The second season of “Preacher” opened with a bang, a bang, and a bang. The Saint of Killers (Graham McTavish) blasted off heads and limbs, while Jesse Custer (Dominic Cooper), his badass ex-girlfriend Tulip (Ruth Negga), and the Irish vampire, Cassidy (Joseph Gilgun), embark on a road trip to find God. Last night AMC quickly aired the second episode, which is easily one of the best in the series. The trio head to Vegas to ask Fiore (Tom Brooke) to call off the hit on their heads in the name of the Saint of Killers.
In next week’s third episode, ‘Damsels’, Jesse, Tulip and Cassidy get a tip that God may be in New Orleans, where they look for God in a jazz club. There’s a clip from the episode that reminds me of Jean-Claude Van Damme’s trip to the kumite in Bloodsport. The trailer has more footage, showing that Arseface is imprisoned in Hell, which is an entirely new spin on the series.
Showrunner Sam Catlin talked a bit about the trip to New Orleans and shifting away from the comics book’s arc in an interview with THR.
“Obviously, or maybe not so obviously to some of the comic book fans, there’s just no way we were going to be able to create a narrative where we were in the south of France in one episode and San Francisco in the next. We had to dig into each one of these places along the way that they stop in and still give the show that epic quality and that sense of even though they may be in New Orleans for an extended stretch, it still has that sense of movement and searching and going into unfamiliar worlds. We really, really stressed in season one that we wanted to ground the show in a familiar and almost archetypal small-town America setting with familiar characters that people could identify with and recognize. Now, with the benefit of being in a place like New Orleans, and the benefit of Jesse actually looking for somebody called God, it’s created so many opportunities for us to just make the world that much more Preacher and that much more perverse and absurd and foreign.”
