Headscratchers / Preacher (2016)

BEWARE OF UNMARKED SPOILERS.

The Cowboy and Hell

• So The Cowboy's Hell is living through the last days of his life on repeat, the same things happening over and over and over and over again, until the angels showed up and broke the cycle. That's all fine and dandy, but why did The Cowboy go along with it? What if he did something different, like helped intervene when he saw what was going in that bar the first time, or brought his guns with him to Ratwater, or, hell, not even went there in the first place? Surely he must be aware that the events are repeating, right?
  • No, I don't think he was aware at all. He is constantly repeating the worse moment of his life and making the same decisions. If he was aware maybe he just gave up trying after hundreds of year. After all that, what would be the point of changing? This isn't the real world. Those aren't his family. Changing things will only last until it resets again. Or hell changes things right back to make things end up even worse no matter what he tries. Maybe that's the real hell for him - Failure Is the Only Option.
  • The preacher who shoots the Cowboys horse mentions that the Cowboy seemed to love killing more than any man he ever saw before. He might actually enjoy an eternity of killing on an infinite loop.
  • Episode S 2 E 12 reveals that the hosts need to will themselves into making different choices than the ones they made in life, which is apparently very difficult and might only be possible with outside help.

Root and the Seraphim

• So, Mercy Kill or not, Root is still the Sherrif. Isn't killing the torture victim highly against regular investigation procedure? Shouldn't he at least try to ask her who did this first?
  • You may also notice that police sheriffs are also not meant to, you know, strangle people to death. The scene may have started as a mercy kill but was depicted to show that Root is growing more and more unhinged over the course of these past trails. He's son tried to kill someone and himself, his wife is catatonic, his town is going to hell and the mayor is a coward and the real man in charge an uncaring monster. Preacher escaping after confessing to killing his son was the final straw. So by that point he has officially stopped giving a shit and is starting to lose his mind more and more. His expression as he killed her seemed to show he was expressing all his rage and hatred of everyone in his life. And the horror afterwards show he is terrified of what he did and how willing he was to do it. Plus he already knew who did it: the agents. And they have left. And giving all the stories he tells of previous crimes, he seems to feel solving crimes doesn't matter much anymore. It's the world that lets this kind of stuff happens that broken.

Retrieving Eugene

• Why didn't Jesse just use the Word to command the angels to bring Eugene back from Hell?
  • At this point he might be thinking it wouldn't work on angels. Another possibility is that given the mishaps caused so far by the Literal Genie nature of the Word, Jesse is cautious that it might cause the angels to go and try do it the most direct and blunt manner possible and fail.
    • He's used it on them before, so he knows it works on them.
  • In the episode in question, he had previously stated that he wouldn't use the word again as long as he could help it. He realizes this is a mistake later, but for the episode he only uses the word to tell the DeBlanc and Fiore to COME IN. Sure, it would have made more sense, but he was hardly in the right state of mind.

The Word and going to Hell

• The series seems to have established that Jesse can't use the Word to make people do something that is blatantly physically impossible, such as when he told Cassidy to "fly". Then why did telling Eugene to "Go to Hell" work, and in the particular manner it did? Do people just have the ability to pop into Hell instantly if they really want it in this setting? And including their physical bodies? I would find it less puzzling if Jesse's command caused Eugene to simply drop dead on the spot and only his soul went to Hell. As a side note, this makes me wonder what would happen if Jesse had told that same thing to someone who does not believe there is such a thing as Hell, be it due to atheism or other belief system...
  • Eugene may not be able to go to Hell by himself, but Genesis, being half-demon, can access Hell. Genesis simply figured, "Wait a sec, he can't do that! I guess I'll just have to do it myself."
    • But Genesis doesn't have a will of its own, it CAN'T make decisions like that.
  • A good chunk of season 2 and an even larger part of season 3 established that God being gone from Heaven has thrown all rules in the Afterlife out the window. That is why Eugene is not only able to be "magically" banished to Hell, but can be held there, even though the people in charge know he doesn't belong. Satan is abusing the rules (or lack of them) to further his own agenda: taking over. Any opportunity he gets to obtain more souls, the innocent the better, he's going to take it.

Why isn't Eugene behind bars?

• In this series' version, Eugene tried to murder someone, and then kill himself out of guilt. Why isn't he in prison (or at least juvenile hall)? Sure, his dad is the sheriff. In the series however it seems everyone knows what he did. Surely his dad couldn't cover for him completely. So why is he free?
  • There is a difference between "everyone knows he did it" and "evidence he did it that will stand up in court." Over in WMG there is a theory that they essentially had the same suicide pact Eugene had with his friend in the comics and after it didn't work he made up the story in order to protect her reputation. With his dad as the sheriff and even with his fake story he could plead down to a lesser charge.
  • The show seems to have answered this by showing Eugene didn't try to kill her at all, he's just being blamed afterward unfairly.

Cassidy's tattoos and healing

• After Cassidy gets horribly burned in the sun, how does his skin grow back with his tattoos still perfectly intact? Come to think of it, how are they still there after half of his body was liquefied after he fell from the plane?

Nature of souls

• In season 1, Odin Quincannon doesn't believe in souls because he can't physically see or touch them. Yet in seasons 2 and 3, souls are a physical substance that can be extracted from people with technology and transferred to other people, thus proving that they exist.
  • But Odin Quincannon doesn't know that.

Humperdoo and the afterlife

• In the finale, Cassidy kills Humperdoo to prevent the apocalypse. God asks Jesus to dance in Humperdoo's place as a last resort. Humperdoo wasn't killed by The Saint Of Killers, so his soul either went to Heaven or Hell. We previously saw God bring Jesus back to Earth from Heaven and Jesse back from Hell, so why doesn't God simply bring Humperdoo back from either Hell or (presumably) Heaven?

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