‘I’ll see you Sunday’
Finally, we’ve come to the end of the Saint’s journey. (Sorry, “Cowboy”.) He returns to Ratwater, only to find what seems like the whole town waiting for him in the saloon. The man there (the preacher) tells him that Ratwater only demands “love of the lord Jesus Christ” from its faithful residents – otherwise, they can just keep on sinning. (This seems like a very Catholic attitude to me.) Certainly, the man needs some form of religious in his life: he killed 77 people at Gettysburg. He rejects this offer, and kills everyone in the town while a man sings.
This is probably the most overtly Tarantino the show will get, and it’s good. All in all, it’s pretty well done, captured in a long shot that forces focus on the singer without calling too much attention to itself. When the song ends, the man shoots the piano player and slices off the singer’s head. Then, a storm. Later in the episode, we run through the entire flashback story again, which … seems unnecessary to get across the point that he’s repeating those few days in a loop.
“Hell” is maybe an even better location font gag than “Sundowner Motel”, and it helps explain why we’ve been paying so much attention to this guy besides an origin story that could have been told in three lines of dialogue. See, the angels have gone to hell via a travel agency (where a woman named Lucinda, throwing off serious Margo Martindale vibes, propositions Fiore – not to save Eugene, but to ask the Saint to kill Jesse in exchange for freeing him from hell. Why this man? Unless we’re getting even more backstory next week, there’s some stuff we’re missing.)
‘I’m going to kill a man in Albuquerque’
Back in Annville, Tulip and Emily take their feud into solidly passive-aggressive territory. When Emily goes to Tulip for help with Jesse’s predicament, Tulip claims to have finally washed her hands of her ex-boyfriend, perhaps because of how she was forced to treat Cassidy – and she’s going to Albuquerque, presumably to kill Carlos. Embarrassed, Emily lies and says she’s dating Miles, though it’s pretty unconvincing. (“So yeah. He’s cool.”)
Poor Miles, sort of. Emily calls him while he’s watching the Meat Men wrestle for Odin’s amusement and asks for help. She sounds scared, blandly acquiescing to his demand that he sleep over – then, in his moment of gross nice-guy triumph, she locks him in the room with Cassidy to become food. Shot from below, Emily is shaking, but she also finally has the power. Not only is this basically the first interesting thing she has ever done on the show (although why she does it I’m not really sure, other than her dislike of Miles), Preacher doesn’t even try to turn it into some kind of fake out. Instead, everything happens linearly and the episode blows through the “twist”, which allows the story to induce dread rather than fake, boring suspense.
The whole thing is shot like a horror movie, with Emily as the victim/final girl (sort of), and Cassidy as the monster. Treating Cassidy as an actual monster for the last two episodes has paid surprising dividends – until now, it’s been easy to forget that he’s a vampire. Or at least, it’s been easy to treat him like a happy-go-lucky “fun” sort of vampire, without paying attention to his very real consumptive habits that have driven centuries of myth. It’ll be hard to forget now. It doesn’t hurt that the slowly healing silly putty Cassidy resembles something out of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which I mean as a complete compliment.
‘It’s not safe for you here’
Note that Jesse has barely shown up at all in this recap, or really in the episode. This is a good thing! He’s ostensibly a fugitive, rolling out of Sheriff Root’s car after using a pen to escape, but he’s also now solidly the most boring character on the show. He doesn’t have much to do other than hide from the law (which he isn’t really doing, anyway), so after a brief stop under a bridge he goes to casually say hi to Tulip.
Instead, he finds Cassidy, who crawls around like an animal (or one of the vampires on the dearly departed, poorly treated Penny Dreadful). After a brief heart to heart, Cassidy and Jesse re-cement their friendship, which is both very sweet and also probably means Cassidy’s feelings for Tulip are getting put on the back burner. Besides, they’ve got projects to work on: it turns out Jesse has taken the direct line to heaven, and enlists Cassidy’s digging up the dead angels so they can use one of their hands. (At least they get to kill two birds with one stone by burying Miles in the same hole.)
Those feelings do, however, getting dragged up a bit when Jesse calls Tulip. Ruth Negga does great work in a long shot of her face, listening to Jesse talk about their relationship. It’s one of the most intimate moments of the show, and the two characters aren’t even in the same room. Except that Tulip isn’t actually listening to the message. In another effective fake-out, she’s staring at a scared, tied-up Carlos from across a room in Albuquerque.
But the most intense moment of Finish the Song involves exactly none of the three main characters, or even the Saint. Instead, it’s a Sheriff Root moment. Still pining for his son, Root goes into the bathroom of the motel room and finds the seraph, limbs cut off, soaking in her own blood in the bathtub. She begs him, repeatedly, to kill her, and rather than shooting her or something, he does it with his bare hands, eyes bulging with rage and terror as she appears again behind him. Except that she leaves, allowing Sheriff Root to believe he murdered an innocent person. That is some hardcore shit.
Notes from the nave
- “What about my comics?” The brief tenderness between the angels when they leave their trunk behind and the fear that heaven would eternally separate them are our first indications that DeBlanc and Fiore might be an item, though it’s barely been hinted at over the course of this entire season.
- They get picked up to go to hell at a location that I am relatively certain is the same place where Jesse dodges the cleaner toward the end of Breaking Bad. Is that why everyone is going to Albuquerque?
- Miles’ idea of a good date night is buying something called Panhandle pinot grigio.
- Donnie’s ears have healed, apparently.
Most on-the-nose movie choice
- In the scene before she calls Miles, Emily is literally watching Psycho. Come on, guys.
Worst job in Texas
- Sheriff Root killing someone he sees as an innocent random woman who has been tortured and had her limbs amputated by some creepy dudes with accidents. It’s hard to be the law.
Cassidy kill count
- Thirteen – it would hard to add up all of the animals he’s apparently been eating, so we’ll just have to make do with adding Miles to the pile. RIP, buddy.
