"The Tom / Brady" – Preacher S03E08 Review

Well, this week with "The Tom / Brady", things happen. Subplots start to intertwine and it looks like things are coming to a finale in two episodes. What that finale is, who knows? But it's Preacher, so being unpredictable is part of its charm.

Let's recap. We start with Marie (Betty Buckley) having a dream about all of the people she's killed or had killed coming back to kill her. This means that she's worried that she's finally going to die, so she calls up Satan (a still hilariously overacting Jason Douglas) and offers to make a new deal... with Satan getting Jesse.

Jesse (Dominic Cooper) shoots Allfather (Jonathan Coyne) but makes the mistake of shooting him in his well-insulated stomach. Allfather shrugs that off, has Jesse captured, and begins a process of trying to transfer Genesis into Humperdoo (Tyson Ritter). Humperdoo blows up, but Allfather has had clones of Humperdoo made. Dr. Slotnick (Karen Strassman) is trying to find the right genetic combination to simulate Jesse's, so that Humperdoo will survive. That involves a lot of Humperdoo clones blowing up, to the strains of "Blue Danube". Slotnick eventually gets it right by mixing the DNA of Thomas Jefferson with Wayne Brady (hence the title). The process works on a Humperdoo clone, Slotnick shoots the clone, and Allfather calls for the real Humperdoo.

Meanwhile, a tied-up Jesse tries to persuade Starr to kill Allfather. Starr (Pip Torrens) dithers a lot and then Allfather sends him to get beignets.

In the third subplot of the week, Tulip (Ruth Negga), Lara (Julie Ann Emery), and Jody (Jeremy Childs) go to Osaka to steal the souls for Marie. After a weird HR sexual-harassment workshop that provides the cover story for our trio to get into the company, Tulip and Lara break into the vault and steal the souls while Jody takes out the guards. But... Satan has sent the Angel of Death, Sidney, to bring Tulip to him. Tulip directs her to Lara, and Lara has the case with the souls.

And in the fourth subplot, FJ (Malcolm Barrett) gets captured by the Children of Blood. Eccarius (Adam Croasdell) has Cassidy (Joseph Gilgun) turn FJ into a vampire and then prepares to kill FJ. Cassidy realizes Eccarius is killing the vampires he claims to be sending out into the world, confronts him, and gets knocked out. FJ escapes, and that's where we leave that.

At the end, the Saint is waiting at the Bus Stop to take Eugene and Hitler back to Hell. Sidney joins them with Lara, and Hitler borrows Lara's phone to call his strip-mall lackey Rick to let him know he's been captured.

So like I said, everything is interconnected... eventually. Lara is with the Saint and going to Hell. Tulip and Jody want Lara because she has the stolen souls Marie needs. The Grail has Jesse and Genesis, and as Starr puts it, Allfather is going to "weaponized idiocy" once he puts Genesis into Humperdoo. However, Starr's two operatives are a vampire and Satan's prisoner.

Other than that FJ is now a vampire, how this all hooks up with Cassidy and Eccarius still isn't clear. FJ could lead the Grail to Kevin's house where the Children are meeting. But it's unlikely the Grail is going to look fondly on a now-vampiric FJ anyway.

Basically, the whole thing doesn't make a lot of sense. So Sidney doesn't even have a photo of Tulip, the woman she was sent to capture? Hitler apparently has an army of strip mall followers waiting to rescue him? Lara acts like a jerk to Tulip just because, when it tends to endanger the mission? And Allfather has Jesse, so why is he trying to duplicate his DNA instead of just taking it?

The show goes for laughs this week and gets them. Allfather finally comes across as menacing, even while he's inducing vomiting while Jesse and Starr try to conspire against him. But it's hard to take any of it seriously, mostly because the creative team doesn't. Remember when Jesse and Tulip had a romantic relationship, and people like Starr were actually threatening?

Well, forget that. Anything with Cassidy still tends to have some emotional weight, because he's being betrayed by someone he loves yet again. And Joseph Gilgun is a great performer. But as we get closer to the season finale, the plot is overwhelming the characterization. For instance, Eugene and Hitler have been backburnered so long that it's hard to care about them. And after they established a friendship last season, this year has been nothing but keeping them mostly off-screen and using them for comedy gags (the Saint throwing Eugene's caretaker through a wall; Hitler as a sandwich shop worker).

So the funny is funny, sure. But it's all very... non-threatening and thus non-appealing. The story is interesting, but the characters not so much. There are also some unanswered questions that are kind of basic to the story. Like... Genesis is still in Jesse? So losing his soul just means that he can't access it. But shouldn't it either be gone, or Jesse should blow up because whatever is in his soul that drew Genesis to him is gone? What is the mechanism between Jesse's soul and Genesis, that allows him to lose the small percentage of his soul but safely keep Genesis?

It'd be nice if they explain some of it. Or at least don't call attention to it like they did this week. I could mostly forget the whole "Jesse = part of his soul missing = can't use Genesis" thing, or least put it on the backburner. Yes, it's weird, but it's a plot contrivance to keep Jesse in Angelville. But now the creative team is questioning the whole thing onscreen, which makes me question it.

Speaking of Angelville, that part of the series continues to be pretty weak. Satan showing up when Marie calls him gives her a little gravitas, although you wonder what he got out of his original deal with her other than her soul when she dies. That was it? But she still comes across more as a weak old woman afraid of death, than some monstrous female figure.

But that's all just my opinion, I could be wrong. What do you think?