American Gods - 'Come to Jesus'

"Let's have a story..."

And so it comes to an end; sort of. Perhaps less an end and more the beginning of the end, or even the end of the beginning.

  

Anansi makes suits for Wednesday and Shadow, and insists on telling them the story of Bilqis, who has adapted to survive throughout history, while envious and fearful men struggle to pull her down. Driven from her homelands (presumably in the Yemen) by kings, and from Iran by Ayatollahs, she comes to America not with her worshippers, but to find worshippers, only to be struck down by a more terrible enemy than any man: AIDS, and the fear of sex which haunted the 90s because of it. At her lowest ebb, the Technical Boy offers her a way out; a new altar where worshippers can swipe left or right. So Bilqis is reborn and so she becomes one of the New Gods(1).

The moral of the story? Get yourself a queen.

"Hit me with your best shot..."

Thus, Wednesday takes Shadow to Kentucky(2) to meet Ostara, aka Easter, a chic and successful Old God riding the sugar high of her holiday thanks to its association with not only the modern, commercial Easter, but also with Jesus Christ. This brings us to what is likely to be one of the more controversial scenes in the series, as Shadow begins to realise that he is in a room full of people, virtually all of whom are, in fact, Jesus Christ(3). Wednesday tries to persuade the sceptical Ostara to join his cause, despite her current success, spinning her the story of Vulcan's murder at the hands of the New Gods and promising that with just a little withholding of her power, she could be truly worshipped again, instead of growing fat on the table scraps of later powers.

While they are talking, Laura arrives with Mad Sweeney. Ostara agrees to 're-life' Laura, but discovers that she cannot, because Laura died at the hand - or at least the design - of a god, leaving Laura to beat the name of the god who sent him out of Mad Sweeney while she attends to more unexpected visitors: Media, and one of the faceless 'children'. Media hints that Ostara has done well by her deal with the New Gods, and could do badly were she to break it, as the one faceless man splits into many, also disgorging the Technical Boy.

My one major regret about this season is that these faceless men failed to do
any finger snaps while circling Ostara.

Shadow talks to a particularly relaxed Jesus about belief, and how he has none, before joining Wednesday and Ostara on the lawn for the big showdown. As the New Gods dismiss him as unimportant, Wednesday draws down lightning to smite the faceless men, dedicating their deaths to Ostara and declaring his names to Shadow: Grimnir, Glad-o-War; Odin. Ostara flexes her own muscles to take back Spring and so blight the land with famine, and, what with one thing and another, Shadow Moon has become a believer.

And then Laura asks to speak to her husband, while in Wisconsin, Bilqis approaches the House on the Rock on some mysterious commission from the Technical Boy.

"Who's queen?"

Episode 8, 'Come to Jesus', brings the first season of American Gods to a close, and it's been quite a ride, full of sex and violence and as many aggressively, deliberately jarring jazz chords as Birdman. Opening pretty much just like the book, it then diverged to include more of Mad Sweeney, more of Bilqis, and much, much more of Laura Moon(4), as well as bringing in Vulcan out of nowhere. It's been more... full-on god than the opening of the book, using hyper-stylised cinematography and effects to portray the divine in contrast to the more commonplace look of the mundane. It's also expanded greatly on a lot of the background action, which is a common enough feature of visual media adaptations of books with a limited narrative viewpoint, and importantly has done this well, which is a lot less common.

It hasn't been perfect, but it's always been interesting, and I'm delighted that the second season is already confirmed. Here's hoping for a third, since that should just about round the story off.

(1) A part of the radical departure from the book, in which she scraped out her worship as a sex worker and was ultimately the victim of male aggression.

(2) Because of course Kentucky.

(3) Explained as the effect of a faith growing so large that it encompasses widely disparate worldviews which look on the same figure in very different ways.

(4) The sheer fact that so much of the heart of this series comes down to the foul-mouthed chemistry between two really quite unpleasant characters is kind of dizzying.

American Gods - 'A Prayer for Mad Sweeny'

It's that woman again.

Another change of pace this week, as we devote almost an entire – Shadow and Wednesday free – episode to a Coming to America story.

