Y’all, Jesse’s grandma is terrifying and has been for years. Without Genesis it’s going to be difficult to get away, but Jesse did it once, surely he can do it again? Right? Here’s our recap of “Sonsabitches”!
“Sonsabitches opens with a young Jesse sitting at a picnic table at school when he’s approached by a science teacher. This man wants Madame L’Angelle’s help in erasing the memory of a teenage girl that he had an affair with because the girl is starting to seek him (and his wife) out now that he broke it off.
Jesse tells him that he can help, but it will cost him. When the science teacher eventually accepts the price, Jesse makes sure he knows that if he misses a payment, things won’t be good for him.
The first week, the guy is a little light on the payment. The following week he doesn’t show up at all. This prompts Jesse, Jody, and T.C. to chase him down in the swamps. Once they get him loaded up in the truck, Jesse kicks him hard in the ribs and tells him that he told him not to skip a payment.
At the house in Angelville, they have the teacher strapped to a chair, and T.C. is talking about how cats struggle to the very end as Jesse is tightening the straps on his arms.
“Is it gonna hurt?”
“You’re damn right it’s gonna hurt.”
Jesse stands up and Jody is beside him. Jesse makes a joke about his Gran’ma pulling out this man’s fingernails, and Jody let’s him in on the truth:
“You don’t pay what you owe, Miss Marie’ll pull out your goddamn soul. How do you think she stays so young?”
CUE GASP! Remember how she told them to strap Jesse’s momma to that chair last night?! Did she take her daughter’s soul!? How old is this woman anyway?
Madame L’Angelle shows up in the room, and as Jesse starts to leave, she tells him to stay. He needs to see the truth of what they do. Then she inserts a long needle into the man’s arm. The machine starts up and so do his screams.
—-
Back to the present, Cassidy and Tulip are talking as she eats some soup he made her. She explains that she doesn’t remember what happened when she was dead. She knew she was with her family, and she knows there was something at the end, but not exactly what.
Cass is super supportive and assures her that it will come back in time.
That’s when Jesse comes in, and things get tense AF.
Cassidy and Jesse still have a whole lot to work through when it comes to Tulip. When she asks them what’s wrong, they say nothing and back down a little. Then Cass makes sure to let Jesse know that it was his friends, The Grail, that killed Tulip.
Since he was so out of it, Jesse doesn’t even really know who this “mom-hair bitch” is that Tulip describes. He definitely wants them to stop calling the The Grail his friends, though.
When they make mention of leaving Angelville, Jesse hesitates and says they’ll need to convince Gran’ma.
He leaves and goes outside on his own. As he stands beside the road, he steps into it as a van approaches. When he tries to use Genesis and fails, he jumps out of the road. That’s when he pulls a card out of his pocket and calls The Grail.
“Yeah, I leave a message. Tell him the Messiah is ready and to bring my soul.”
—-
INDIA (KRISHNA HEADQUARTERS)
Herr Starr claims he has an appointment with the Swami, and he and the other members of The Grail enter. They’re in disguise, and until they take them off, they’re greeted kindly. When he tosses off the orange clothe to reveal who he is, they start reaching for their guns.
The ensuing gun fight is set to really upbeat music, which is characteristic of Preacher, but was noticeably absent from the season premiere. This begs the question, how bad is Jesse, Tulip, and Cassidy’s situation? Was it just the gravity of “Angelville” or is it the nature of the place their inhabiting.
Herr Starr and his Grail team kill everyone but the leader. The Swami ends up kicked in the balls right before The Grail reaches Starr to tell him Jesse called. He’s surprised it happened so quickly.
Starr tells the Swami to pledge his support to Humperdoo, but he gives him a very colorful no.
“That kind of language? In a house of worship? No wonder God left.”
He shoots and kills the leader and leaves, making his way to Angelville to collect Jesse.
—-
Cassidy is in the house looking over a painting when Jesse comes up behind him. The conversation that follows is basically Jesse telling Cassidy that he can leave, and Cassidy saying that he’s not going anywhere without Tulip. Gran’ma interrupts and they can’t continue, but this one is going to boil over again.
