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American Gods

I’m never sure whether to be pleased or annoyed when a mediocre show finally airs an episode that warrants the praise it’s been getting from the start. On one hand, as a critic — and no one believes me when I say this, but it’s true — I’m in the liking-things business, and getting to experience art I enjoy is the delight that drives my whole career. On the other, climbing aboard an already-in-full-swing bandwagon for a show that I sincerely believed to be bad makes me feel dirty, at least until its future trajectory can be determined.

And one episode is definitely not enough to make that determination. Take Noah Hawley’s Legion, about as apples-to-apples a comparison with Bryan Fuller’s American Gods as you can get. Like American Gods, Legion was a new project from a television visionary fresh from a stunningly successful and unique adaptation of outside source material, with Fargo standing in for Hannibal. Like American Gods, Legion was itself an adaptation, of work by influential comic-book creators, with Neil Gaiman standing in for Chris Claremont and Bill Sienkiewicz (themselves working off concepts created by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee). Like American Gods, Legion saw the artifice and spectacle present in the showrunners’ previous work cranked up to astronomical new heights. And like American Gods, Legion waited until its fourth episode to do something worth the extravagant praise that had been heaped upon it already.

The commonalities don’t stop there. Legion’s fourth installment, by far the best episode of the season, was helmed by Larysa Kondracki, who took over from creator Hawley and go-to director Michael Uppendahl to give the show’s visual and narrative tics genuine wonder, terror, and power. She’d previously directed one of the best episodes of another series’ second season: Better Call Saul’s “Fifi,” aka the one that began with like a four-minute continuous shot of a truck crossing the border. “Git Gone,” episode four of American Gods, is directed by Craig Zobel, stepping in for Fuller’s primary collaborator David Slade and toning down the “gee whiz look at all the shit we can do!” pyrotechnics to a far more restrained and lacerating level. Zobel had also previously directed one of the best episodes of another series’ second season: The Leftovers’ “International Assassin,” the divisive but increasingly series-defining trip to what was either the afterlife or a hallucinatory approximation thereof. Perhaps it’s excessive to spell all this out, but the thin line between coincidence and fate is much on the mind of many shows these days, American Gods included, so what the heck.

“Git Gone” is effectively an American Gods prequel, focused not on Shadow Moon or any of his supernatural associates but on his wife, Laura. What a great decision. The striking and talented actor Emily Browning plays her as a fundamentally unhappy person, and it’s an unhappiness that not even her whirlwind romance and basically sincere affection for Shadow, whom she meets when he badly attempts to rip off the casino where she works as a dealer, can lift. It’s hard to overstate how much the show needed this kind of myth-busting. Amid beautiful witches pulling the moon from the sky and randy sex gods and fuck demons, a display of how love and sex don’t necessarily change your life for the better is a welcome injection of actual emotional reality.

Every other aspect of the show seems to follow Laura/Browning’s lead. This begins with the performances. Ricky Whittle is the best he’s been yet as the pre-prison, pre-Mr. Wednesday Shadow; he’s much more convincing as a charming lowlife trying to go legit than he is as a bereaved fish out of water getting world-warping magic tossed in his face every five seconds. (He and Browning have intense physical chemistry too.) Betty Gilpin returns as Audrey, Laura’s best friend and the woman whose husband Laura cheated with, and died in the midst of said cheating, while Shadow was in jail. Once again, she’s fucking magnificent, a live wire of grief, anger, and bitter black humor. Her eyes seem perpetually red and wet, like she’s immediately to one side or the other of a nasty crying jag; she takes Laura’s return as the sick cosmic prank (complete with toilet humor and dick jokes) it really is.

Even comedian Dane Cook excels as Robbie, Shadow’s friend, Audrey’s husband, and Laura’s lover. The moments in which Laura forces him to confront the shittiness of his actions (“Fuck, I’m sorry,” he says when they first kiss in a moment of weakness; “Are you?” she challenges him, “Are you sorry?”) are among the realest and rawest of the hour, both for Browning’s brutally resigned delivery and Cook’s shamefaced acceptance of his complicity and desire.

On a visual level, I can’t tell you how refreshing it is to watch the show keep its camera in place and allow these talented actors to sell the material all on their own, or for it to keep its CGI powder dry until it’s really needed. Zobel and cinematographer Darran Tiernan do amazing work just with capturing the light on Browning’s elfin, angular face, whether during sex scenes or suicide attempts. When you’ve spent the better part of the episode watching Laura make her anhedonic way through an unfulfilling life, marriage, and affair, the cosmic vista into which the god Anubis brings her after her death, or the absolute bloodfest that ensues when she rises from the dead and winds up rescuing Shadow from Technical Boy’s minions (yep, that was her), or the sight of her walking around with her severed arm in one hand like the world’s most exhausted zombie — these things have oomph, for perhaps the first time.

So yeah, I’m pleased. This was a fine episode of television. To get back to Legion, as I mentioned, that fourth episode was never topped, nor did anything even come close; the season closed out with one of its weakest installments. Much about this episode — the time frame, the main character, the subject matter, the director — leads me to suspect it’s a one-off, and that we’ll be back to the sloppy status quo next week. But like I said, I’m in the liking-things business, and I liked American Gods this week a great deal.