The tale is that of Essie MacGowan(1) a young lass who grows up on stories of the good folk and – almost – never neglects to leave a little something for the leprechauns. She leads a proper Moll Flanders of a life – an affair with a rich man, framed for theft, transported to the Carolinas, returned, a long career as a thief, arrested again after failing to leave bread for her ‘sponsor’, sentenced to death but transported after pleading her belly – before finding a good, quiet retirement with a kind man on a tobacco plantation. As an old, old woman she finally passes, and her life-long guardian comes to collect her.

Mad Sweeney.

Movin' right along.

Now… I’ll be honest, I can’t remember if the one that came for her in the novel was Mad Sweeney, but it’s a brilliant move here, tying this episode-length Coming to America to Mad Sweeney’s current reluctant road trip with Laura Moon and – until he slips and Laura is able to pass on the location of the meeting of gods – Saleem(2). The doubling of Emily Browning of course strengthens the mirroring, and between the now and the flashback, the writers develop the character of Mad Sweeney, like a scruffy, ginger Oliver Queen. He was a king, before he fled the battle he knew would be his death, and now he works for Wednesday because he owes a battle; not to Wednesday, but perhaps to himself.

And – and this is a big and – we learn that Mad Sweeney killed Laura Moon on Wednesday’s orders. Clearly, he feels somewhat badly for this, as when a car crash gives him the chance to take back his coin, he instead returns it to her, to be reclaimed once he brings her to the resurrection man.

In many episodes of Arrow, the flashbacks feel intrusive. While they provided vital development in American Gods’ second (original to the TV series) thread, the present day elements of ‘A Prayer for Mad Sweeney’ kind of interrupt the flow of the amazingly realised Coming to America. They aren’t bad, indeed they’re pretty good and make both Mad Sweeney and Laura Moon more explicable; just… a bit of an oddity. All in all, it’s one hell of an episode, with Browning and Pablo Schreiber acting up a storm in what is almost a two-hander.

I guess we’ll be going back to Shadow next week, but with this and ‘Git Gone’ it’s apparent that the show is building a world that is bigger than its lead.

(1) Tregowan in the novel, but I guess that either Emily Browning, doubling up as Essie, couldn’t do a Cornish accent, or the Irish production lobby was stronger.

(2) Saleem has only a tangential role here, with the most important development for him being that, when given the likely location of the djinn, he abandons his prayer mat.

American Gods - 'A Murder of Gods'

So... a happy story?

In a very topical Coming to America, we open this week with a group of Mexicans crossing the Rio Grande. One falters in the water, but a long-haired man with a kind face walks on the water to rescue him. "You know my name," he assures the man, and light blossoms behind his head, but the light comes from the headlights of a posse of faceless killers, who clutch crucifixes and write holy slogans on the rifles that they use to gun down men, women, children, and even Mexican Jesus.

Elsewhere, Shadow's world is getting weirder by the day. Even as Wednesday uses the threat of the New Gods to hurry him away from any chance of meeting his wife again, a wound inflicted by some sort of walking treeoid becomes infested with a wooden being. People have always had 'a god shaped hole'(1) inside them, Wednesday explains, and trees were the first things that learned to fill it. He is evasive, however, as to what he and his ilk really are; perhaps, in the end, no-one really knows.

Vulcan, Virginia; where we love guns.

Wednesday takes Shadow to Vulcan, Virginia, to meet one of his potential big guns, as it were. Vulcan, god of the forge, has become a god of guns; the power of fire is now fire power. Industrial accidents and a cult of the gun are his meat and drink, and every shooting with his bullets – including those in the opening scene – a prayer to him. Veteran comic actor Corbin Bernsen plays Vulcan deadly straight, as he menaces Shadow with a hanging tree and revels in the power given him by every movie theatre massacre and NRA rally. He is as menacing as Byelobog, but full of force and vigour, and his talk of franchising his worship comes close to the rebranding offered by the New Gods.

Buddies.

Meanwhile, Laura is left behind at the diner, where Mad Sweeney makes her an offer. He'll find someone to properly resurrect her – in Kentucky – after which she will have no more need of the coin and can return it to him. They try to steal a taxi and thus end up travelling with former salesman Saleem, who is looking for his djinn. Mostly to fuck with Mad Sweeney, but also for her own reasons, Laura detours to Indiana where she looks through her mother's window, but does not stay.

