(May Contain Spoilers)
I appreciate the cinematography, directorial vision and acting of this series, but the story is SOOO confusing, I’m not sure if the timeline is linear or if it is jumping around. Ian McShane’s performance is astonishing, amazing, wonderful, I cannot praise him enough, everything just seems to come with ease. The battle between old gods and new has never been so watchable. Adapted by the Neil Gaiman novel of the same name American Gods follows the story of Shadow Moon (Ricky Whittle) who is released from prison early due to his wife’s sudden death from a car accident. On his way home Shadow meets Mr Wednesday (Ian McShane) who offers him a position to become his henchman/bodyguard. Throughout the series Wednesday tries to recruit old gods to fight in a war against the new, technological dependent gods.
After meeting Wednesday, Shadow has a bar brawl with Mad Sweeney (Pablo Schreiber) a leprechaun who plucks gold coins out the air. After winning the fight, Shadow makes his way back to his wife’s funeral where Audrey (Betty Gilpin), informs him that his wife, Laura (Emily Browning), died sucking on her husband’s dick. Despite Audrey’s attempts to shag Shadow on Laura’s grave as a last fuck-you, he resists and says a final goodbye to his wife flicking a gold coin onto her grave. When Sweeney wakes from his drunken slumber he realises that he accidently gave Shadow the coin that grants him luck, which resulted in bringing Laura back to life. Laura and Sweeney join forces to find Shadow so that she can complete her unfinished business with him, once she does that Sweeney will get his coin back.
In this bizarre modern world where gods walk amongst the people, it is revealed that there can be a god for anything as long as there is someone worshipping them. Exampled by Vulcan (Corbin Bernsen), a god embodying the American people who worship guns. The new gods are made up of Technical Boy (Bruce Langley), Media (Gillian Anderson) and The World (Crispin Glover) – assumed to be the world wide web – and have tried to give the old gods purpose as they slowly fade into the background, much to Mr Wednesday’s dismay. Shadow also has powers of his own, although we have not explicitly been told what they are, we see him control the weather and has a beaming orange glow around him, although only seen through the perspective of his dead-now-alive-maybe-zombie wife Laura.
The moments that don’t necessarily match up are the odd written stories that appear at the beginning of some of the earlier episodes, which seem to be either writing history or recording it. We are introduced to a lot of potential gods including death, war, as well as Bilquis (Yetide Badaki), a vagina-guzzling woman who confusing people into her vagina and feeds off their soul (which I have assumed is Shadows mother). We have been introduced to a lot of gods and situations, but there hasn’t been as much resolution or explanation, which has been frustrating as it felt that the series didn’t have as much of a story arch and there wasn’t much of an arch to speak of for Shadow and it was played at one tone of does he believe and will he believe. The end of the series sees Laura reunite with Shadow, Wednesday recruit the old gods he needed to begin a war and Shadow to believe.
I did enjoy the series for the moody tone, gore, and the vagina-guzzling woman alone! However, felt that the overall story arch of the series and Shadow particularly was slow and didn’t see much resolution at the end of series one. It is safe to say that I will be watching series two to see if I can find the answers to the questions asked in series one. I would recommend this watch, however, would take a warning before watching that you may be offended if you are a religious person. Mesmerizing, shocking and baffling.
Avaliable now on Amazon Prime.
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