3.8 The Tom/Brady One of the benefits to mixing up characters is that you create some crackling set pieces. With Starr and Jesse, the chemistry is obvious. They don’t dislike one another, at least on the surface, and unlike Featherstone and Tulip, their antagonism to one another is easily put aside in service of a bigger goal, or in this case killing a bunch of grail security officers in an elevator and shooting, but not killing, the Allfather. This initial failure puts the two together for the rest of the episode, communicating in terse whispers while the Allfather tries to find the right genetic serum to allow Genesis to exist in someone who isn’t Jesse Custer, blowing up an army of Humperdoo clones in the process. The trip to Japan is somehow funnier, if only because of the anti-sexual harassment HR session being conducted by Featherstone, using Tulip and Jody as actors in her scenarios. They’re delightfully wooden, until Tulip gets to sexually harass (and steal the ID card of) the soul company’s director. They get access to the vault, then have to break into the vault. Throughout this interaction, they keep nearly complimenting one another, only for Featherstone to announce that the compliment was fake and Tulip to bellow in response that her response to the compliment was also fake. It works well, because it’s not overused. They spark, then lapse back into professionalism, then spark again. The episode, as a whole, is an improvement over last week. Last week was entertaining enough, but this week’s episode manages to wring out legitimate feelings regarding Cas discovering Lisa’s blood-soaked neck pillow for her plane trip. That scene, and Cas’s confronting Eccarius, is very touching, as it Eccarius’s response when he smashes Cas into the wall. (Hoover, who decided to turn into a vampire rather than allow himself to die, runs off in the melee, which is an interesting development.) The script, from Mary Laws and Kevin Rosen, is tightly written. The three plots work well together, and the episode is divided pretty evenly between all three groups. There’s some very funny interchanges in all three sets, with Hoover (as usual) being one of the funnier elements, with Jesse and Starr coming in a close second in their quiet, whispered discussions about how to stop the Allfather’s crazy scheme to empower Humperdoo. Starr plays his part, slapping Jesse around, and Jesse plays his part, smart-mouthing the Allfather (when he’s not making a surprisingly logical case for his possessing Genesis). That flair spices up a lot of the heist scene in Osaka. If Jesse and Starr is shot like Reanimator, then Tulip and Featherstone is shot like Ocean’s 11. The set-ups are fairly simple. Tulip, Jody, and Featherstone are walking through a hallway. But there’s a nice crane shot looking down on the three of them, and some cool compositing to put the three of them in the same frame without needing a wide shot. Marie’s brief nightmare was also really well done, and very creepy to watch in a Carnival Of Souls sort of way. Between the gore, the cool criminal antics, and the comedic ineptitude of Hoover, The Tom/Brady worked remarkably well, even if the title joke about American football player Tom Brady is an eye-roller. It progresses the relationships between Starr and Custer forward, nudges Les Enfants a little farther towards a confrontation between Eccarius and Cas, and humanises Marie just slightly (while still giving Tulip ample reason to hate her). Certainly, there have been slower episodes this season, but overall, there’s a lot to like where Preacher is concerned. There still feels like a consistent progression of the plot forward, without feeling too slow or too rushed. There’s a lot to be said for a ten-episode season, and a certain other AMC show about the undead could benefit from dropping a few episodes from their seasonal order to stop padding out twelve episodes of material into sixteen-episode seasons. It’s better for a show to exit early than overstay its welcome. Read Ron’s review of the previous episode, Hitler, here. US Correspondent Ron Hogan laughed quite a bit at Hoover’s big toothy vampire smile after being turned. It’s a really funny visual to consider. Find more by Ron daily at PopFi.
