Well, this was something else.
We’ve gone from the worst episode of the show to the best episode! Sure, I was a bit confused when the episode started, but it all fit together in the end.
“I started having second thoughts, and then second thoughts about the second thoughts.”
When this episode began I actually paused the episode a couple of times. I wasn’t sure if I was watching the right show, it looked like Preacher but it felt stranger. And then seeing James Kyson (my reaction was “Hey, it’s Ando from Heroes) confused me even more. I had no idea he would be in the show, but then again I didn’t keep up with cast announcements.
But after this weird scene about transfusions of something we got back to our Unholy Trinity. And after last week’s fiasco it looks like things are back to normal. And Tulip’s making some sort of pancakes. Jesse’s face when he says ‘I love your cooking’ really gets to me.
Not that this lasts long, because the Saint finally gets to them. But this confrontation is less meaty because they just get the hell out.
“-Really? A book on tape? -Still a book”
Realizing that Fiore has betrayed them and is dead their only choice is finding out what the bargain was. And why the voice doesn’t work on him.
I really loved the library scene. All in all seeing the characters find out about something the audience already knows can be tiresome. But it was done in a montage showing other books about the Saint to make it look cooler. I mean, seeing a parody of one of those romantic novels with the Saint in it was fun, but I particularly liked how they used panels of the Preacher: Saint of Killers miniseries, it was a nice touch.
As was the joke at the end of the audiobook, it’s a joke that Garth Ennis himself could’ve done. But the important thing is that this montage gives some new information about the Saint. And it reveals something I had been wondering about. The Saint has no soul, and that has a particular meaning.
“You got one hour”
Apart from this information Jesse has a bargaining chip. The Saint doesn’t know that God’s gone, so Jesse uses that to his advantage, promising to give the Saint what he wants to get him to Heaven. But the others are left behind as hostages while Jesse looks for a soul, and we finally find out what’s the deal with Cass and Denis. I always thought he was just a random guy fed up with Cassidy’s bullshit, but making him his son makes things interesting. Cassidy mentions having sons in the comic book but they were never seen. I keep forgetting he’s been around for 100 years, so who knows what kind of skeletons he has in his closet.
On the other hand, that search for a soul doesn’t go well, until Jesse uses the L’Angelle name (when are we meeting those pricks! I thought Grandma L’Angelle would be around by now) and he gets told that the soul commerce has been monopolized by the Japanese.
That moment, the penny dropped. That scene in the beginning confused me and I still thought “But there was nothing involving souls in the comic book!” but I don’t care about that any longer. Sam Catlin, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg took the roadtrip from the original and we’re taking a more scenic route. And all in all, this thing with the souls makes sense.
The idea of Jesse having to use his own soul is also interesting, it has the potential to lead to some bad things in the future.
“A cop-killing, child-murdering, son of a bitch trying to make it through the Pearly Gates?”
All in all, this episode hits the mark in pretty much everything. And it fixes an issue I had with the comic book. I always wondered why the Saint of Killers carries a sabre here. Now I believe it’s to cover a mistake from the comic books, on the first issues (before the full extent of the Saint’s abilities and backstory were established) the Saint shoots Cassidy but he lives, and several issues later we’re told that everything he shoots dies.
I guess the sabre is a workaround to that, because he uses it on Cassidy and he only loses his fingers, no biggie. But all in all, this episode is interesting when it comes to this.
Remember last week when I complained about how Jesse’s dark side could be exploring without being boring? This episode does exactly that! It would’ve been easy for Jesse to just send the Saint of Killers back to Hell, or any other place. But he lets his pride gets the best of him, puts him in the armoured car (Sokosha means armoured car in Japanese apparently, so that explains the episode’s title) and drives it to a swamp. Sure, Jesse has taken the Saint’s weapons but this way of dealing with the Saint will have consequences.
But I’m not going to lie, seeing this confrontation against the Saint was pretty cool. I’m looking forward to the consequences this will have.
Angry Spaniard, adoptive Irishman. Writer, reader, tea drinker and video game player/designer.
