REVIEW: American Gods, Episode 104
Unlike all the previous episodes, “Git Gone” follows only one storyline: Laura’s. We see her journey since maybe a few days before she met Shadow, until the moment that ended the last episode (Laura showing up in the motel room where Shadow was staying).
First, we see that the casino where Laura works has a very peculiar theme: Egypt, or even better, old Egypt, when pharaohs were still in charge. In a show about gods where we also got to meet Anubis, in a scene like this there is irony everywhere. And it is in this same place where Laura meets Shadow, in what was a funny scene: Shadow was cheating and Laura warned him to stop or he would suffer the consequences. And this is how a new love was born.
We also saw a glimpse of Laura’s life before Shadow: it was just from work, to home where she did pretty much the same things every day. She was sad all the time, and we even saw a scene in which she tried to kill herself (I am not sure that was her exact goal, but it seemed so). After she met Shadow she started to be happier with him, but eventually she went back to her very strict daily routine, and nothing seemed to please her. She wanted to feel some excitement again and so she asked Shadow for his help to rob the casino (like Shadow had asked before). Apparently it was a perfect plan and could definitely not have failed, but it did, and that is why Shadow was in prison in the beginning of the show. Laura does say a lot of times that the plan was perfect and there was no way he could have been caught, even when he was already in jail, which makes me wonder if there was some God interference. I have been saying, in past reviews, that I think there is something special about Shadow and, if there is, then Wednesday probably had to make sure that Shadow was exactly where he wanted him. He had to make sure that Shadow had nothing to go back to when he got out, otherwise he wouldn’t take the job. So, how long was Wednesday manipulating Shadow’s life (there is if he actually was)?
We also got to see how the relationship between Laura and Rob began and ended, but this time around, Laura didn’t even feel happy again like she did when she stared seeing Shadow. It was also really great to see the parallels between Laura’s scene in “heaven” and Mrs. Fadil’s. In fact, the reason why they showed the Mrs. Fadil scene was probably so that we could “compare” it to Laura’s. Like I said before, both Mrs. Fadil and Anubis were extremely calm during the entire passage, but when it comes to Laura it is a completely different story, and not only because she didn’t pass the heart test. Laura was, as it is to expect, extremely upset and not welcome to any idea of the afterlife (like she had said before in the episode). But Laura’s journey didn’t end with her death. She was pulled back to Earth and she is now on a quest for love. Anubis warned her that this doesn’t mean she is back for good, and when she finishes her task, Anubis will take her back and put her into the darkness.
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There is also something else I enjoyed in this episode. Throughout this hour we saw that there were a lot of flies going around and Laura was obsessed with killing them with her bug spray (she used one called “Git Gone”, like the name of the episode). This is of course just a detail, but it is this kind of details that are able to take a show from “good” to “great”. In my view, this is a metaphor that represents Gods and us humans. We are the flies that are constantly bugging the Gods. When the Gods are sick of us, they use their “bug spray” on us, meaning that they do whatever they want to us, and that definitely does not keep them awake at night, after all, they simply killed a fly.
This was a good episode, but I think maybe it should have been split to other episodes, I mean, show these flashbacks throughout the previous episodes. I understand they wanted to make us wonder if Laura was truly alive and also who had saved Shadow in the pilot, but they could have still shown these scenes in this episode and just divide the ones that happened before Laura’s death, instead of “waste” an entire episode with this. It wasn’t really a waste, but I just feel like it would have been more interesting if they had done things differently.
This was, in my opinion, the worst episode so far. It was good as I said, but compared to the others it felt lacking. We didn’t see Wednesday nor any other Gods (except Anubis but he is not very important). I am giving it a 7.7/10.
Hope you guys stay tuned, because next episode, “Lemon Scented You” is really awesome.