Preacher: "Call and Response"

Preacher: "Call and Response." Season 1, episode 10 (31 July 2016). Sam Catlin, director, script. Developed by Sam Catlin, Seth Rogen, and Evan Goldberg. Based on the graphic novels by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon. There have been a total of three seasons of the TV show as of early 2019. There were 75 issues of the Vertigo/DC Comics series.

"Mundane" + horror and supernatural TV series, with touches of comedy and SF.

Most relevant here, the Preacher obtains and brings to his church a device identified in the episode and earlier in the season as a telephone with a direct line to God, which it sort of is, except (Spoiler), God has absconded, and the being who answers the phone is a divine being in some sense, but emphatically not God (beings divine and demonic are relatively common in the Texas of this world, and Hell, in some sense, is close by). The telephone is a compact desk model, in appearance post-modern retro/Industrial, and relatively plausible and intuitive in operation — at least intuitive for the technologically savvy woman in the congregation who helps the Preacher with set-up. It's a projection phone with three lenses in the correct colors, but holographic. The phone requires an angel's hand to contact a kind of verification pad, but the Preacher obtains such a hand — and only the hand — from the acting church janitor, an Irish vampire. The phone provides an interface and linkage between the human and angelic, and potentially between the human and as divine as it gets: God.

A number of town residents and congregants — a strong majority of those we see — don't react with spiritual or philosophical equanimity to a Deus absconditus (absent God) and behave badly; one pair behaving badly includes the safety officer of a methane-power operation. We have seen the control room before in the series, including times when action has been necessary to prevent problems as pressure builds as the plant processes cattle excrement and presumably offal collected in a shit lagoon under the town: cf. and contrast the power operations in MAD MAX BEYOND THUNDERDOME. Too tied up to take care of the rising pressure — literally tied up in the case of the male technician — and/or too involved in malicious mischief (in an S&M outfit), in the case of his wife, the human portion of the safety system fails; pressure builds, as indicated on large dials; and the town is blown up in the ensuing explosion; cf. and contrast the explosion in METROPOLIS, and the continuing threats of at least gas-buildup explosions in the real world.

RDE, Initial Compiler, 6Jan19