Afterward, Cassidy ends up talking to T.C. who offers him drugs, and you know exactly how Cass responds to that questions.
Jesse sits with Gran’ma, and she asks how Tulip is even though she doesn’t care. Then she brings up getting Angelvill back up and running again.
“You’ve been gone a long time, Jesse. That’s a lot of souls you owe me.”
When he suggests she say that she’s happy to see him and that he could leave, Gran’ma says:
“Now, why would I do that?”
Yeaaaah. Gran’ma is going to keep you around until you can get Genesis and put an end to her spell. He alludes to that, too.
“You never know what a person will say, until you ask them right.”
—
Outside, Tulip is trying to shoot at a can when Jody shows up and blows up the damn fence with his gun. He asks if she’s Jesse’s dead lady friend, and she takes offense to that, but they seem to get a long okay.
“What was it like?”
“Why does everyone keep asking me that?”
“You died and you came back. What else is there to ask about?”
I mean, he has a point.
They bond over guns until Tulip sees some movement from the bushes. That’s when she goes on a chase and finds Jenny, Lara Featherstone from The Grail, watching her. Tulip takes a couple of good hits then nails Lara until she falls down.
She’s definitely happy to be back now.
—
Cass and T.C. are sniffing something in the kitchen and they’re talking about their dreams. It’s just a freaking wild as you’d imagine.
“T.C., please tell me you’re the worst person here.”
“Definitely not.”
Oh, if it were only that simple.
Jesse shows up looking for Tulip, and boy things go downhill from here.
He and Cass find Tulip and Jody with Lara and Hoover. Tulip is ready to kill them, but Jesse needs to ask them if they’ve told Starr that Tulip’s alive. They have, and that’s really bad news.
Before Jesse can fix the situation, Gran’ma is there, asking who everyone is. Jesse’s plan is to take them into the woods and kill them, and Gran’ma tells them to take Jody, too. This plan got a lot more complicated.
On the walk to the swamp, Hoover says that he doesn’t want his mother to find his body like this, and Jody comfortingly tells him that his mother won’t ever find his body out here.
For a brief moment, Tulip and Cass have an argument about the Cohen brothers’ films before Tulip goes up to Lara to talk. She’s super rude, and Tulip decides that they should just kill them now.
Jesse steps in, AGAIN, and says after everything they did, they deserve more than a bullet. He asks Jody if they still have the grinder. Once they get to it, Jody describes what they do with the grinder and how one racoon actually jumped out one time, and it was just disgusting.
When he drains the grinder, Tulip realizes that the soup she had earlier was from the blood in this grinder and she’s not happy with Cassidy.
While all this is going on, Jesse lets Hoover go. Jesse alerts everyone else, and they take off into the swamp after him. Jesse takes Lara to a special opening in the swamp, and tells her how to get back to town, and to rely a message to Starr that he’s ready. She runs off, and when Jesse turns around and asks:
“Jesse Custer, what the hell did you do?”
Later when they’ve arrived back at Angelville, Jody tells Madame L’Angelle that Jesse’s up to something.
“Doesn’t matter if he is. He’s mine.”
—-
With the group together, Jesse tells Tulip and Cassidy about his deal with Starr, The Grail, and his soul. If he can get his soul back, he’s going to kill them all.
Tulip is on board. She still trusts Jesse, but Cass is more hesitant to say he’s with them. In the end, he agrees to stick with this plan.
—
Tulip and Cassidy are responsible for sending a message to the Boyds that will get them out to Angelville. This will provide enough of a distraction to give Jesse enough time to talk to Starr when he shows up.
Cassidy tries to get Tulip to go along with his plan once they’re out of the road. He wants to keep driving and leave Jesse behind. Tulip won’t do that, though. She does want to know what’s going on with him and Jesse, though.
The whole truth is that Cassidy is in love with Tulip and thinks that Jesse isn’t good enough for her. He’ll never tell her that, though, so they go back to Angelville.
