REVIEW: American Gods, Episode 102
Like the pilot, “The Secret of Spoon” starts with a little sideline scene, but that still fits completely to the story. A few centuries ago, in a boat full of slaves, a black man prays to his God for help, and in fact a God appears, but probably not the one he was praying for. This way we meet Mr. Nancy, short for Anansi, African trickster God. Like any other God (as we saw in the first moments of the last episode), what Nancy wants is death, sacrifices in his name to keep his belly full. What I like about tricksters in shows and movies (at least in the good ones) is that they usually trick people by telling them the truth, and that is exactly what he does. He tells those soon-to-be slaves all about their not-so-bright future once they get to America. And that makes them burn the ship, killing all those aboard. Pleased, Nancy manages to get back to shore, in a spider form, ready to continue with his tricks.
But Nancy isn’t the only God we meet in this episode. When Shadow goes shopping for Wednesday, he crosses paths with Media who is Mass Media and Entertainment personified. This time she appears as Lucy Ricardo from I Love Lucy. Even after unplugging all the TV’s in the store, Media is still there and she is focused on hiring Shadow, welcoming him to the “winners team” saying that Wednesday is “old news”. I love when she says that the screen is the altar and what people sacrifice to her is time and attention. There are definitely a lot of differences between old and new Gods, but it is really interesting to think about it and realize that maybe sacrificing attention may be better than sacrificing lives. When you sacrifice a life, it may be a powerful sacrifice, but that’s it. But when you sacrifice attention, you do it today, tomorrow and you also did it yesterday. This may prove that the New Gods may have an upper hand. Or not.
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It was also nice seeing how old-fashioned Wednesday is, which could not be in any other way. It was hilarious when he threw the phone off the car window and when he said they would not be using highways, ever. In this episode we also have one of the first clues to Wednesday’s real identity. When Czernobog gets home, he calls him “Wotan”. I am not going to talk about it here (at least not now) because I don’t want to spoil those people that want to find out who he is in the context of the show, but if you do want to find out about it, just google “Wotan”, and you will find it easily.
We are also introduced in this episode to the mysterious Zorya sisters (who come from Slavic mythology). If you, like me, had never heard of them don’t worry because who they are and what they do is explain in the next episode (pretty close to the beginning if I am not mistaken). Apart from these, we also meet Czernobog, who, as a cow killer, also doesn’t like modern tools very much (the details in the explanation he gives are beyond weird and scary, even for someone whose name can be translated as “Black God”).
Czernobog challenges Shadow to a game of checkers and they eventually make a wager that is only worthy of the “Black God” himself: if Shadow wins, Czernobog will go with Wednesday and help him on his quest, but if Shadow loses, he gets to smash his head and brain with a hammer. I think this is the moment Shadow kind of starts to believe the things around him. After seeing Media he was a bit reluctant about the whole thing, but then he sees Czernobog’s hammer bleeding and he just gives up on trying to find a reasonable explanation for everything, because “The world is either crazy or you are”, like Wednesday said.
I think it is also nice to reflect about the title of this episode, because unlike the premiere’s title, this one is not as much straightforward. While Czernobog and Shadow are playing checkers, the “Black God” starts singing a song and after a little digging I found the lyrics:
My love made the sweetest coffee with no sugar at all
She only stirred with her spoon and it was done
Now my drink is bitter, the secret of spoon forgotten
When my voice breaks on this song, remember all love gone
And drink the bitter coffee
And drink the bitter coffee.
We see earlier that the Zorya sisters can read the future through what stays in the cup after one drinks his coffee, and that is what she does with Shadow. But after saying she will do it, Wednesday gets a spoon and mixes his coffee, maybe making it impossible for Zorya Vechernyaya to read his future, and therefore, that secret is forever lost to the spoon.
Overall, this episode was great. It was nice being introduced to new characters, especially knowing that each one has a meaning of its own. This way, I will give it a 8.3/10 (I don’t want to overrate it, because it is only going to get better and better).
Stay tuned for my next review of episode 103 entitled “Head Full of Snow”.
REVIEW: American Gods, Episode 101
As a book lover and a fan of “American Gods”, I know that this show is based on a book with the same name. But as a book lover, my “to-read list” is close to infinite, so I didn’t read this one yet. But I will. Hopefully before S2 starts.
