A new trailer for the rest of the second season of AMC’s “Preacher was unveiled during the show’s Hall H panel at Comic-Con 2017 on Friday, and fans of one of the original comic’s most despicable characters can rejoice.
Front and center in the new trailer is Herr Star (Pip Torrens), the military leader for The Grail, which comic readers know is a secret society that essentially runs the world behind the scenes. Starr has one of the comic’s more particularly gruesome storylines, filled with perversion, cruelty, prodigious violence, and of course, deeply held religious fanaticism.
The trailer doesn’t hint at some of the more disturbing things in store for Starr (should the show last long enough), but it does have a moment that captures the character’s combination of bland vulgarity and passionless cruelty perfectly: “Like a 10-inch penis, I have to see it to believe it,” he says.
Starr is set to debut in this Sunday’s episode of “Preacher,” and to hype the crowd up further, the panel featuring the show’s stars along with series co-creator Seth Rogen showed an extended clip from the episode, a flashback showing just how Starr joined The Grail.
The sequence, set to “Blood on the Risers,” sees Starr pitted against other recruits as they endure brutal physical challenges and combat tests. Highlights: Starr escapes a sleeper hold by masturbating until the combat instructor recoils in disgust, then kills the instructor with a golf club; Star rejects the premise of a seduction/espionage workshop by threatening to kill the instructor’s family; Starr wins a marksmanship competition by killing his competition.
“When we read the comic, TV was totally different,” Rogen said during the panel. “There was no network that would let you do this kind of thing. Luckily standards have declined over the years … so it’s really nice for us that we’re living in such an age of decline and that we’re able to enable that decline.”
That about sums it up.