‘American Gods’ Recap, Season 1, Episode 5: The Stars Are Out Tonight

If you’re going to bring a character back from the dead, the fact that Emily Browning plays her is as good a reason as any. “Lemon Scented You,” this week’s episode of American Gods, leans heavily on the young Australian actor; You might say it depends on her Laura Moon body and soul, if the state of those two elements of her existence weren’t so dubious. In the long conversation with her husband Shadow (Ricky Whittle) that kicks off the episode following its odd animated prologue, Laura must appear as both familiar and alien, seductive and repellent, an impossible blessing and an unwelcome curse. She has to do it all in the nude for much of the time, too. Browning is a preposterously good-looking human being who’s certainly fearless in that particular department, but the nudity itself is part of something deeper in the performance. Like the stitches that literally keep her reanimated body in once piece, Laura is attempting to knit herself back together.

When she tells Shadow she still loves him, she’s convincing herself as much as him. When she explains how little her infidelity with his best friend really means, she’s not just offering excuses or even sincere explanations, but attempting to give meaning to sunlight that radiates from Shadow whenever she sees him now. Thanks to last week’s spotlight episode, Laura’s the show’s most fully developed character, which means that we understand why her death and resurrection hasn’t changed her more fundamentally; She’s never had the lust for life, no pun intended, required for such a transformation. (This is what makes her conversation with Shadow so much more convincing than her out-of-character taunting and torture of Mad Sweeney when he comes to collect the magic coin that brought her back to life.) Browning portrays Laura’s slightly pained attempts to play everything off as blasé with a flat voice and a little “it is what it is” shake of the head so constant she practically looks like a bobblehead doll. Laura may not really buy it, and Shadow (played by Ricky Whittle, who picks a single facial expression for the encounter and sticks with it) may not buy it either, but she needs them to agree to pretend to buy it. The power of belief, baby.

That’s the key ingredient in the conversation that provides the episode’s opposite bookend, the one between Mr. Wednesday and his “new god” rivals in the police station where Wednesday and Shadow are brought for questioning. “It isn’t our fault they found other ways to occupy their time,” says the Hollywood goddess Media, played by Gillian Anderson. “That’s all you do — occupy their time,” Wednesday retorts. “We gave back, we gave them meaning.”

There’s a self-defeating irony in this claim, for this episode in particular. If all these new gods do is help us kill time, nothing deeper, why bother dressing Gillian Anderson up as Marilyn Monroe in this scene and (cue Tumblr gifsets!) David Bowie in another? Doesn’t the mental depth charge that the appearance of those icons ignites in the viewer — an effect clearly intended by the show itself, or it wouldn’t have bothered casting Anderson, an icon in her own right thanks to her work on its weird-America antecedent The X-Files — depend precisely on them meaning more to us than mere distraction?

Then again, perhaps it’s better of American Gods really does take Wednesday’s position in this argument. Its incorporation of Monroe’s tragic death, here described by the woman herself as a CIA assassination, is easier to justify if the show fundamentally disregards her value to her fans. (Not for nothing, but another of American Gods’ antecedents, that little show called Twin Peaks, had a more humane outlook on the matter.) So too is its cringey Bowie scene, an act of revivification as creepy and gross in its own way as what Laura Moon is going through. With an egregious pastiche of his Scary Monsters period playing in the background courtesy of composer Brian Reitzell, whose tacky omnipresent bombast is one of the series’ most distracting elements, the Bowie-deity incorporates lyrical snippets from the musician’s actual songs into its conversation with fellow new god Technical Boy. Every one of the lyrics is so much better than the dialogue — every one of the songs is so much better than the show — that, again, it all becomes easier to swallow if Fuller and company regard the originals as the mental junk food Wednesday implies they are.

Now that I’ve beaten the shit out of the show for three indulgent paragraphs on this point, it’s important to note that it’s fallacious just to assume the show’s position and Wednesday’s are one and the same. Isn’t he something of an unreliable narrator, as Mad Sweeney asserts to Laura in this very episode? Isn’t the whole show about the power of belief, the same force behind both gods and superstars? Isn’t author Neil Gaiman’s entire schtick based on The Magic of Storytelling — a form of wizardry with which the former Norma Jean Baker and David Jones would be quite familiar, seeing how they used it to transform themselves first and foremost?

Yes, yes, and yes — which makes the story’s stacking of the deck against the new gods in favor of the old all the harder to parse. There’s simply no comparison, audience-sympathy-wise, between the salt-of-the-earth old gods and the sneering Technical Boy, the shape-shifting Media, and the sinister Mr. World. Even the casting of that character feels like a tell. Crispin Glover’s presence as a refined weirdo in a nice suit will get a lot of attention, and I suppose he’s entertaining enough, but he just made me think of Mads Mikkelsen in Fuller’s Hannibal — a better performance in a better show, but one that wouldn’t work here simply because of Mikkelsen’s old-world accent. (Which reminds me, why do the Middle Eastern, Eastern European, and Irish deities we’ve encountered sound like immigrants, while Wednesday and Orlando Jones’s Mr. Nancy don’t?) When you play the game of gods, at least try to play fair.

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.

Stream American Gods, "Lemon Scented You" on Starz