• July 28, 2017
• Leave a Comment on REVIEW: American Gods, Episode 103
• American Gods, Reviews, Starz, Television
• American Gods, Head Full of Snow, review, Television

REVIEW: American Gods, Episode 103

American Gods‘ episode 103, “Head Full of Snow”, begins, as usual, with a little sideline scene that reflects mostly the banality and unpredictability of death. Just when one is trying to get something from a high shelf, Anubis comes knocking at your door. Literally. When the woman, Mrs. Fadil, finds out she is dead, a lot of questions go through her mind, but none of them truly matter, because ultimately the little things are important too. “They will find me like this” and “they won’t even taste my meal” are two thoughts that go through her mind. It is also nice to notice how calm both people in this scene are. No bad words, no tempers lost, the conversation just flows naturally (there may not be anything more natural than death). After climbing an almost infinite staircase, Anubis and Mrs. Fadil arrive to what we may refer as heaven, and the cinematography in this scene is beyond incredible. There he weights her heart against a feather. In this moment we see the concern on Mrs. Fadil’s face because she knows that if her heart is heavier, things will probably go wrong. She starts saying all the bad things she did over the years and, because they weren’t so bad, she passed the test and was probably able to find peace.

Before I get into the major storyline, I will talk about another scene also more to the sideline, but that will be more relevant a few episodes from now. Later in the episode, we meet Salim, a guy that waits an entire day for a reunion that didn’t happen. Even though that day sucked and that most people would start a murder spree because of the way they were treated, Salim never once loses his temper. In the end of the day he gets a taxi to go back to the hotel and, because his eyes are in flames, Salim finds out the taxi driver is a Jinn. Even though the Jinn says repeatedly that he does not grant wishes, Salim invites him over to his room, where we see an intense sex scene, and on the next day the Jinn is gone. Turns out the Jinn was wrong, because he granted Salim’s wish to be free of all the things he had to do, to be free of his life. Now has a Jinn, Salim gets the other guy’s clothes, like he was completely taking his identity, and goes to the taxi to start his new job. When he is checking the wallet the other Jinn had left, we see a taxi driver license that doesn’t even belong to the previous Jinn. This could mean that in New York no one will care that Salim isn’t the guy on the picture, just as they didn’t care the other guy wasn’t either. Apparently, New York doesn’t care about anyone.

Back to our main story now, we find out more about the Zorya sisters. Zorya Polunochnyaya tells Shadow that the 3 sisters watch the stars (the constellations Ursa Minor and Odin’s Wain to be specific), day and night to prevent “not a god, but like a god” to escape. This, like the Czernobog, comes from Slavic mythology and the creature they watch is a doomsday hound called Simargl, who is chained in the star Polaris, in the constellation Ursa Minor (Little Bear). If the chain breaks, the hound will devour the constellation and the universe will end. In the original myth, there are only two sisters, who are called the Morning Star and the Evening Star, but Neil Gaiman (author of the book that inspired this show) declared he made up a third sister. This third sister is the Zorya to whom Shadow talks to in this episode, and she is called the Midnight Star. Still in this scene, Zorya Polunochnyaya reads Shadow’s hand and says he believes in nothing but he is now on a path from nothing to everything. She gives him a coin, and Shadow wakes up.

At the same time, in a hilarious scene in which Wednesday flirts with Zorya Vechernyaya, she reads his future through his coffee. She says he will lose the battle, but Wednesday refuses to believe that.

After another game of checkers that ensures Shadow stays alive and Czernobog will join the fight against the new Gods, Wednesday and Shadow go off to rob a bank. This is another hilarious scene in this episode. Now we know how an old God makes money. This is the scene in which Wednesday asks Shadow to think of snow and later on, it does snow, against everything weathermen everywhere had said. This makes, not only Shadow but also us, think if any other person could have done that (we have been seeing what belief can do in this show, so could anyone make that happen by believing hard enough?) or if Shadow is somehow special. I don’t really know the answer to this, but my bet is on the second. I think Wednesday didn’t choose Shadow just because he was the first guy he stumbled into. There is also the fact that in the last episode, Media said Shadow was special. Looks like we will have to wait and see how special he is, and what exactly he can do.

There is also something that has been bugging me since the beginning: in every episode there seems to be a buffalo looming over. We saw or heard about it in every episode so far. In the first one, we saw a buffalo with flames in its eyes (I wonder now if that could be related to the Jinn) in Shadow’s dream when he was still in prison. In the second episode, after getting beaten up, Shadow takes a shirt from the motel he and Wednesday were staying at. The logo of that motel was a buffalo and so there was a big one in Shadow’s T-shirt. In this episode, one of the first things we hear Zorya Polunochnyaya say is: “The buffalo is waning tonight”. I don’t really understand what she meant, but she was probably refereeing to the moon. Aside from this, we can see that there is a buffalo in one of the official posters of the show. And this isn’t just a detail that only fanatic fans see by analyzing every inch of the poster, it is right there, big enough for everyone to notice, hiding in plain sight. I read there is also a buffalo in the book and it is important, so we will find out more about it when the time is right.

Overall this was a great episode, as usual, and it won’t take long now for one of my favorite episodes of the season. I am giving it an 8.5/10.

As I said, there is an amazing episode coming soon, so stay tuned for my next review of episode 104, “Git Gone”.