'Preacher' Recap: 'Puzzle Piece'

Written by John Edward Betancourt

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​It’s truly something special when a television show finds a way to surprise its audience in new and exciting ways and that is something that AMC’s Preacher is becoming incredibly good at. After all, season two as a whole has been nothing short of an outright reinvention of the show, which is a pleasant surprise on its own, but last night…well last night the series brought together and resolved several storylines in unexpected fashion, making ‘Puzzle Piece’ an absolutely wonderful episode that also managed to keep me on the edge of my seat.
 
It accomplished that, by giving us one tense tale wherein the grand clash between the Grail Corporation and the Custer Gang finally came to fruition and while Jesse and Cassidy and oddly enough Denis (more on that in a moment) were able to handle the first wave of the Grail’s elite fighting force, the possibility of another assault was more than Jesse could bear. The assault genuinely rattled him and despite putting the Police under the power of The Word to protect everyone in his care, nothing gave him peace as he waited with baited and shaky breath for a second showdown that oddly enough…never arrived and what made this part of the story so incredibly tense was that you truly felt a sense of danger for the Gang and Jesse’s paranoia put an uncomfortable cloud over just about everything.
 
But while it was neat to share in Jesse’s emotions, it was far more awesome to see those lingering storylines find their resolution, specifically the pair of problems that Tulip and Cassidy have been dealing with. Because in this tale we learned that Cassidy made the hard call and in order to win over the love of his son, he converted his boy to vampirism, a decision that Denis relished in throughout the entire episode and used to his advantage to help in the fight, and Jesse and Tulip finally sat down to deal with the terror in her heart and it would seem the only way to cure the enigmatic Tulip of any kind of fear of lack of confidence is to get her into a good old-fashioned fight and while the results of that solution were a tad mixed, it was supremely satisfying to see Tulip snap out of her funk and get back into the game again.
 
However, it’s the big surprise that I made mention of that made this episode so worthwhile and wouldn’t you know it, the stunner of the evening came by way of Herr Starr and the Grail Corporation. Because following the failure of their attempt to bring Jesse down, plans were put in place by Lara to do away with Jesse in far more efficient fashion by way of a tactical missile strike and while she prepares for the aerial attack, Starr begins to research his nemesis and taking a closer look at the power of The Word and hearing Jesse express concern that a lack of God’s presence could mean chaos for our world at some point or another, allows for Starr to come to the realization that he and Custer share a strange philosophical kinship and mere moments before the missile hits, Starr orders a halt to the attack so that he can meet Jesse face to face…
 
If anything, I love the fact that this transitional episode ended up having far more gravity and weight than I expected it to at first glance. Because the scenes where Cassidy and Tulip dealt with their problems were incredibly intimate and touching in their own special way and really…the whole matter with Herr Starr now seeing Jesse as an equal and as he put it ‘the missing puzzle piece’ to the Grail’s machinations is nothing short of brilliant. It puts forth an uneasy but necessary alliance between the two men and it puts the story right back onto the path to finding God and with the Grail’s resources at Jesse’s disposal now to conduct the search…it should only be a matter of time before they find the Creator, the only question remaining at this point, is when they find Him…what happens then? Either way, we are getting that much closer to finding out. Until next time. 

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