Preacher – The Coffin

By: Kelly Kearney

In this episode Cassidy lands a date on Tinder for vamps, Jesse gets a visit from a childhood hero and Tulip takes on Gran’ma with a surprising twist nobody saw coming. It’s vampire romances, John Wayne coffin dreams and creative weaponry on this week’s “Preacher.”

Tulip, you up for a fist fight?

Tulip (Ruth Negga) is done with Angelville and Jesse’s (Dominic Cooper) monstrous relatives. According to Madame Boyd (Prema Cruz), the only way off this plantation is killing Marie L’Angelle (Betty Buckley). The problem is Gran’ma is off limits according to Jesse and not just because she’s family either. Before Jesse can explain why his debt cannot be broken, Jody (Jeremy Childs) and T.C. (Colin Cunningham) bust through his bedroom door when they discover Cassidy (Joseph Gilgun) escaped the tombs. Jesse turns to Tulip and asks, “You ready for a fist fight,” but fists are not the only thing flying when these four go at it. Everything is a weapon if you’re creative enough and Tulip is the master of reinventing the beat down. While Jesse is getting stomped by the freakishly strong Jody, Tulip takes her brawl with T.C. to the bathroom where the two engage in “found object weaponry.” Armed with an eyelash curler and a toothbrush, Tulip manages to outsmart T.C. and his flaming roll of toilet paper long enough for her to knock him out, take his gun and stop Jody from carrying an unconscious Jesse out to the swamps. Unfortunately, Gran’ma gets involved when she whips out Jesse’s blood debt and uses her voodoo powers to strangle the life out of her grandson. As Jesse chokes and gasps for air, Gran’ma forces Tulip’s hand, leaving her with no other option but to drop the gun. Marie orders T.C. and Jody to lock Tulip up after they teach Jesse a lesson by tossing him in a coffin and dunking it into the swamp.

Allfather

As Jesse drowns in family angst, The Grail has a dilemma of their own; how to turn that simpleton Humperdo (Tyson Ritter) into a believable messiah. Imagine “My Fair Lady” with Herr Starr (Pip Torrens) as Henry Higgins and Humperdo as the drooling and sexually excitable Eliza Doolittle, who just happens to have a holy bloodline and few months before he ascends the throne. Even after hiring actors to teach Humperdo how to behave in a holy manner, the new Messiah isn’t really grasping the finer details of the job. When faced with kissing the ring of a monarch, Humperdo eats the gem and slobbers all over the actress’s hand. Starr and The Grail have their work cut out for them and it doesn’t help that their boss, the All Father (Jonny Coyne), thinks the son of God is a genius. So much so that he threatens to skin Herr Starr alive if he doesn’t get Humperdo ready for the Messiah’s coming out party. With God absent from heaven, the humans are getting rowdy and they need their savior, slovenly fool and all. Starr, who was always team Custer for the throne, grits his teeth and agrees to whip the holy Humperdo into shape. All Father demands to see what skills Heaven’s Prince has learned and the only thing Starr can pull together is a spastic dance to the tune, “The Old Soft Shoe.” The performance is just awful enough to turn the equally horrible All Father into a Humperdo fanboy and he orders Starr to push the Messiah’s coronation up a few weeks.

Back in Angelville, Tulip is held prisoner while Marie decides her punishment. Gran’ma kind of likes Tulip’s sass, if it wasn’t for the fact she disrespected the woman who saved her life. “So much life. So much spark but not for long,” she says.  It seems that when Marie brought Tulip back from the dead, her life became indebted to gran’ma. Every breath she takes and every tear she sheds now belong to Marie, but Tulip could care less and mouths off about how they treated Cassidy. Marie laughs off her outrage and tells Tulip that the vampire was just food for the tombs and nothing more. If Tulip wasn’t chained up and under Jody’s watch, she would’ve ended granny right then and there, but no matter how many times she tries to weasel her way out of Jody’s grasp she’s stuck and Marie remains in control.

Dating in the modern world

When last we saw Cassidy, he was boarding a bus for New Orleans after escaping the L’Angelle’s tombs. After being friend zoned by Tulip, Cassidy is lonely and starts looking for love on dating apps for Vampires. It’s not long before someone swipes right on his profile and Cassidy treks to a bar to meet his date, Lisa (Lucy Faust). Things start off well but turn violent when the two head to the bathroom for a hot and heavy makeout session. Cassidy assumed his date was a 200 year old vampire, but when he finds out she’s a fake fang banger he becomes outraged and almost tears her throat out. It’s all fun and games until your duped by a wannabe vamp and Cassidy takes his disappointment out on a bottle of booze at the bar. Meanwhile, Mistress of disguises, Featherstone (Julie Ann Emery) is also at the bar and plotting to use Cass to lure Jesse back to The Grail.