Vulcan forges a blade for Wednesday, who realises that he has been betrayed by this one time comrade for the favour of the New Gods who have helped Vulcan to maintain his power. Vulcan calls Wednesday a martyr, but Wendesday insists that that honour goes to the one who joined his fight, forged him a blade and was then cut down. Shadow's reaction of utter horror as Wednesday first decapitates Vulcan and pushes him into a vat of molten steel to steal his power, before pissing into the vat to curse the entire factory and all it produces(2) is flawless.

As Shadow walks further into darkness, Laura finds a moment of light as she watches Saleem pray. "God is great," he tells her. "Life is great," she returns.

Affable evil to the hilt.

'A Murder of Gods' confirms two things: First, that Wednesday has no interest in surviving if it means adapting to the methods of the New Gods. He doesn't want to tap into the zeitgeist and feed on the attention of mortals directed to some icon or other. He wants the real deal; blood and iron and his name as a holy word, giving purpose as well as receiving veneration. And second, that just because they are modern, the New Gods are no kind of nice. I liken him to a more vital Byelobog, but Vulcan is actually much more sinister with his impersonal, uncaring drive to see weapons used, and that's New God to the hilt. As Wednesday notes, his new cult has nothing personal about it, no craftsmanship. The gun and the sword are the martial expressions of this division: One machined and mass produced, efficient and impersonal; the other hand-forged, very personal, but still a device for making people bleed and die.

In the parallel road trip, Saleem is one of the first to show something entirely new. He has hope; he has joy. He's been handed a new life driving a cab which someone took a shit in the back of, and he's loving it. He's looking for his djinn, but not for wishes or for power, and his outlook seems to be affecting Laura somewhat (Mad Sweeney less so.)

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this episode is that it is basically all new. Vulcan wasn't in the book at all, and neither was Laura's road trip. While recognising the need to expand the text for a TV series, I was concerned that the new material might be jarring, but this is pretty much spot on. I think my only complaint is that the Vulcan, Virginia gun cult seems to be made up, whereas the book content grew out of what was there. And it's not as if Vulcan doesn't have its story(3).

(1) Which any other week would have been title material.

(2) I strongly suspect that the curse on Vulcan's bullets will turn up later in the series.

(3) When the state of Virginia refused to pay to have the only bridge into and out of town repaired, they approached the Soviet Union for international aid. Virginia cut them a cheque.

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.

American Gods - 'Head Full of Snow'

Anubis.

Shadow ups his game and Wednesday runs a con, and there's surprisingly little blood this week, although I can't honestly say that no-one gets hurt.

We open with a Somewhere in America, as a Muslim woman who once loved stories of Ancient Egypt is escorted to her final rest by Anubis, who is lovely(1). 

Shadow encounters the youngest and least pronounceable of the Zorya sisters on the roof, while Wednesday turns on the charm with the oldest and least bullshitable. Zorya Polunochnaya asks Shadow for a kiss, something she has not had before, in exchange for a coin plucked from the moon. Wednesday kissed Zorya Vechernyaya, provoking a massive and portentous storm. During this storm, Shadow challenges Czernobog to another game of checkers on the same terms, offering a second blow in case the first isn't enough. He wins, because Czernobog plays the same game as before, forcing Czernobog to accompany Wednesday to Wisconsin, although the first blow of the hammer still stands, to be delivered after Wednesday's business is concluded.

"You're going to start off in that suit and I'm going to start off in this sweater
and it's still going to be sexy as all hell."

There is another run in with Mad Sweeny the Leprechaun, whose luck has turned bad after accidentally giving Shadow his lucky coin. No Bilquis this week, so the sex quota is met by the Djinn's story, in which a mild-mannered salesman has a passionate encounter with a djinn who drives a taxi, and the two end up swapping places(2). Props to the series for not skimping on the book's m/m sex scene having gone all in with Bilquis, with the resulting x-ray fire transference being hailed as one of the most powerful and graphic non-porno gay sex scenes of all time.

Wednesday then takes Shadow to rob a bank, which he does by swiping a load of deposit slips and pretending to be a security guard taking night deposits in lieu of a broken ATM. Shadow reluctantly helps out by visualising a snowstorm, which promptly appears in defiance of all meteorological predictions, and by answering a payphone when the police call to check Wednesday's less-than-bona fides. Despite his reticence, he shows a bit of a flair for the game.

