse agrees that that’s just what they’re going to do. Looks like the bromance is back on!
In the middle of cleaning up the room, Cassidy tries to use the angel phone they had absconded with, but Jesse realizes that they need angel hands to make it work, and he needs it to work if his whole “calling down God” thing is going to happen. Luckily, Cassidy knows where to find angel hands, and the grave they make their way to that apparently has several of them is also where the two end up burying all the bodies Cassidy tore his way through while he was healing. Way to kill two birds with one stone, boys.
Hunting
Elsewhere, two other characters are in the middle of going after their own prey. Tulip has made her way to New Mexico and tracked down Carlos there. While he is tied up in front of her, she plays a heartfelt voicemail from Jesse, in which he recounts a memory he has of her. He then ends the message by saying, “For me, it’s just you. ‘Til the end of the world.” Which, if you recall, is kind of their “thing” they say to each other. This seems to embolden Tulip, and she makes her way over to the bound man in front of her with a weapon in hand. That probably won’t end well.
Meanwhile, when the Sheriff heads to the angels’ hotel room to gather more information on Jesse’s whereabouts, he’s told that DeBlanc and Fiore are long gone. He does, however, find the seraphim the two left dismembered in the bathtub and tells someone in the other room to call an ambulance because, for all he knows, she’s just a civilian in dire need of assistance.
The woman continuously asks him to kill her, and at first, he tries to comfort her and tell her everything’s going to be okay. But she persists, and in the end, the Sheriff strangles her until he believes she is dead. What he doesn’t see is the woman reappearing behind him in the doorway, before she leaves to track down her own targets — DeBlanc and Fiore.
This is Hell
Finally, we get yet another flashback to the mysterious murderer who made his way to Ratwater to retrieve medicine for his sick daughter. Early on in the episode, he walks into the town saloon and shoots everyone inside, all while threatening a man who is singing to finish the song before killing him and the pianist last.
Before his massacre, the preacher asked him whether he would accept the love of Jesus Christ, and the man replies that he loves three things: his horse, his wife and his little girl. And because of their actions, all three are dead. So he isn’t totally without reason in his killings, I guess?
Most important, the man says that Jesus can “join” them all in Hell, and when the show repeats scenes several times from much of the previously seen flashbacks involving the man at the end of the episode, it quickly becomes clear that the man is actually in Hell himself. His Hell is repeating that nightmare that lost him his family over and over and over. Ouch.
But then something changes. One of the times, after he kills everyone in the saloon, the man is joined by DeBlanc and Fiore, who come to him with a job and the promise that his nightmare can end. When the murderous gunslinger asks about the job, DeBlanc tells him that if he comes with them, they’ll tell him more. And he shoot the angel. So Fiore is left to explain that they want him to kill someone, but not just any someone — a preacher.
I think we all know where this is headed, but we’ll have to tune in to the season 1 finale of Preacher to know for sure!
Preacher airs Sunday nights at 9pm on AMC.
(Image courtesy of AMC)
Contributing Writer, BuddyTV
