Whether you’re looking for a bank robbery, wannabe vampires, or the least heartwarming adoption in history, you’ll find it in “Les Enfants Du Sang”.
Preacher Feature is a weekly look into the AMC show Preacher based on the comic book of the same name by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon. In this column, Josh Versalle gives a breakdown of the events from the show, including how they relate to the comics, and speculates as to what’s going on and what might be coming up. That means we’re headed into SPOILER territory, pardner, so if you haven’t got the grit for it, turn back now.
Need to catch up on last week’s action? Look no further.
“My story is just beginning.”
Poor Eugene. He finally makes it back from Hell to his hometown of Annville, only to find out that everyone he’s ever known or loved was killed in a fiery methane explosion while he was gone. But, surely this is rock-bottom, right? Surely there’s nothing left but smiles and sunshine for the Job-like young man with the unbreakable spirit and the face like an anus, right? Wrong. In Preacher, there are no rock-bottoms and Eugene finds himself in an orphanage and although he seems to be immediately adopted, the would-be parent is none other than the Saint of Killers, whose days as a caring parent are some 100+ years in the past.
“Clock’s ticking. Let’s go steal some shit.”
In order to save Miss Marie, Jody and TC agree to work with Jesse and Tulip. The plan is to rob the bank where Sabina keeps her souls, thus hurting their rivals the Boyds at the same time. To do so, director Laura Belsey (The Flash, Arrow), takes us into full-heist movie mode: quick cuts of security cameras, Tulip in a blond wig, fingerprint, er…saliva verification, the works.
Since they need Sabina’s saliva to open her deposit box, Jesse tries to get her to spit in his face. When this scheme fails, he goes for an alternate line of action (though it seems like it was his plan A the whole time): getting his ex to kiss him instead.
Everyone’s got a part to play in the plan. For TC, it’s using his peculiar interests to cause a distraction, i.e.: banging a goat in a local petting zoo to draw the police away from the bank. Jody heads to the Boyds’ motel HQ and kills the lot of them. Well, almost the lot. We find out later that he has kidnapped Sabina, in order to feed her soul to Miss Marie.
“We are plotting a coup.”
Pip Torrens (Herr Starr) gives my favorite performance of the episode, being reduced from fearless leader of his conspiracy-within-the-conspiracy to simpering toady in the face of the Grail’s true leader, the All-Father. The elevator ride with Hoover (Malcolm Barrett) is hilarious, but it’s the expressions on Torrens’ face as he tries to lie to the murderous All-Father and hide his disgust at the man and his choice of meal (an entire barbecued horse, his portion of which the All-Father then pukes into a waiting receptable) that push the performance from memorable to classic. Starr learns the All-Father’s plan for Armageddon is to destroy Earth in nuclear fire. He also learns, to his great dismay, that the All-Father knows about Jesse.
“Who’s prepared to lie back and take flight?”
Meanwhile, Cassidy is learning more of what being a vampire can mean. He meets Eccarius (Adam Croasdell), the leader of Les Enfants Du Sang. At first he looks to Cassidy like a wanker (and let’s face it, he is), but the harp-playing dandy knows a few things Cassidy hasn’t learned in his 100 years of being undead, like how to fly, enthrall humans, and transform oneself into a beast (okay, it’s just a house cat, but that’s more than Cass can do). After demonstrating his abilities to Cass, Eccarius reveals how he achieves them: drinking the blood of his followers and turning them into vampires. Cassidy, still troubled by how things went down with his son Denis (in “The End of the Road”, last season), tries to kick Eccarius’s ass, but he’s no match for the foppish, but lighting-quick vampire. Eccarius says the difference between Denis and his group is that each member of Les Enfants Du Sang is a good person.
After rejecting Eccarius’s attempt to befriend him, Cass falls back into old habits, namely smoking crack in a graffiti-covered basement. Tulip calls him, lonely and worried about the way she left things with him at the end of “The Tombs”. Tulip feels she and Jesse abandoned Cassidy, but reassures him that they three will be reunited soon. Cass tells her that he’s gone through a lot of friends in his abnormally-long lifetime and she and Jesse are no different. He hang up and heads back to the basement headquarters of Les Enfants Du Sang.
Tulip doesn’t get much time to wallow, though, as she is quickly knocked out by Jody. TC also knocks out Jesse and we see that Marie has Sabina hooked up to the soul extractor. Marie plans to drain the soul from Sabina, then have her fight in the Tombs. Jesse wakes up in time to kill Sabina, sparing her from the torturous fate of becoming a soulless drone. He tells Marie he will pay his debt to her. The only way he knows to do that is to contact the Grail.
From Panels to Screen:
All-father eating a horse was a reference to the Preacher one-shot comic Tall in the Saddle, a western-themed flashback to Jesse and Tulip pre-Genesis, where they take down a bunch of horse thieves whose plan is to sell the horses to a Frenchman named Napoleon Vichy, who in turn plans to cook up the horseflesh.
Herr Starr is trying out one of many hats to cover up his head’s phallic appearance (to quote the All-Father “Your head looks like a penis, Starr.”), inspired no doubt by these wonderful panels of Steve Dillon’s from the comic book:
