Preacher: "Puzzle Piece"

That could have gone worse. Well, not this date.

OK, I think it's official. I am unhappy with what Preacher Season 2 is doing with at least two of the three major characters. 

Nine episodes in to a 13 episode season and Tulip is still mopey and freaked out and now she gets to be useless too, shooting the cleaner out of misplaced trauma panic.

Nine episodes in, and Jesse is a monomaniac, obsessing over his incredibly slow and incredibly ineffective search for God to the point where he doesn't see anything going on around him - either Tulip's issues or Cassidy's.It

Cassidy is sympatheti to a fault. The whole point of Cassidy in the comics is that he fools Jesse into thinking he's a nice, if troubled and self-hating, guy when he's really a bastard who's had centuries to practice getting away with it. This Cassidy seems here to fool the audience? Or just be that nice and troubled guy?

The best thing about this episode is the Grail trio, and the absolute best thing about this episode is the way it recontextualizes one of the most 90's, most Ennisy, least woke events from the original Preacher, simply by changing how Starr reacts to it. It was a tricky thing to pull off, and they managed it well.

But we spent the first season with the characters where we needed them and the plot way off in proof-of-concept prequel mode, and now, with the second season, we get the plot stuff we wanted, but with characters that are somehow more boring and more shallow by virtue of them having been given a bit of depth. Preacher, ultimately, should be fun. Embarrassingly fun, yes. Troublingly fun sometimes. But fun. This Preacher isn't fun.