After starting off the season with a strong pair of episodes Preacher crashes back to Earth. Well, they can’t all be winners. Believing their troubles to be over, but still in need of tracking down God, Jesse Custer (Dominic Cooper), Tulip (Ruth Negga), and Cassidy (Joseph Gilgun) arrive in New Orleans. While Jesse fails to find much of use, Tulip’s past comes back to haunt her as she’s taken by Viktor‘s (Paul Ben-Victor) men. The pair of episodes offers quite a bit of wandering and extended sequences of not much actually happening up until the end of “Viktor” where a distracted Jesse goes looking for his missing girl leading to an all-too-obvious American Pscyho rip-off action sequence and a revelation of just who Viktor is to Tulip.
Although they eventually do push forward the plot incrementally, there’s several issues here including the fact that despite using Genesis several times the Saint of Killers (Graham McTavish) is nowhere to be found (the cowboy’s pace certainly has slowed down from earlier in the season). The trouble with the slow-build around Tulip is the show never convinces us she’s ever in any real danger. Yes, she’s certainly scared to be confronted by Viktor, but Preacher never sells us on even the smallest possibility she could actually die. Other than her relationship with Viktor, we do learn two things here in the identity (and fate) of the actor portraying God in last season’s finale and the fact that a little noise can drastically lessen Genesis effect. The other piece of the story involves Eugene (Ian Colletti) trying to find his place in a rather bland version of Hell where he befriends and then joins in the gang beating of Hitler (Noah Taylor) in groan-worthy sophomoric sequences that never deliver.