American Gods, and we are off..

Published March 10, 2019 · Updated July 6, 2022

Good lord.

Well, gentleman, we are in the second season for better or for worse. I am not sure how you felt about the first episode, but I wanted to offer a few thoughts. I will keep this brief, since you are only doing one episode per week this time around…

I flat out did not enjoy this episode, and I think the main reason is how bloated the script felt. Now, I love Gaiman, and I love this novel, but he, like other fantasy writers, often gets bogged down in lengthy monologues and too much exposition. While that is fine for reading, it does not translate well to the screen. This episode felt so dialogue heavy… so boring when it didn’t need to be.

See, I loved what you did in your recap of S1, where you discussed at length the moments before each episode’s main content where we were introduced to the Gods and how they arrived on our shores. From the speech on the slave ship to Jesus trying to save the immigrants (in the most brilliant sequence of last season in my humble opinion), under Fuller, we were shown this things. We were given the images and left to process them. We weren’t told what to think in heavy handed dialogue. Instead, we figured it out ourselves through the visual experience, which was often truly beautiful last season.

The visuals we did get (the carousel scene on through, just had wooden CGI that didn’t excite me. It was wasted. The cast was wasted. And it’s just sad.

Oh, and don’t get me started on the travesty that is New Media… what fucking fresh hell was that? By the old Gods and the new, bring back Gillian Anderson. And the excuse for way Easter is gone? Huge eye roll on that one…

Anyhow, I was wrong about TD, so I am hoping I’ll be wrong by the end of this one.

I suppose I can pray to Odin that it’s so… Until next week.

-Ash Schlafly

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