Anna Pigeon Episode 3 Recap: ‘The Preacher’
Anna Pigeon (Tracy Spiridakos) and Jesse Garland (Cooper Levy) at the Ranger and Friends talent show in Anna Pigeon Episode 3, “The Preacher.”
Photo credit: Michelle Faye/Versant Media
Anna Pigeon Episode 3, “The Preacher,” opens with a bank robbery, but not the kind where someone storms in waving a gun and screaming at everyone to get on the floor. The robber walks up to a teller and tells her to empty the cash. When she tries to move, he stops her by showing her a photograph of her own family.
“God doesn’t want anyone to die today,” he tells her.
Meanwhile, Anna is still dreaming about Zach. Her nightmares keep returning to the party on the night her husband was killed, and Molly keeps telling her to write them down. Anna would rather argue with her sister about psychology than take the advice, but Zach’s murder is becoming more than background to the weekly cases.
Anna runs into FBI agent Frederick Stanton at the credit union while he is dealing with the robberies. Three banks have now been hit, which brought in the FBI, although Frederick says he plans to strengthen security protocols and leave the ongoing investigation with local law enforcement.
He also asks Anna about her nightmares, and she tells him they are about the night Zach was killed. The murder was never solved; Anna was told it was a random home invasion, but the lack of answers still bothers her.
Frederick offers to listen if she wants to talk, and by Episode 3, the chemistry between these two is becoming difficult to miss. The show is not exactly hiding it either.
Jesse is still very much around, though. He and Anna talk about the upcoming Ranger and Friends talent show, which Jesse has participated in before, and he reminds her that she used to work backstage in theatre. Anna wants nothing to do with that part of her old life, while Jesse keeps trying to get a little further inside the walls she has built around herself.
The central case moves toward Manny, who has joined a church group led by Pastor Nelson, played by Roger Cross. During a meeting, Manny admits that he is struggling. He loves being a ranger but is barely making ends meet, he and Bethany want to start a family, and the stress has left him thinking about using drugs again, which was how he once coped.
Nelson’s church is built around redemption, second chances and the belief that people can put their worst choices behind them. Manny is preparing to be baptized, and Anna attends.
The baptism happens near an area where park workers are using explosives to remove old trees. Just as Manny comes out of the water, another blast goes off and money starts raining down, which is a pretty spectacular way to interrupt a baptism.
A buried toolbox full of cash has been blown apart. Local law enforcement officer Guthrie arrives and makes it clear that the bank robberies are not Anna’s case, but because the money was buried inside the park, Anna now has something she can investigate.
Anna can still be mildly irritating, although I still basically like her.
Before she can get very far with the money, Manny asks her to take Pastor Nelson and some of the church group on a hike for him. The men in the group have histories that include addiction, aggression and incarceration, and Anna starts questioning Nelson about redemption.
She tells him nature is her church because trees do not judge. Nelson argues that he does not judge either and tells her the men have been saved. Anna says she believes in redemption, but she is not buying the miracles he is selling.
Back at the ranger station, Zoey Bear Child helps Anna with the money. When Anna asks her to run the serial numbers, Zoey immediately points out that the bill is evidence and agrees to help while refusing to touch it.
This is where Zoey is really starting to stand out for me. Paulina Alexis, a member of Alexis Nakota Sioux Nation in Alberta, plays her with an eagerness that fits the younger-ranger role, but Zoey is not simply following Anna around waiting for instructions. Even with the ranger she looks up to standing there, she knows how the evidence should be handled and sticks to it. Anna does not pressure her, Zoey does not turn it into a confrontation, and the whole exchange is cute and funny without making either of them look incompetent. There is a strong ethical streak developing underneath Zoey’s enthusiasm, and I like that she can be Anna’s mentee without simply deferring to her.
Manny Lopez (Manuel Rodriguez-Saenz), Bethany Lopez (Melanie Scrofano) and Anna Pigeon (Tracy Spiridakos) in Anna Pigeon Episode 3, “The Preacher.”
Photo credit: Michelle Faye/Versant Media
Zoey traces the serial numbers and discovers that the bills are old. Then she finds something much more useful: a series of older bank robberies in Detroit committed by someone who used the same method as the current robber, stalking bank tellers, photographing their families and using the pictures to frighten them into cooperating.
The robber used the same line — “God doesn’t want anyone to die today” — and became known as the Preacher.
Frieda, played by Crystle Lightning, a member of Enoch Cree Nation in Alberta, has a completely different energy from Zoey. She is nosy and seems constitutionally incapable of staying out of everyone else’s business, but there is also something mothering and good-hearted about her. She keeps track of what is happening around the station and gives the impression that the people around her are partly her responsibility. Her concern and her curiosity tend to arrive together, and Lightning makes that combination funny rather than intrusive.