Speaking of Jesse, he’s sinking deeper into the swamp and even though Jody provided him with an oxygen supply, the Preacher is starting to lose consciousness. Dreaming of his childhood hero John Wayne (a/k/a The Duke), Jesse envisions a Wild West shoot out with himself as the town’s sheriff and The Duke as his side kick. The delusions pass the time until The Duke tells Jesse to snap out of it and get to Tulip who is having a tough time getting away from Jody. Luckily, Jesse must’ve watched a lot of “MacGyver” growing up because he manages to jam a lit cigarette into the oxygen tube placed in the coffin. The first try fizzles but the second attempt blasts the Preacher right out of the water, but also alerts his family that he’s free from his gravely time out in the swamp. When Jody hears the BOOM, Tulip swipes a pen from the man and picks the lock on her handcuffs. During all this commotion, T.C. is downstairs trying to diffuse gran’ma’s anger into a less lethal outcome. Out of all the inbred monsters in Jesse’s family, T.C. might be the only one with a heart and it’s clear when he tries distracting Madame L’Angelle from Tulip by attempting to seduce her. The old woman realizes what he’s up to when her would-be lover compliments her on her sexy good looks. Flying into a rage, Marie rips off her wig and throws T.C. to the ground, which seems out of character for a wheelchair bound elderly woman that appears to be on her last leg. Leaning over the terrified T.C., Marie growls out an order to collect Tulip, “I’m gonna eat her soul!” Only when T.C. tries to get Tulip, she’s ready and waiting with a knock out punch and a plan to finish things, once and for all, with Marie.

Lives intertwined

When Tulip finds Madame L’Angelle, her plan is to kill the woman and erase Jesse’s debt so they can leave Angelville and go find Cassidy. It’s a solid plan, but Marie isn’t the invalid she’s pretended to be. The instant Tulip approaches the woman, Marie throws a table across the room and the fight is on! Tulip and Marie get into a knock down drag out fight that finds both women rolling around on the floor and fighting over a knife. The younger woman manages to get the upper-hand and strangles Marie to death. Enter Jesse, who barely gets a chance to grasp what he’s seeing when Tulip falls to the ground alongside Marie. Jesse goes into hero mode as T.C. and Jody inform him that Tulip’s life is intertwined with Marie’s ever since she brought her back from the dead. To save Tulip he has to save Marie and like a scene from “Pulp Fiction,” Jesse drives a shot of Adrenalin directly into Marie’s heart. Thank goodness for T.C. and his love for pharmaceuticals because the shot works and both women wake up gasping for air. The only problem is the fight took a lot out of Marie and if she dies Tulip goes with her, something Jesse says Madame Boyd knew all along. The only way to keep that evil old woman going is to feed her and what does evil eat? SOULS! When Jesse and Tulip learn that Marie needs a soul, they attack Jody and T.C. hoping to steal one of theirs and revive the matriarch to her old witchy self.

Back in New Orleans, Lara’s plan works and she manages to kidnap an extremely inebriated Cassidy and take him to Herr Starr. Propped up in the Grail’s offices, they force the Irish vampire into making a ransom video for Jesse. The idea is that the Grail will return Jesse’s soul and his best friend unharmed if the Preacher agrees to be the new Messiah. Apparently, there’s not enough etiquette classes in the world to turn Humperdo into a respectable savior and Starr needs Jesse or else Allfather will kill them all. It’s a solid plan, but Cassidy can’t stay coherent enough to read the ransom note or notice when the room gets overtaken by dark cloaked assailants who knockout Starr and Featherstone and kidnap him for the second time that day. When Cass eventually comes to he finds his date from earlier welcoming him to her goth coven for cosplaying vampire wannabes! While it’s lonely being the only vampire you know, this coven of dress up Lestats isn’t exactly what Cassidy had in mind when he went looking to make new friends.

The episode ends with Tulip and Jesse attempting to snatch Jody and T.C.’s soul as Cassidy tries to make sense of how he wound up captive by a group of vampire posers. What could these pretend vamps want with Cassidy and whose soul will be Marie L’Angelle’s dinner? Find out next week on an all new “Preacher.”