The pilot, entitled “The Bone Orchard”, begins with the main character, Shadow Moon, an ex-con, in prison. He makes a phone call to his wife, Laura Moon, and we find out he is going to be released 5 days after, but Shadow is not all too happy about it because he has a strange feeling that something bad is about to happen. After that, Laura replies with a really interesting quote: “Waiting for the sky to fall is going to cause more bother than the sky actually falling”. Sometimes we worry too much about something that turns out didn’t deserve that much concern and that is what this quote is all about.
The next day Shadow wakes up to find out that his wife had died in a car crash and so they will release him a few days early. And that is when the action begins. He goes to the airport but finds out he has to wait a day to get a flight to the town he lives in. When the time comes, Shadow enters the plane and, because of a mistake with the sits (his was taken) he finds himself in first class, next to a very strange man who calls himself Mr. Wednesday. There, they have an interesting conversation about belief and faith. Wednesday asks Shadow how he thinks the plane flies: for technical reasons or because people want so hard to believe the plane will continue to fly instead of crashing that that is exactly what the plane does. In a show about Gods (old Gods and new ones) it is to expect that faith and belief will get to be an important subject, and the show doesn’t disappoint in that area, since there are some deep conversations about it, and also some scenes that relate to it, like for example the scene we meet the Goddess of Love. This scene was, in my point of view, very weird. I won’t describe it because I wouldn’t even know where I’d begin. But it became obvious that Bilquis was feeding on that man’s belief and worship.
Shadow wakes up on the plane to find out that, because of the storm, the plane had to perform an emergency landing and so he decides to continue his journey by car. He stops in a bar (maybe to stretch his legs) and, call it fate, he finds Mr. Wednesday once again, but this time he isn’t alone. Shadow meets a man who calls himself Leprechaun but, apparently, others call Mad Sweeney. Wednesday offers Shadow a job and, to prove that he will never take it, Shadow shows him a coin and says that if it is heads he will work for Wednesday, but if it is tails Wednesday must stop bugging him with that. After rigging the coin to make sure it is tails, Shadow tosses the coin, but apparently his con tricks have seen better days, because this time it wasn’t tails, meaning that Shadow found himself a job.
After finally getting to Eagle Point and after finding out that his best friend also died in the same crash his wife did, Shadow attends Laura’s funeral. There he finds Audrey (his friend’s wife) and she tells him that they had been having an affair for a while then and that is why they were together in the car. When the funeral was over, Shadow was walking to the motel he and Wednesday were staying in, and he found a very strange object that attacked him. Afterwards, Shadow founds himself in the strangest limousine where he meets a boy (the first New God we find in our screen: Technical Boy, God of technology). After not answering his questions, the God of technology orders his faceless minions to kill Shadow. And that is where I stop understanding what is going on. Technical Boy’s henchmen start beating Shadow, tie a rope around his neck and hung him in a tree. Then there is blood everywhere, the faceless guys start being ripped in half by an invisible force and the rope that was linking Shadow and the tree gets cutted allowing him to survive and fight another day.
Since the devil’s in the details, here are some I liked:
- Maybe it is unfair to describe the very scene of the episode as a detail, but I don’t know what else to call it. In it we see that Gods have been around for a long time and that they love sacrifices in their name;
- Before finding out his wife was dead, Shadow has a dream where he is in sort of a forest full of bones and skulls (maybe this explains the title of the episode). In the dream, Shadow is slapped by a tree. Since trees are supposed to represent life, I feel like the dream means Shadow is about to gets screwed over, since it is never a good sign when life slaps you in the face. It was from this point on that the actions started and that Shadow’s life began to turn in unimaginable ways;
- It was also nice (especially for the ones that are rewatching the season, like me) to see that during Laura’s funeral there was a malfunction in the machine that was lowering her casket, almost like she didn’t want to stay dead.
It was a good start to the show, but I feel like the synopsis they gave to it and to the book has a few spoilers since there is nothing in this episode (or even in other episodes to come) that suggests that this is a show about old and new Gods in the eve of a battle. But it is in fact a great idea to a story, because if what makes a God is people’s belief in him, then Gods we worship today are completely different from the Gods that used to be worshipped. Nowadays we tend to believe more in what we see, so things like information, technology, media… We don’t exactly worship that in a God like way, but we don’t have to.
The special effects in this show are also really good. In this episode this is more present in that last scene, since it doesn’t have many more, but the rest of the season is full of amazing scenarios. We also get to see some great things in the opening of the show (no wonder the show is nominated for Emmy of Outstanding Special Visual and Outstanding Main Title Design).
This was a nice episode, but it wasn’t the best of the season, so I will give it an 8.0/10.
Stay tuned for my review of episode 102 “The Secret of Spoons”.