Zoey and Frieda are becoming two of the supporting characters I most look forward to seeing, but for very different reasons: Zoey’s enthusiasm is increasingly paired with competence and a firm sense of what is right, while Frieda brings a warmer, meddlesome presence to the ranger-station scenes.
The Detroit connection points Anna toward Nelson, who is from Detroit himself, but the investigation takes an abrupt turn when Guthrie arrives and arrests Manny.
An anonymous caller has identified him as the robber, and the serial numbers on cash found in his truck match money from the recent robberies. Anna does not believe he did it.
Bethany eventually tells her what Manny has been hiding: after someone left him an anonymous note telling him where to look, he used a metal detector in the park and found the buried money. Manny says he thought God wanted him to have it and planned to use it to pay for IVF so he and Bethany could have a child.
Anna concludes that someone knew Manny had found the money and deliberately set him up. Manny had only told the men in his church group.
Anna becomes convinced that Pastor Nelson is the original Preacher and confronts him. She is half right.
Nelson admits that he really was the Detroit bank robber known as the Preacher, but says he has not robbed a bank in more than 20 years. After his final robbery brought him to Montana, he buried the stolen money in the park and started over.
More recently, someone with a distorted voice discovered his secret and blackmailed him into explaining exactly how he had committed the robberies.
I somehow did not recognize Roger Cross while watching this episode, and I wish I had because he played Six on the Canadian Dark Matter, which I love as well as Travis Verta on Continuum. I like the newer Dark Matter too, but the Canadian series is the one I really adore.
While Anna is pulling apart the bank robbery case, Frederick is doing something much more personal.
At an interagency conference, he talks to Wilton Fontaine, the detective who worked Zach’s homicide, and asks him to take another look at the old case. Fontaine notices what the series has also been signalling: Frederick is interested in Anna.
Frederick later approaches Molly directly. He tells her he cares about Anna and thinks finding some closure might help her, but Molly pushes back. Zach was Anna’s husband, and reopening the investigation is Anna’s decision, not hers or Frederick’s.
The chemistry between Anna and Frederick is definitely there, but Frederick is also beginning to involve himself in the most painful part of Anna’s life without her asking him to.
Back in Montana, someone tries to kill Nelson with explosives, and Anna learns explosives went missing after Manny’s baptism. She starts connecting the attack to the bank robberies and to whoever has been using Nelson’s old methods.
Then a photograph provides the final piece.
Nelson explains that when he committed his robberies, he photographed the teller’s entire family. Looking at one of the photographs connected to the current crimes, Anna realizes Ken Thompson is missing from it because he was the one taking the picture.
Ken, who has been part of Nelson’s church community and who, with his wife Lorraine, served as one of Manny’s witnesses at the baptism, is the new Preacher. Lorraine is involved as well.
Ken also has a history with Nelson. He was once a bank teller in Detroit and was one of the people terrorized by the original Preacher. Years later, after coming to Montana and unexpectedly finding Nelson living there as a pastor, he used Nelson’s old methods himself.
Anna works out that Ken and Lorraine are preparing another robbery. She stays outside the bank and calls Guthrie, but Nelson walks inside himself and tries to talk Ken down.
Nelson does not deny what he did to Ken. He admits the harm and tries to convince him not to keep repeating it. Lorraine ultimately refuses to keep running, and Guthrie arrives to take Ken into custody.
With the real robber identified, the case against Manny falls apart.
When Anna later visits Nelson, he is continuing work on the church renovations. She asks whether he plans to step down, but his answer suggests the opposite. He no longer wants to pretend that the Preacher and the pastor are two completely separate people.
Anna also gives him an answer to their earlier argument: for the record, she does believe someone can come back from something.
The episode is not finished with Zach. Fontaine gives Frederick another piece of information from the old investigation: at the party on the night Zach was killed, someone left behind a vintage red coat, and police never discovered where it came from.
It gives Frederick one unexplained detail from the case to pursue.
The episode ends back at the Ranger and Friends talent show. Frieda gets her moment onstage, and Anna finally shows up to see Jesse perform. Jesse has been trying throughout the episode to persuade her to let him show her more of himself, while Frederick is elsewhere reopening questions about her husband’s murder.
Three episodes in, Anna Pigeon is still largely giving us a new crime each week, but “The Preacher” makes the continuing story harder to ignore. Zach’s death is moving forward as an active mystery, and Frederick is becoming involved in both the investigation and Anna’s life.
At the same time, some of the supporting characters are becoming more interesting. Zoey’s enthusiasm is being matched by competence and a strong ethical centre, while Frieda’s nosiness comes with enough warmth and mothering energy that it feels good-hearted rather than merely intrusive. Manny and Bethany also get considerably more to do this week.
Anna herself can still be mildly irritating, but I still like her.
