Good news for fans of AMC’s adaptation of the Garth Ennis and Steve Dillion Preacher graphic novel: We’re actually going to get out of Annville and onto the main plot of the series, because the show has just been renewed for an extended second season. Dominic Cooper plays Reverend Jesse Custer on the television show, which has chosen a different starting point for the character than the source material. In the Preacher comics, the fictional Texas town of Annville, its church, and the parishioners don’t make it too far into the series. The power of Genesis, the word of God on the show, embodying Jesse for the first time causes an explosion that ensures the character cannot stay in one place. Instead, series creators Seth Rogan, Evan Goldberg, and showrunner Sam Catlin decided that Annville would be the setting of a slow character burn, building to bigger and more audacious things. Catlin laid out the plan to io9 before the series even started: “We want to [escalate things] step by step,” Catlin said.
“Because I think if we just showed in the first episode, [angels] Deblanc and Fiore and Heaven and their floating space station with a hole in it… you sort of have to ratchet these things up. The idea of the show is like ‘Oh, you’re okay with vampires now? Oh what about this? So it’s sort of like putting a frog in bowl of boiling water or something. So by the time you look upon Satan, you’re like, ‘Yeah, that makes sense.’” Right now, Preacher is approaching the halfway point of the 10-episode first season, and although we’ve been introduced to a large cast of characters, fans who have read the comic know we’ve made very little forward progress on the journey of Jesse Custer. Ruth Negga’s onscreen portrayal of Tulip has become an almost entirely different character now that her backstory has undergone significant changes and she’s forced by the plot to stay in Custer’s orbit, even when the preacher stays in one place and constantly rebuffs her advances.
The third lead, Cassidy (Joe Gilgun) is a vampire who has made the jump from comics to the screen pretty much as-is, even if some specifics have been shuffled or altered to make his character fit in the fixed Annville setting. Jackie Earl Haley’s character, Odin Quincannon, has made the jump from the book’s fictional town of Salvation over to Annville. The show has added energy production to the Quincannon business and gave Odin an obsession with obtaining land, instead of his Nazi sociopath tendencies in the comic. Odin and the Saint of Killers (Graham McTavish of Outlander and The Hobbit trilogy) look like they’ve had the majority of their story moved to the first season, so those characters have had a lot to do in the four episodes that have aired. Up until yesterday’s announcement that AMC has renewed Preacher for a second season, there was the shadow of a fear that what made Preacher a fun and audacious comic with big ideas would never get to manifest on television because the show’s decision to stay in Annville led to some stagnant character moments early on in the run.
Now, we know that not only will Preacher get to extend beyond Annville in the second season, but the length of that season will be extended by three episodes. Instead of 10 installments, like season one, the next group will have 13 episodes. The Preacher, Vol 1 trade paperback starts with Jesse Custer on a road trip with Cassidy and Tulip and the trio learn about each other’s backstories and Jesse’s power while on the run from the Saint of Killers and searching for God himself. A lot of exposition early on in the story comes in the form of Jesse sharing memories with the entity that lives inside of him, while the show has made Genesis look like a ball of power that is hiding inside Jesse, not in symbiosis with him. That doesn’t mean the series hasn’t alluded to the comic’s road trip plot to come; it already cryptically introduced Herr Starr (we never saw his face), an ongoing villain through the rest of the story, and if the Saint of Killers flashback sequences continue at this pace, we could get him hot on Jesse’s trail by the end of the season.
Thankfully, we can now look forward to at least 18 more episodes for Preacher to find the pacing it needs to snag a bigger audience and live up to the potential of the source material.I typically upload pictures before I start writing, and usually need to put some filler text in to keep our blog software from going all… well, WordPress-y. Usually it’s just something like “placeholder” or “something.” For some reason, when I started to write this, I was humming “Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting.” Maybe I just needed a little disco in my day after the Imperial Battle Pack review. This has nothing at all to do with the review for this set… it’s just hard to come up with intros after a couple hundred reviews. Of all the battle packs to come out this year, I was most excited to review 75133 Rebel Alliance Battle Pack. My love of Rodians (and Ewoks, but that’s unrelated) is well documented. I mean, as much as I hate on the PT, I own multiples of all of the Rodians from those movies.
I also like the irregular nature of Rebel forces, and that means it makes a lot more sense to have different looking troops and uniforms. The big draw, outside the jetpacks (which in gray are just nicer overall that the Imperial White ones), is that we get two different aliens in this set, the Rodian as well as a Duros trooper (Cad Bane was the only Duros figure we’d gotten previously, I believe), to go along with our two generic trooper heads. The speeder bike is an evolution of the Endor bike, though much like the turret in the Galactic Empire Battle Pack, I do not recall this being in the game itself that these are based on. There are bikes, but they’re the normal type we saw in Jedi. Still, for $13 and 101 pieces, both standard for a battle pack, there seems to be a lot to like about this set at first glance. Should I just get the critique out of the way right now? This pack has the same gap that the Galactic Empire does in gender and person of color representation, which are both in the game (and in the modern canon and comics).
