What Has Gone Before kept going

Hm? Wha-? Was I supposed to be awake there?

I'm a "book reader" when it comes to Game of Thrones, as opposed to a "show watcher", which means that I read the novels before the show began; since 1996, in fact. So the vast majority of what occurred in the seasons leading up to the current one (season 6) was replay for me: I knew what was going to happen but it was enjoyable simply to see it played out onscreen and by an excellent cast. Sometimes it really is cooler to see dragons than it is to imagine them. In a similar vein, I read the entire run of Preacher, month by month, in the 90s, so you'd think that I'd have a similar reaction to the TV show. I'd be able to anticipate what was coming and be excited, even if I knew how it would turn out.

But four episodes into the first season, I don't really have much to look forward to because we're really not getting anywhere. We've seen mildly weird stuff, but nothing anywhere near the extremes that the comic series approached. We've seen a little bit of character development, but nothing that makes any of the characters particularly gripping. Meanwhile, most of the cast is still kind of running in place and the story is stuck with them.

Hey. Hey! You're not paying attention.

On the positive side, we have Jesse deciding that he's going to use The Voice for something positive: getting people to serve God. Specifically, he's getting Odin Quincannon, local industrial and real estate overlord, to do so. But that means... what? The most we've seen of Quincannon so far is that he likes snuff films, is willing to pay people so that he can bulldoze their houses, and gives rather short and direct eulogies for people that die on his land. None of that adds up to anything particularly dramatic when he suddenly finds a reason to listen to the song of the Lord. It's not the equivalent of Cersei suddenly giving away all of her money to the poor of Kings' Landing and becoming a Silent Sister, simply because we don't know enough about Quincannon for it to have that kind of impact.

Similarly. the funeral of Lacey shows Tulip getting pissed about how casually both her demise and the consequent corpse are treated. Great. Tulip can get angry. But we've known that since episode one when she killed two guys in a speeding car over some meth. Tulip is supposed to be a major character in this story, but her participation in this episode was a couple minutes of indignant rage about everyone else's passivity. Shouldn't there have been something else there? The entire episode seemed to be character setup that was already established. It's like the background that editors tell you not to include when you're making a pitch for a fantasy novel: if the exciting stuff is in the past, then why do we care about your story now?

I know there was an interesting story in here somewhere.

Likewise, Cassidy continues the role of clown and occasional scheming addict, but that turned out to be OK. At least he's contributing something by running a con on the angels (Yes. They're not bounty hunters. We'll just call them angels since they've at least revealed that they come from the land in the clouds.), which are the two characters that actually most moved the overall (and current!) series plot forward this time, since they've come close to admitting just what it is they're pursuing and why it seems to require Jesse's vivisection. If there's any reason that a casual observer just coming across the show would stay and watch, it's the comedy of errors that is that trio while Cassidy attempts to score with their cash, and the fact that they retain some degree of mystery while they ineptly attempt to be mysterious.

Y'all are idiots for abandoning God. And sitting here this long.

But all of this surrounds the central plot of the episode, which is Jesse trying to be a man of God and fill the church by holding a raffle. Once again, we seem to have a writing team that wants to play in a Tales from the Crypt-esque world but doesn't quite know how to pull it off while still saying something "profound" about Jesse's motivations. The flashbacks to his childhood, his father's expectations, the incredibly restrained whipping, and Jesse's general disenchantment with religious life are obvious attempts to display the experiences (what has gone before...) that would make Jesse the kind of metronome of morality that he seems to be (hardcore crook to minister who still isn't above beating the shit out of people in bars and manipulating the emotions of his assistant for a big screen TV.) But none of that made for particularly gripping television, either, as it seemed to stumble away from the weird stuff while trying to say something larger. This is, in truth, the problem that I eventually had with the comic series, but Garth Ennis was a hell of a lot better at it. I stayed with that for 66 issues and over five years. I may not last three months with the show unless they can give me a better reason to pay attention than watching Cassidy toy with the minions of Heaven.