Spoiler alert: this blog is for people watching American Gods on Starz in the US and Amazon Prime in the UK. Don’t read on unless you have watched episode two.
From a lynching to cranial demolition by Slavic hammer, the opening instalments of American Gods have not been kind to our hero. This episode begins with Shadow Moon resolving matters in his home town, boxing away his belongings, and seeing visions of his dead wife and his dead friend’s penis. After that he joins Wednesday in travelling to Chicago where he meets Wednesday’s old pal, Czernobog. Wednesday needs Czernobog’s hammer but negotiations aren’t easy – Shadow Moon is forced to wager his life for that hammer over a game of checkers instead. And let’s say the result of that game isn’t entirely optimal.
For a man about to have his skull destroyed by an implement the size of a railway sleeper, Shadow Moon seems pretty calm as the episode closes. Maybe this is because his journey through Bryan Fuller’s spangly, bloody adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Hugo award-winning novel has sent the hero on a path of discovery. Shadow Moon now accepts that there is something happening to him that is out of the ordinary – supernatural in fact. “If there’s a world under a world, fuck it. It’s good,” he says ahead of the checker match. Nothing like a dose of dick hallucinations to make one a tad philosophical.
That Shadow Moon has come to realise things are not entirely as they seem is not all down to him, of course. His employer Wednesday, or Wotan if you will, has been easing him in with elliptical explanations and the odd bit of sorcery – like switching on the radio with a thrum of his fingers. Then there was Shadow Moon’s encounter with a reincarnated Lucille Ball in a supermarket. This Lucy, stuck behind a TV screen (and played by Gillian Anderson), defies the laws of physics and first pleads, then threatens, Shadow Moon to work with her. Curiouser and curiouser.
Lucy (known as Media) refers to Wednesday and his pals as “the old guys”. We’re beginning to see that there are two rival camps scrapping over Shadow Moon, and with each other. On the one side, we have Wednesday, Czernobog and last week’s Leprechaun Mad Sweeney. On the other, there’s Media and perhaps the Technical Boy too (Media certainly seems to know him). The reason for the two gangs’ enmity is unknown; perhaps they’re fighting for dominion over the realms of heaven or, I don’t know, the elixir of eternal grooming.
This week’s was a slower episode – perhaps only to be expected after the opening firework show. We got two strong cameo performances: first from Anderson, who gives just the right tint of menace to her convincing Lucille Ball (or Lucy Ricardo, as Media points out, everyone having a character to play); the second from Peter Stormare as Czernobog. Stormare, still best known for his turn as a bumbling but brutal killer in the Coen brothers’ Fargo, gleefully slobs it out as an eternal abattoir worker undercover in the Windy City. Every hearty drag on a cigarette or drunken leer is slowly indulged, the whole character so greasy you can feel him sticking to your skin. Plus he has a hammer that bleeds all over the table – quite the dinner-party guest.
The deity digest
Ian McShane’s Wednesday was pretty much present in every scene, but didn’t reveal much more of himself beyond a taste for disgusting bucket hats. It was Czernobog who called him Wotan, AKA Woden, AKA Odin, AKA the one-eyed king of the Norse gods. He’s king of the old guys, that means, but it seems increasingly as if he is in a state of uncertainty. He requires Czernobog and his hammer for a scrap that appears to be vital.
Czernobog is also a God in real-world mythology, a minor Slavic deity only ever cited in Christian sources. Czernobog is the black god (as he observes to Shadow Moon, it was always his lot given the shade of his skin) while his brother Belobog is the white. It may have been that Wednesday would have preferred to ask a favour of Belobog than his brother. Shadow Moon might have preferred it that way too.
In a wonderful prologue we are introduced to Anansi, a figure from African folklore and a holder of great knowledge. Anansi is both a tarantula and a flamboyantly dressed jazz-era African American. The outfit seems especially unusual as Anansi is wearing it on a 17th-century slave ship, explaining to the African men therein the full extent of the horrors that await them in the New World. He does so rather effectively, to the point that when he magically pops their chains, the slaves instantly go about setting fire to their captors and their own boat, killing themselves rather than continue the shameful process.
We also return to Bilquis. In the real world, her name is that given to the Queen of Sheba by Islamic scholars. They derived the term from the word “concubine”. This might help explain why we were back in her bed this week, watching her again devour people with a voracious vagina. To be fair to Bilquis, she doesn’t seem to discriminate; men and women of all races were encouraged up there. Perhaps, like Scarlett Johansson in the film Under the Skin (she plays an alien who first seduces then reduces men to their base components so that she might refuel her spaceship), all that devouring is for a greater purpose.
Divine lines
“The only good news is that the tobacco your grandkids grow for free will give a whole load of motherfucking white people cancer.” Anansi explaining a small upside to slavery to his captive audience.
“I want you in my camp with us. We’re the coming thing, we are already here. We are now and tomorrow and tomorrow. And he isn’t even yesterday any more.” Media gives Wednesday the sharp end of her tongue in her pitch to Shadow Moon.
“Strange is a new language and what we’re doing is vocabulary building.” Wednesday to Shadow Moon over lunch.
“No cow-killing stories during dinner!” Granny Czernobog.
Some questions
• If we have old gods fighting new gods, what are they fighting over?
• How buff is Ricky Whittle and how do they make his skin look so sparkly?
• What was happening to Wednesday’s dandelion in space? And is that the same space where the naked Robbie manifested itself. Is this the world inside the world? Or is it all dreams? Or does that mean the same thing?
