[rating=7.00] “Git Gone”
“Then, one day you find out Santa isn’t real, then the Tooth Fairy isn’t real, and there’s no farm upstate for dogs.”
A quick aside before I really dig into this week’s installment of American Gods, but when I initially saw the premiere episode, weeks before it aired, I was still mired in Neil Gaiman’s novel which the show is based. While I understand the necessity for drastic changes when adapting source material, the hyper-stylized, almost cartoonish violence of the show’s opening scene was jarring, to say the least, even if it was clear that co-creator Bryan Fuller was onto something much more ambitious.
By the time I started watching regularly on Sunday evenings, with some distance between myself and the novel, it became easier to appreciate what the show was aiming for, and how it was translating itself onto the small screen. That being said, this week’s installment, “Git Gone,” boldly diverges from Gaiman’s text, both in terms of the narrative, and how it’s developing the character of the late Laura Moon (Emily Browning), to mixed results.
Most notably, the first half of “Git Gone” goes way out of its way to establish how Laura met Shadow (Ricky Whittle), their courtship, and most importantly, the emptiness between them. The latter is what leads Laura to convince Shadow to rob the Egyptian-themed casino where she worked (which comes up again). This is what led to Shadow’s imprisonment, and indirectly the circumstances of her affair and, later, her death.
Of course, this is still a Gaiman story, so something like death isn’t going to keep her from being integral to the story, even as it was noted that she wasn’t nearly as prominent in the early episodes as she was in the novel that covered the same basic part of the narrative.
While their backstory was an interesting idea, spending the first half of the episode did tend to drag the overall story down, piling on too much show-and-tell exposition to keep the momentum going, despite giving Laura some extra dimension as a self-destructive, bug spray-huffing character prior to coming war between the new and old gods.
It isn’t until the car crash that kills her and her lover, Robbie (Dane Cook, in some surprising stunt casting), that things started to get interesting. Having established herself as an atheist, and characteristics closer to that of nihilism, the Egyptian-themed casino was enough to have Anubis (Chris Obi) show up and, like he did last week, weigh her heart against a feather.
Unlike the experience Mrs. Fadil (Jacqueline Antaramian) had last week, Laura’s heart sinks to the bottom of the scale, while she stand there openly unapologetic for any of it. While Anubis insists she enter a world of unending darkness, she’s suddenly plucked from limbo and re-emerges from her grave as a corpse, autopsy scars and all.
At this point the episode pulls a Back To The Future 2 on us, showing Shadow lynched by Technical Boy’s (Bruce Langley) goons, which was the scene that ended the first episode. We now watch as Laura intervenes, not only saving the life of the widow she left behind, but adding what seemed like the requisite amount of over-the-top gore for the week. It all at once seemed a little silly, even with her kicking a goon right in the nuggets so hard his skull and spine burst through the top of his head.
Afterwards, as she ambles through her hometown desperately looking for the crafts needed to repair her right arm, severed during the battle, she reconnects with her friend Audrey (Betty Gilpin) while shitting out embalming fluid in her bathroom. It was an unusual scene (to the say the least), but I honestly can’t decide if it was ultimately redeemed by the underlying humanity to it all. Hours later and I’m still on the fence about it.
Anyway, just as her and Audrey form an uneasy living/dead alliance, despite the clear animosity Audrey has for her — rightfully so, they cross paths with Anubis and Mr. Ibis (Demore Barnes), who offer to repair Laura’s corpse to a near-living state. Their motives are still unclear, though I’m wagering it has something to do with keeping Shadow in the game. (Also worth noting, while Ian McShane’s Mr. Wednesday was nowhere to be seen, he was very much present throughout). What is clear is Anubis’ promise to “return Laura to the darkness” as soon as everything is all over
What proved to be the episodes best moment, though, was Laura referring to Shadow as “the light of her life,” a sentence smattered with irony considering how she treated him when they were together, and the fact that she’s now, you know, dead. This, coupled with Laura’s occasional POV of Shadow as a glowing beacon just over the horizon, was able to secure in some much-needed sympathy for her character, someone who seems willing to redeem herself in death simply to make it up to her husband.
As she ends up making it to Shadow’s motel room, she waits for him on the bed to greet him, ending this episode on the exact same cliffhanger as the week before, this time with a weightier backstory that gave some real weight to her greeting of “Hello, puppy.”
