American Gods - 'The Secret of Spoons'

Spider God, Spider God,
Is occasionally a spider just to fuck with arachnophobes...

We begin with spiders. Thanks for that.

Yes, we open episode two with another Coming to America story, this one featuring African slaves and their divine hitchhiker Compe Anansi(1): Spider, trickster, snappy dresser and agitator. After that, we cut back to Shadow, battered and bloody, tormented by visions of his late wife, as he packs up his house before heading out of Eagle Point with Wednesday. En route to Chicago he is charged with acquiring some items as 'gifts', and finds himself receiving a job offer from Lucille Ball(2) via the giant TV display. Then they continue on to meet the fortune-telling Zoraya sisters(3) and their non-specific relative Czernobog(4). Wednesday wants Czernobog on the team, but Czernobog wants nothing to do with him. Still, he's willing to make a wager on a game of chequers: If Shadow can beat him, he'll join the cause; if he beats Shadow, then he gets to knock on Shadow's head with his hammer.

Shadow loses.

During the course of this fairly simple plot development, we learn a lot more about the nature of the beings Shadow is dealing with. Their currency is worship; for the old gods, this mostly means blood, be it the blood of a ship full of slaves and slavers, the blood of the cattle Czernobog spills in his own honour as a slaughterman, or the blood of our Vikings from the first episode. Perhaps it can also mean Shadow's blood; Shadow's life, which seems to be constantly in peril. For the new gods, it's time and attention, hours wasted on the television and the computer. And for Bilquis it's sex.

We revisit Bilquis, briefly, as she consumes four more lovers (some men, some women.) She then visits what is either a private shrine or a museum exhibit, where a human shape begins to form within strings of golden jewellery. Bilquis had a fairly brief arc in the original novel, so this is all new, and I really hope that she is trying to resurrect someone as part of a plan which will significantly impact on the story, rather than just being included to add a little sex every week. I'm also curious to see where her arc will end given that her fate in the novel was so tied to her having been forced to find her worship not, as here, through online dating, but prostitution. There, she was the tragic low-ebb of the independent divinity scraping a living; here, she seems to be planning something.

You've got red on you.

In addition to worship, there's a lot about race this week. First and foremost is Anansi's monologue on the fate of black people in America, used to stir up a riot on the slave ship and propel him to the new world. Then of course there is poor Shadow, a black man caught up in what is so far a white man's war. Czernobog explains that race confuses him, as in the old country they didn't really have black or white, so shades of skin were the cassus bellum, as between him and his so-bright brother(5), now as grey as he is. America, Anansi reminds us, is where the black man gets fucked, but the Slavs aren't doing so hot either.

(1) The always excellent Orlando Jones, when not a bloody spider.

(2) A gloriously period-permed Gillian Anderson.

(3) Headed by Cloris Leachman.

(4) A typically disturbing performance from Peter Stormare, wielding the bleeding hammer we saw in the trailers.

(5) Of course, from the follow-up short stories we know that Shadow's birth name is Baldur Moon, which pretty much makes him the brightest thing going, skin colour notwithstanding.