I want to start by acknowledging that “Morty’s Mind Blowers” was terrific—inventive and unsettling and frequently hilarious, and the fact that the show can still surprise is impressive as hell. (To the person who is definitely typing “I figured it out in the first five minutes” right now in the comments,…
So this was frustrating. “The End Of The Road” opens with a strong flashback to Jesse’s days outside Angelville; the teenage Custer working as a low-fi parking lot attendant and pickpocket. When a pair of assholes in a pick-up truck come to take his money (which is the job) and torture him a little, Jesse is upset…
Holy shit, Atlantis motherfuckers! I mean, I know I’ve been hyperbolic about this show in the past, but no joke, watching Rick and Morty take a trip under the sea was the best possible thing that could’ve happened to me, or you, or any sentient creature with the ability to process visual and aural stimuli. It’s been…
So it turns out Herr Starr is not a complete idiot after all. While certain details remain obscure, his plan to bring Jesse around to his side seems to have succeeded. By the end of “On Your Knees,” Starr is kneeling to the preacher, but it’s clear enough where the real power lies. Having seen the current descendant…
I’ve been positive about this season of Preacher. I’ve appreciated how the show has narrowed its focus and managed a great sense of narrative urgency without losing the loopiness and charm that made the first season stand out. But there’s a certain amount of slackness that keeps the show from being really great. It’s…
In the world of Preacher, Jesus spends the last free evening of his life having a lot of sex with a married woman. As blasphemies go, this one is genial enough. Jesus seems like kind of an airhead, but he’s not an asshole, and the woman is clearly really, really, really into all the fucking. When he says he loves her,…
Sitcoms need an outsider figure—the wild card who can introduce new plots or add tension to the resolution of old ones. On Rick And Morty, Jerry is the outsider, which is honestly pretty pathetic, right? Like, Rick is the classic wild card, the wacky relative who shows up and throws everyone’s life into chaos; but the…
Both Jesse Custer and Herr Starr are looking for something. They’re disillusioned with the world, cynical, and they’re each in their way searching for a cause to fight for. To Jesse, that cause is the Search for God. It’s a questionable quest, an effort to take the bizarre events of his life and put them to some…
So, way back all those months ago when we were so much younger than we are now (and man, I joke, but it really does feel like a happier time, doesn’t it; which can’t say many good things about where we’re headed next), I wondered about Rick’s monologue at the end of the season premiere. I felt like a bit of a jackass…
“Holes” finds Preacher still in setup mode, as Jesse, Cassidy, Tulip, and Eugene struggle to find ways to move forward with limited information. Unlike “Pig,” there’s no origin story to tie everything together, but in a way, the lack of a clear, strong narrative makes the whole hour feel more cohesive. Starr was such…
So, Rick turned himself into a pickle to get out of family therapy. We’ve all been there.
“Pig” is almost a great episode. Having (temporarily, at least) resolved the Saint Lf Killers threat, Jesse is back at work looking for God. Only he isn’t having much luck, and neither he, nor Cassidy, nor Tulip is exactly at their best. Things start well enough, with a fun night out that has the trio conning a bar…
Your parents will fuck you up. Beth and Jerry’s relationship has never been a shining beacon of hope, but on a show like Rick And Morty, where dysfunction rules and the most important thing in the universe may be the ability to find something you can hold on to, at least they’d managed to stay together. Beth is…
It took me a while to realize the cold open was about a man buying a percentage of another man’s soul. It was such a striking, odd way to begin an episode: a couple bargaining with someone, worriedly asking for terms and after-effects before signing on because they desperately need the money. We don’t see any…
Jesse Custer wants to be the good guy. And that’s great, because as someone once said, there’s way too many of the other kind. Being good isn’t easy, though, especially not when you have a talent for violence and theft, and a bad temper that sends you raging whenever anyone gets between you and your girl. Last week,…
Four episodes in, and now’s as good a time as any for things to slow down a bit. Actually, “slow down” isn’t the best way to describe it; “Viktor” is packed with subplots, from Eugene’s ongoing adventures in Hell, to Jesse and Cassidy tracking down the history of the actor who played God, to Tulip’s efforts to manage…
Eugene is still in hell, which sucks for him. In the source material, Eugene was a depressed teen who tried to kill himself after Kurt Cobain committed suicide. The same scenario wouldn’t work for the TV show, if only because the timelines wouldn’t match up; all the same, I’m not sure the changes made to the…
We ended last night with Jesse in the path of the Saint; and tonight, we pick up pretty much exactly where we left off. It’s night, we’re outside a motel, and Jesse’s squinting into the darkness as Death strides towards him. Jesse tries using the Word, and it has no effect. The Saint, doing what he was pulled out of…
The first season of Preacher was a strange one, full of wild variations in tone, plot hiccups, and an often frustrating lack of focus. When it worked, it was thrilling, hilarious, and shocking in all the best ways. When it didn’t work, it was a sneering, overloaded mess. The second season wastes no time in showing…
A few weeks back, I brought up Don DeLillo’s White Noise in an attempt to describe what set V.M. Varga apart as a villain: The modern world is full of useless information, and Varga exploits that as a way to overwhelm and manipulate people. This, of course, was a terribly clever reference to make, a sort of scholarly…
