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American Gods

This week, American Gods took a step in the right direction. Only a step, mind you. Not that I’d be surprised if fans of the show look back on “Head Full of Snow,” its third episode, as the one where the series came into its own, a la “College” from The Sopranos Season One.

The continuing adventures of Shadow Moon (Ricky Whittle) and Mr. Wednesday (Ian McShane) aren’t all that different from their previous ones, though. Once again, Shadow bets his life on a game of checkers against the Slavic death god Czernobog (Peter Stormare) and butts heads with the intimidatingly large leprechaun Mad Sweeney (Pablo Schreiber). Once again, Wednesday attempts to beguile Zorya Vechernyaya (Cloris Leachman), the eldest of the three prophetic Zorya sisters. Once again, Shadow’s wife Laura (Emily Browning) haunts his memories, although thanks to Mad Sweeney’s purloined lucky coin, which Shadow tossed on her grave, she now also haunts his hotel room.

True, there are a few cool wrinkles to their end of the story this week, like the Better Call Saul–worthy scheme Wendesday cooks up to rob a bank simply by dressing up as a security guard and convincing patrons that the deposit slot is out of order, so they should leave their cash with him. Or like Zorya Polunochnaya (Erika Kaar), the youngest of the three sisters, plucking the moon from the sky to give Shadow a lucky coin of his own

But it’s the side quests and detours that pack the biggest wallop this time around. The show begins with a striking stand-alone sequence about a woman who dies, unbeknownst to herself, after falling while reaching for an ingredient on a too-high shelf. She learns the truth about her situation from Anubis (Chris Obi), whose sonorous voice and placid demeanor help keep her on an even keel as he escorts her to the land of the dead. A lot of American Gods’ visual spectacle is all sizzle and no steak; this is one of the first times its flamboyantly artificial digital trickery really conveyed something cosmic.

In an equally self-contained vignette, a down-on-his-luck immigrant salesman named Salim (Omid Abtahi) strikes up a conversation with his cab driver (Mousa Kraish, who’s going to be a very hot ticket indeed after this week) after a disastrously abortive attempt at a job interview. Before long he discovers that the driver is a Jinn, a fiery-eyed spirit best known in Western lore as the basis for the wish-granting genie. (We glimpsed him before, coming out of a meeting with Wednesday.) Bonded by their unhappy experiences here in the States, the two have a tender yet torrid one-night stand, which begins with holding hands and ends with full-on transmutational cosmic desert fire orgasms.

Once again this feels a little too close to Under the Skin for comfort, but still, not bad, right?

But in both sequences, the faults of the modern-fantasy writing style pioneered by original American Gods author Neil Gaiman, both in his prose work and in his mega-popular Sandman comics, remain visible cracks in the edifice. The opening sequence begins with the soon to be dead woman talking to herself out loud about her good-for-nothing son, her wild grandkids, and the meal she’s cooking; It’s so needlessly direct and explicit that you can all but see the comic-book word balloons or caption boxes floating around every line of dialogue. Her acceptance of her supernatural visitor feels convincing enough, though, perhaps because she just died and that seems like the kind of experience that would leave one feeling particularly open-minded about how the world works.

The jinn sequence has no such excuse. It’s just hard to swallow the idea that a novelty salesman in a powder-blue suit who just dutifully sat in an office for seven hours waiting for a meeting with a guy who never even bothered to show up would simply roll with the punches when he discovers his cab driver’s eyeballs are on fire. I mean, does he strike you as the adventurous type? But the blithe treatment of the extraordinary as commonplace is a hallmark of Gaiman’s work and that of all the writers who followed in his footsteps, both in the Vertigo comics line built around his characters and in the world of fantastic fiction at large. This dude has to be okay with meeting (and eventually fucking) a supernatural entity within seconds of discovering his existence, because otherwise there’s no story, is there? Granted, this is in part just a genre convention: Normies react differently to supernatural beings in urban fantasy stories than they do in, say, superhero or horror. But it’s always sat wrong with me, and no amount of red-hot (literally and figuratively) sex is gonna set it right. (The less said about the decision to superimpose the subtitles for their conversation against gigantic flowing Arabic script, the better.)

At least creators and writers Bryan Fuller and Michael Green grant Shadow Moon the concession of innate skepticism. When confronted with uncanny coincidences, magic tricks, vivid visions, lucid dreams, sudden snowstorms he telepathically initiated, and the like, his reaction is the one I think most of us would have: There’s probably some explanation for all this other than, y’know, the gods walking among us or what have you. Indeed, what’s bothering him most isn’t the idea that this stuff is real, but that it feels disturbingly fake. “Delusions feel real — that’s what makes it a delusion,” he tells Mr. Wednesday in a fit of exasperation. “None of this feels real. It feels like a dream.” There’s an interesting point being made here about how the introduction of impossible events into everyday life would make those events feel more impossible, not less, by contrast with their surroundings.

But the idea is undercut by the rest of the pair’s exchange, which comes across like a series of disconnected aphorisms with little to no bearing on one another. A sample: “The one thing that scares me: being forgotten. I can survive a lot of things, but not that.” “The best part of memory is mostly forgetting.” “We remember what’s important to us.” That feels like a page from a book of quotations or an order form for inspirational posters, not a conversation; by the end I wouldn’t be surprised to hear Mr. Wednesday say “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take” or some such bullshit. It takes aim at profundity and misses the mark entirely.

If only the cameoing Scott Thompson were so lucky. When he picks up Mad Sweeney from the side of the road, recognizing a fellow alcoholic in need of help, he gets into a car accident that leaves him with a steel bar right through the face for his troubles.

A little more of this madness and a little less speechifying about the meaning of life and the nature of reality, please. We can get that from any goth teenager’s comic book collection.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, the Observer, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.