‘Preacher’ Pilot Recap And Review [SPOILERS]: A Smashingly Explosive Start

The pilot episode for AMC’s “Preacher” just came out and people are beyond impressed. Collider calls it a “Bloody Excellent Start” and they have a bloody excellent point. From the first few seconds of the comic book TV adaption, viewers get a pretty good idea of what they can expect from this show going forward. A mysterious entity comes down from space, enters the body of a preacher in Africa, gives a foreboding command and explodes into a thousand bloody pieces. Suffice it to say, AMC grabbed audiences’ attention by the eyeballs from the get-go.

From this one episode alone, viewers get the sense that they already know which characters are worth paying attention. Aside from the protagonist Jesse Custer, there’s also Tulip O’Hare who appears to be an old friend of the preacher and the Irish vampire Cassidy.

Tulip and Cassidy got the bigger fight scenes in the pilot though. Tulip was introduced while fighting two men and blowing up a helicopter. Cassidy was introduced via bloodbath in a plane full of cultists while in midair.

At the start, the episode plays around a little, giving just taste as to what kind of a man Jesse was, particularly with the scene where a young boy asks the preacher to hurt his father who was abusing his mother. Although Jesse tells the boy that he’ll find another way, some part of his sinister nature can be seen simmering under the surface. By the time audiences get to the bar scene though, the show stops making any pretense as to who Jesse Custer really is.  

Perhaps the most striking part about the pilot episode for “Preacher” is how clear the intentions were with every scene, every line of dialog and even every confrontation. The actions scenes are not just loud and fast, but measured and deliberate. Comicbook.com did a satisfactory job in outlining some of the major scenes in the episode.

As the episode got near the end, viewers also start to understand what the theme of the show will be going forward, when the entity entered Jesse and he was unharmed. Even though “Preacher” made some departures from its source material, it is not inferior in any way to the comic books.

Episode 2 of “Preacher” will air on May 29 on AMC.