—
Jesse is standing beside his Gran’ma in the cemetery on the Angelville property with Gran’ma. They’re right in front of his mom’s grave.
“I loved your mama.”
“You had a funny way of showing it.”
Does this mean that Jesse knows how his mom died??
—
It’s not long before things go south after the Boyds recover from Tulip and Cassidy’s remote control car bomb, and when T.C., Jody, Tulip, and Cass are outside, they show up. It’s not a pretty sight either. They launch a pygmi goat over the fence and it lands beside them.
It’s a voodoo death threat.
Tulip wants to know why they’d want Jesse dead, and there’s some miscommunication between Jody and T.C.
It could either be sex or murder. We (the audience) aren’t sure yet.
The Boyds leave quickly, but Tulip and Cassidy know they need more time for Jesse, so Cass “accidentally” shoots one of the big guns and almost hits the convoy.
Jody takes the gun from him, and HOW DOES NOONE KNOW CASSIDY IS A VAMPIRE? He’s wearing an umbrella hat and randomly drinks blood sludge from mason jars. C’MON.
Meanwhile, Jesse hears all this noise and tells his grandma that he’ll take care of it, and he leaves her in the graveyard. Instead of going to the fight, though, he goes into the kitchen and waits. A few seconds pass and Herr Starr comes inside and sits at the table with him.
“I got your message.”
“Give it to me.”
Starr hands over the vial of soul and Jesse swallows it.
“How do you feel, Messiah.”
“I told you before not to call me that.”
Jesse tests out Genesis, and it seems to work. He gets Starr to kneel on the ground, kiss his hand, and as Jesse turns to leave, he tells Starr:
“Eat your dick.”
That’s when Genesis power wears off, and it’s obvious that Starr gave him something different. It was a placebo, and now he wants to talk to Jesse about his feelings.
Jesse is obviously upset about what went down with Tulip, but Starr desperately needs him to play the part of the Messiah and save the world. If Humperdoo gets on screen, it’s just never going to work.
“What do you say, Messiah? Shall we take a short walk and save the world?”
Jesse agrees and they walk toward the front of the property where The Grail’s vans are located. This is really bad because Tulip sees from a window after she gets back from her fight with the Boyds and her time with God finally comes back full force.
Tulip finally remembers what God said to her:
“I want you to get those sonsabitches!”
So Tulip gets a gun and follows Starr and Jesse.
Right before Starr passes over his soul to Jesse, Tulip starts firing. He yells for her to stop, but it’s too late, and Starr yanks back the vial and they all start driving away.
“I intend to give Jesse Custer time to marinate in his own little Hell.”
I guess everyone will eventually get a trip to what their Hell will look like on this show.
Tulip kills several members of The Grail before she stops and Jesse explains what happened. During this, Gran’ma uses the cloth she has with Jesse’s blood to choke him until he falls down.
Once he’s back up, Tulip apologizes, but Jesse shrugs her off and says they need to take the bodies to the swamp.
As Jesse walks away, she’s transported back to the memory of her father from Purgatory.
“Why can’t I do one thing right?”
That night, Tulip tells Cassidy that she wants to make this right, but she doesn’t know how. Cassidy tells her that this dark side is Jesse’s family. He doesn’t have much hope here.
Gran’ma, who knows she has Jesse right where she wants him, tells him to get to work. He goes to the basement of the old out building and starts mopping. Someone approaches from the shadows but they’re chained up.
“Help me.”
“I can’t.”
This is the same thing his mother told the person that approached her in the season premiere! Jesse took over for his momma!
Jesse goes back to work and ignores the old high school science teacher still looking the same and chained up for his Gran’ma. Apparently, she’s still getting souls or pieces of them…
—-
Oh my! This is getting insane, and we still haven’t see where Eugene or the Saint of Killers is yet! I can imagine that every single person in this season will be in a bind of some kind, and right now, Jesse is stuck without Genesis, and his Gran’ma is way more powerful (and evil) than I gave her her credit for.
What did you think of “Sonsabitches”?
Preacher airs Sundays at 10/9c on AMC! Be sure to live tweet with us @WeSoNerdy!