Yes, I’m going to keep banging that drum until it gets better, but let me also be clear about one thing: it has gotten better this year. All of the city $10 packs included a female character, the TFA First Order pack had a person of color, and we are getting several sets that represent the cast makeup so much better (like in the Civil War sets). But better does not mean good enough. Star Wars and LEGO can both be better. We’re seeing change, and that’s cool, but I want this hobby to be approachable to as many people and fans as it can be. I want it to reflect what we see, and in a lot of ways, real life (because all Sci-Fi is ultimately about real life), so there’s still a long way to go. But I also promise I won’t beat that dead horse for the rest of the review. I make no promises at all about the next review. The minifig lineup is split between two regular troopers and two troops with jetpacks. The pack is basically mix-and-match, as there are also only two torso and leg variations, we just get a little bit of swapping to differentiate them.
If you follow the instructions, our Duros buddy and captain “sadly born with a chin butt on his forehead” end up with the jetpacks. While they are a cool way to travel, they strike me as wildly impractical. I mean, you’re basically presenting all those Stormtroopers with a nicely elevated target. I mean, armor is strictly “for looks” in the Star Wars universe, but really, these guys might as well hang a bullseye on those uniforms. The printed tile is darker, as is the pack, and in gneeral, I just like the look of these guys a lot more than the Stormtrooper versions. The packs really got lost on the white armor with them, which is great for the situation where they are on Hoth and Snowtroopers aren’t available, or it’s an exceptionally cloudy day, but they looked kind of boring. We also get a new version of a pilot’s helmet for one of the troops, which is probably the coolest part of the set. When I end up getting more of these (did I just tip my hand on the final score?) it’s probably because I want to outfit my deck crews with gear like that.
Our regular troopers are a bit more coordinated with their outfits. Apparently Rodians know how to pick separates, which is always a useful skill when trying to die from getting shot in the back shortly after arriving on the planet. Probably from friendly-fire, if Han Solo just spawned. He always shoots a Rodian, just to be safe. The gap on the printing is a bit jarring, but honestly, there isn’t a great solution to that yet. Still, I like the overall look of the torsos and the pants… it’s just a bit of shame that they’re all basically stuck together now. Still, nice that you can swap the legs around for a little bit of color difference. For those keeping score, the Rebel helmet is in a new color (dark tan). Previously, we’ve just seen it in white (Hoth) and light tan (other Rebels), so it’s always nice to get a little variety. Looking at the back, he also has a printed hood on the back, and I sort of wish they’d start providing those hoods as the neck part we’ve seen in a few other figures (Wyldstyle and Green Arrow come to mind).
I’d love to start getting more of those type of accessory parts for figures, especially if they’re going to include them in the overall look. The speederbike is actually fairly interesting. There’s certainly an established aesthetic that it’s going for, which is a little bit weird, given that those bikes were Imperial bikes in Jedi that the Rebels stole. I guess that particular company wasn’t afraid of selling to both sides, or the Rebels just stole a whole bunch of these things. It’s kind of funny to see a simple addition, like that rear facing seat and gun that would have vastly improved what our plucky rebels were capable of when landing on the Forest Moon of Endor. It seems like being able to shoot at anyone following you is quite a bit more useful than having to steer your explosive bike through tens of thousands of trees that you are recklessly weaving through at absurd speeds. Probably the nicest thing about this little build is that they made sure the troops that end up on it have a place to but their blasters.
Unlike the Empire pack, which I questioned the usefulness of the cannon, this is something I could put on the shelf for display or drop into a battle scene. Sure, in spots, it’s kind of basic, but it still just seems like more fun than that ugly gun. There are some useful parts tucked in here, though I’ll admit not as many as on the Empire pack. The engines in brown, always nice to get the triangle flags, and 2×1 brown round slopes are all good things to have. What this pack does well that the Empire one didn’t is make buying more of them attractive. Sure, you’re going to end up with a lot of Rodians and Duros that way, but there are plenty of uses for those heads outside these troops. There are a couple of combinations for the patterns on the troops as well, and these guys can fit into a couple of different applications. The somewhat generic nature of the troops also makes them easy to drop into either Rebel Alliance or Resistance armies as well (especially since the sourcebooks made it clear that the Resistance was reusing a lot of the Rebellions equipment).