American Gods - 'Git Gone' and 'Lemon Scented You'

The hell of mundanity.

So, we left Shadow walking into a motel room to be confronted with his dead wife. We'll have to wait to see what happens next, because first we're going back to see what happened before.

A bored croupier named Laura meets a thief named Shadow in the casino where she works. He proposes that they rob the place together after she keeps him from getting caught trying to rip the house off. Instead they fall in love and get married. He gets into normal life, but she craves something more exciting and persuades him to carry out her 'perfect' plan. He gets caught and goes to prison, but covers for her. While he's inside, she has an affair with her best friend's husband and they both die in a car crash (while ravens circle overhead, which is a touch suspect.)

"And what do we say to the God of death?"
"Fuck you!"

Laura goes to a desert, where Anubis threatens to seal her into the hot tub where she used to huff bug spray (the titular 'Git Gone') for a release from the monotony of her life. Having believed in nothing, she will go into darkness, he explains. "And then peace?" she asks. "There will be darkness," he replies. Then she is dragged back to the world, where she slaughters shadow's attackers, but loses an arm. Going to Audrey's house to scavenge thread to sew the arm back on, she meets her erstwhile best friend in a surreal and awkward scene which reiterates what seems to be the thesis of the episode: Laura shouldn't be with Shadow because he loves her, and she doesn't love him. She admits that maybe she didn't in life, but in death she does.

After a run in with Anubis/Mr Jaquel and his partner Mr Ibis, who get her all preserved and vital looking before promising to seal her in a hot tub for eternity when she's done, Laura waits for an indeterminate amount of time in a motel room until Shadow arrives.

So... mammoth.

'Lemon Scented You' opens with a gorgeously stylised 'Coming to America' about a stone age tribe crossing the land bridge from Siberia, then follows up on this less-than-cordial reunion (Shadow is angry that she had an affair, but takes her resurrection as par for the course,) which is interrupted when he and Wednesday are ratted out for bank robbery. Laura has a fight with Mad Sweeney, who is a poor match for zombie strength, but manages to force her into a bathtub just as the police arrive, again, to break up the fight.

At the precinct, three of the new gods show up: The Technical Boy, Media (appearing as Seven-Year Itch Marilyn Monroe, having earlier manifested as David Bowie) and their apparent boss, Mr World, seemingly a god of surveillance and/or information. The Boy is forced to apologise to Wednesday and Shadow for interfering with Wednesday's business and lynching Shadow (lynching a black man, his colleagues remind the Boy, is poor public image,) and World offers Wednesday an alliance. An upgrade to become god of military death satellites. Odin refuses, insisting that the new gods just take people's time; they don't give back. They don't give people purpose.

Bowie.

The new gods take this with equanimity, then leave our protagonists to flee from a precinct full of horribly murdered cops, because they lack class and subtlety more or less as a defining characteristic.

'Git Gone' is a strange episode, but by showing us the backstory of Laura's life sheds a light on the character that the novel never managed. There she remained in the conflict between Shadow's idealised memories and the fact of her betrayal, but here she is fully realised as a frankly rather unlikeable character – Mad Sweeney is a jerk, but you can't help feeling for him as he's dragged away from the smirking corpse who is sending him down with her immobility – which is a bold and even brilliant subversion of the dead love archetype.

The story doesn't really pick up again until 'Lemon Scented You', which gives the new gods a chance to flex their muscles and show their hand, which is powerful, if flashy. This too, however, is a curiously immobile episode, and in two hours of television we've only really progressed about that long in real time from the end of 'A Head Full of Snow', and now we're halfway through the season. It's a brave step in the history of pacing to go for such a leisurely gait, and I don't think we'll know until the end of the season whether it will prove to have paid off.