Tulip has been taken by Viktor’s men. And by taken I mean they hang around menacingly and very very very carefully watch her comply. They clearly know Tulip because at no point do they treat her as less than a very very dangerous person
Of course, so is Viktor. He’s a rich man with an army of goons, a pet torturer with fighting skills and a lot of money. Tulip arrives and starts crying and begging forgiveness… hmmm… ok this better be a ruse, because a tearful scared Tulip is not what I’m signing up for.
Viktor isn’t buying. SHe tries to get the whole household who she knows - but all of them are giving her the silent treatment. Which is an odd form of torture. A girl even spits at her, hoping her father kills her - and Tulip doesn’t murder her. She seems quite upset, hurt even.
Eventually she grabs a gun from one goon and it takes 3 more goons to stop her killing Viktor - though he’s confident she won’t kill him.
Jessie and Cassidy, meanwhile are looking for God. Cassidy keeps trying to hint to Jessie that Tulip’s in trouble without breaking his promise to Tulip, but Jessie is completely self absorbed. Part of this is based on an awareness of Tulip - he thinks she’s mad at him over the broken marriage thing so has run off to be mad somewhere, apparently a Tulip’s habit. There’s also this awesome exchange:
Cassidy: if I had a woman like Tulip, I’d worry all the time
Jessie: then you’d be wasting your time. If you had a woman like Tulip you don’t need to worry. She can look after herself
All very true and very respectful of her power and knowing her - but there’s a difference between knowing someone can help themselves and also showing a level of concern rather than treating them as a distraction.
THeir quest for god leads them to an actor - the actor who played god in Heaven’s little display at the church. Yes he’s a human actor from New Orleans. Tracking down his agent and with some clever fast talking from Cassidy they managed to get a copy of his audition tape - but not the actor himself
Not the actor because the tape shows that when he passed the audition, his employer killed him. Jessie realises they needed to do that to get him to Heaven to playing the role.
Which is the point when Cassidy can’t take it any more and tells Jessie that Tulips in trouble
Time for a rescue - of Tulip? Yeah I can’t help but think if she really wanted out a whole lot of people would be dead by now.
Jessie goes, throwing the Word of Genesis around until he reaches the lethal torturer who guesses what is up and wears headphones playing music. The supernatural word of genesis apparently doesn’t work if you can’t hear it… there’s a fight and the torturer is very very good. He lasts a few minutes before Jessie thoroughly stabs him.
From there he goes to strangle Viktor and stops - when Tulip tells him that Viktor is her husband
Oh that is going to get messy. No it already is messy, abusive, possessive relationship, violence and the likelihood of this being turned not into Tulip’s choice, freedom or agency but into a battle between two men for “their” woman.
And in Hell Eugene and several other inmates are dealing with an outage of the system. Apparently this happens from time to time because Hell is severely underfunded and has way more inmates than they ever expected
Prison guard with the intermittently spooky voice is also super creepy. She is suspicious of Eugene who seems like a nice boy - and that kind of behaviour doesn’t fly in hell.
We also have Hitler. And, again I’m super uncomfortable with this. Like a look in his hell - his worst nightmare, is a past where he forgives a jewish man for jostling him and is reluctant to go ahead with his girlfriend’s passionate hatred of communists? He tries to defend a romani woman from being bullied?
And he’s kind to Eugene?
Originally the other inmates are intimidated by hitler. After all, as one of the worst people ever almost has a cachet in hell. But as people realise it’s all bluster and he’s not that tough or scary the other inmates turn on him, mocking him with “sieg heil” and punching and kicking him. Remember the demon woman’s warning and seeing the camera watching, Eugene joins in.
Far be it from me to protest the cruel treatment of Hitler but… This feel like an attempt to… humanise Hitler? To make him… Sympathetic? It even depicted him defending the very people he tried to wipe out. I… I don’t have words for how not OK I am with that. Preacher is going to have to pull something pretty big to make this work.