Zorya Polunochnaya brings the ethereal floatiness this series was missing.

Mad Sweeny digs up Laura's grave to find his coin, but there is only an empty coffin with a coin-sized hole burned in the lid. Elsewhere, Shadow enters his motel room to find his dead wife waiting for him.

'Head Full of Snow' is an important episode, because a) this is not a series that deals in filler, and b) it represents Shadow's first conscious steps into the weird. Up to now he's been dragged into the divine realm a time or two, but when he steps up with a second challenge for Czernobog and later accepts that he might have made it snow, that is when he accepts that perhaps the world is mad, rather than him. Odin shows his dark side as he puts his moves on Zorya Vechernyaya, which is starkly at odds with the smiling conman image he works hard in the latter half of the episode.

American Gods continues a strong run, with not a god miscast so far (which is no small thing with an ensemble this big.) I can't help comparing it to the book, and I think it compares well. So far it's running very close to the original text, and in as much as I picture characters at all (for whatever reason, I rarely have strong images of book characters, which is a huge help when watching adaptations,) they all seem to fit.

(1) I'm not sure if Neil Gaiman has ever met a personification of death he didn't think was a sweetums.

(2) The Djinn appeared briefly in the last episode, wearing the salesman's suit for a meeting with Wednesday, so presumably this is a bit of a flashback.

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.

American Gods - 'The Bone Orchard'

Some casting is good. Some casting is bad. Ian McShane was born for this.

It's been a while in coming, but the Starz adaptation of Neil Gaiman's modern classic American Gods has arrived in the UK on Amazon Video.

'The Bone Orchard' adapts the opening chapters of the book, with protagonist Shadow Moon being released from prison early to attend his wife's funeral, and making his way across country with one suit and a credit card to do so. During the journey he encounters the shabby, one-eyed conman Wednesday, who seems to know a great deal about him and offers him a job. He gets into a fight with a seven foot tall, self-styled leprechaun, discovers that his wife was having an affair with his best friend (and that they died not only in the same car crash but in flagrante,) and accepts Wednesday's offer in spite of his better judgement.

Punching!

After the funeral, he is attacked by a rabid VR helmet and subjected to interrogation by a virtual young man, who orders his virtual goons to beat Shadow to actual death. He is cut down from a lynching rope as the goons are violently torn apart by an unseen assailant.

In addition, we open with a tale of stranded Vikings in an adaptation of one of the novel's 'Coming to America' segments, and have a brief diversion as a lonely online dater is consumed by the sex goddess Bilquis(1).

The series is stylish AF; moody and dark(2), with lots of half-muttered dialogue and dimly-lit – although not indistinct; this is quality darkness – scenes in the parts which follow Shadow's normal life. Where the action tips over into the realm of the gods, however, things get a little screwy, from the Red Lodge chic of Bilquis' boudoir to the Technical Boy's virtual limo, from the use of wildly inappropriate diegetic music(3) to signal a disconnect from normality to slow-motion violence in which incredible fountains of blood spray across the shot.

 

Granted, it's an edge look...

With 'The Bone Orchard', American Gods definitely establishes potential, but I don't think it's realised it yet. This is not to say there is nothing to like here, and oddly it's one of the more difficult scenes of the book that comes out best here. At the funeral, Shadow runs into his best friend's wife, Audrey, who is drunk off her arse and bitter as anything. Her awkward, angry attempt at revenge seduction is hard to read and hard to watch, in large part because what could be cringeworthy comes across as raw and real. The writing and direction deserve credit, but huge props to Ricky Whittle and Betty Gilpin for playing the absolute heck out of the scene. It is this quality of reality that pervades much of the series, and in particular marks the noir atmosphere of the real world and juxtaposes with the hyper-stylised god world. Perhaps the most telling lack in this opening episode is a scene set in the latter which compares to the funeral for impact, leaving the magical world seeming flat and unextraordinary by comparison to the mundane.

So, to paraphrase Calvin Candie, American Gods has my curiosity; it remains to be seen if it will up its game and truly get my attention.

(1) Pronounced here 'bill-kwiss', rather than as I have always heard it before 'bill-kiss'. I found that oddly distracting.
(2) Attorneys at Law.
(3) I'm trying to remember the particular instance that caught my attention, and I can't. That's going to bother me.