A review of tonight’s Preacher coming up just as soon as we agree to upgrade your ticket to business class…
Figures: one week after I point out how season two is focusing a bit more on episodic storytelling, we get an hour like “Viktor” that’s almost entirely serialized as it moves various arcs from Point C to Point D. Now, it’s a fun episode, including one of the show’s best-filmed fight scenes, a weirdly moving inside joke, and the unexpected Arseface/Hitler friendship, but it exists mostly to move various pieces around on the board.
Let’s start on the Earth-bound side of things, where the biggest developments are Jesse and Cassidy tracking down the actor who impersonated God when Jesse called him on the angel phone in the season one finale, and the revelation that Tulip isn’t a runaway employee of Viktor’s, but a runaway wife. Jesse and Cassidy’s hunt is amusing, between hard-boiled ’40s pastiche showbiz agent Teddy Gunt, and the revelation that the actor is hard-working character actor Mark Harelik(*) playing a long white bearded version of himself — and one who’s genuinely overwhelmed by the opportunity to play the role of a lifetime — but for this week, at least, it’s mainly a stall to keep Jesse from going to rescue Tulip until we’ve seen her spend some time getting the cold shoulder from Viktor’s henchmen and his daughter. That’s interesting because up until now, Tulip has been presented as someone most people love, yet the silent treatment she gets in Viktor’s house feels even more savage than when past associates try to kill her. Tulip’s betrayal of what turns out to be her husband had to be really, really bad to get her spit on by a little girl who’s rooting for her to die, but the various hitmen all seem embarrassed just to be around her. The assumption going in is that Viktor is a very bad guy — and he is, what with him having a torture suite connected to his home office — yet the longer we linger there, the more our sympathies seem to pivot away from Tulip, whom we know and like a lot. It’s interesting.
(*) Harelik’s been around a long time (I first noticed him as a gay man pretending to be Diane’s fiance in the Cheers finale), but he’s probably best known either as Milos from Seinfeld or the adulterous Dave Novotny from Election.
And when Jesse does find out what’s going on, we get a mix of the Word of God at full force until Viktor’s lead henchman Pat simply can’t hear it because he’s blasting “Uptown Girl” in his earbuds. This leads to some nifty camerawork from the team led by director Michael Slovis (formerly a brilliant director of photography on Breaking Bad, who helped craft many of that show’s iconic POV shots) as the brawl between Jesse and Pat plays out in what looks like a single take, with the camera whirling around the small room as the advantage and the weapons constantly shift. It arguably crosses the line into calling attention to itself in spots, but it also creates an immediacy (there was a Slovis-directed long oner when Jesse was rescuing “Florida” from the white-suited goons last week, too) and made the whole thing more memorable than if Slovis had shot it conventionally, and/or without Billy Joel singing an ode to Christie Brinkley in the background of it all.
We’ll have to see where all that’s going, though, and the same is true of the situation down in Hell. This is a weird but interesting diversion, and one that notably changes our sense of Hell from when we saw the Saint of Killers trapped in it last season. The idea of Hell as an overwhelmed bureaucracy that’s grown far beyond what its infrastructure was designed to support feels about right, and the prison cliches are all livened up by the way the population seems drawn from across human history, including a caveman fascinated by an image of fire on a TV screen, an ’80s movie villain type in Tyler the bully, and of course Hitler himself. I had forgotten that Noah Taylor played Hitler once before in 2002’s Max, which also dealt with the future Fuhrer’s time as an aspiring artist. So far, this seems to be a humbled Hitler, perhaps stinging from his utter failure to take over the world and prove the dominance of the Aryan race, and it suits the prison archetype of it all to have at least one inmate starting to reform from the experience. The question is whether Eugene will be the inverse of that: the guy who gets locked up despite not really being a danger to others, and who becomes too hardened just to survive being inside. The superintendent warns our favorite sphincter mouth that his many good qualities won’t be tolerated down there, and when he sees the security cameras watching him, he takes the chance to act tough by beating on Hitler even more than the others.
Is Hitler’s taming sincere, or is he working a master plan that involves Eugene being accepted by his fellow damned inmates? What exactly did Tulip do to Viktor, and what does he expect in return, and how will Jesse respond to learning that she got married to someone else during one of their many fights? “Viktor” leaves a lot to be answered down the road, but the good news is that Preacher season two just keeps moving forward.
Some other thoughts:
* Besides Mark Harelik as himself, some notable guests this week: Malcolm in the Middle star Frankie Muniz, also as himself for the Katrina charity ad; Paul Ben-Victor (Vondas from The Wire, among many other things) as Viktor; Justin Prentice (Bryce the evil jock from 13 Reasons Why) as Tyler; Sean Boyd as Pet; and James Hiroyuki Liao as Teddy Gunt.
* The Saint finally makes his way to New Orleans, arriving over the bike lanes on the Crescent City Connection. Seeing him after so much time spent in other parts of Hell the past few weeks has me wondering what it would have been like to spend time in a holding room with him.
* Nice touch to have some soundalike Game of Thrones music on the score for a moment while Cassidy is trying to hustle Teddy into giving them Mark Harelik’s info.
What did everybody else think?
Alan Sepinwall may be reached at sepinwall@uproxx.com