“How the fuck is that an upgrade?”
“Muninn” has so many elements of a great episode of American Gods: hearty doses of Americana, clever embroideries on the source material, a nastily effective visual or two, and—finally!—SIDECAR ADVENTURES! But it’s too muddled, too crammed with exposition, too emotionally empty, too heavy-handed, to be satisfying. The writers keep breaking up reliable sources of enlivening chemistry (Shadow and Wednesday, Mad Sweeney and Laura, Shadow and Laura, anyone and Laura), and characters are introduced and dispatched with heedless speed. It’s exhausting, not exalting.
Congratulations to Kahyun Kim for crafting a presence as viscerally annoying to watch as Bruce Langley’s Technical Boy—sincerely, it’s an achievement—and condolences to American Gods viewers for having to watch them both. Stepping into Gillian Anderson’s shoes must be daunting, but she nails her (undeservedly shallow) introduction. “Download complete,” announces a disembodied voice at Argus’ headquarters, and from the static arises a new new god.
Dressed in kawaii cats and manga-schoolgirl jumper-and-socks, New Media speaks in hashtags that utterly fail to conceal how self-interested she is, despite the likes and kissy-faces spilling out of the ether around her. “I’ll sing back-up,” she assures Technical Boy with glib speed, seconds before undercutting his confidence and minutes before stepping into the spotlight and hooking up (ew) with Argus.
The vision of Argus (Christian Lloyd) is impressively conceived and crafted. It’s a shame to squander it on this grimy quick-hit scene. Part man, part tendrils of potential connectivity and surveillance, Argus gleams palely in his dim chamber, seeing everything and nothing as Technical Boy spits insults at him. Then New Media steps in, standing astride the loops and piles of cables emerging from Argus’ current incarnation, and Argus’ many eyes open; one of his members slithers up her skirt as she moans about synergy.
It’s predictable. It’s dull. It’s diminishing to both characters. It’s hentai porn tailored to Jack Donaghy. (Or maybe Bert Cooper, whose career predated New Media’s pet buzzwords and who never heard of broadband, but who proudly displayed The Fisherman’s Wife in his office.) The show that gave us the dreamy, erotic, electric “Head Full Of Snow” should treat its characters and their coitus with more care than this.
Contrast New Media’s introduction—born already simpering and pandering and practicing her Marilyn Monroe impression, immediately sent off to engulf a strange god’s bandwidth—with the episode’s treatment of Laura Moon (and of Emily Browning). In Cairo, on the mortuary table of Ibis & Jacquel, Laura lies, neither poised seductively nor sprawled out for inspection. In her modest white skivvies and clunky boots, smudges of dirt from the train wreck still on her graying face, Laura looks like a doll, but not a playful one.
For a show that burned so much energy (and so much of its viewers’ good will) getting back to Cairo, “Muninn” makes surprisingly little out of their arrivals and departures at Ibis & Jacquel’s funeral home. Wednesday’s party stays just long enough to stitch Laura back up, and to almost justify a soliloquy by Mr. Ibis as they leave. With prim precision, he fits together a praxinoscope and starts it turning, Demore Barnes’ honeyed voice pouring over the scene as Mr. Ibis explains (to the funeral parlor’s cat) “why Argus.” It’s a handsome, quiet scene, but not so hypnotic that it actually tricks anyone into thinking this is coherent storytelling.
I said two weeks that I’d never tire of seeing Mad Sweeney taking it on the chin, and that’s lucky, because that’s all the Mad Sweeney “Muninn” gives us. As for Salim and The Jinn, I never imagined SIDECAR ADVENTURES would be so inconsequential. The “corn palace” Wednesday sent them to turns out to be a porn palace with strategically burnt-out neon, and after the gratuitous Bada Bing scene, they just pick up a package and skedaddle.
There’s a token attempt to make this errand feel more resonant: When Iktome (Julian Richings), the trickster spider god they’re bargaining with, bridles against Odin’s authority, The Jinn leans over and repeats to the god the very words Salim spoke to him in “The Beguiling Man.” But we have barely set eyes on these two since they headed out on their SIDECAR ADVENTURES, and in order for arc words to have impact, they should coincide with, well, an arc.
I love Julian Richings’ work and his distinctive face. Eighteen years ago, thanks in part to Neil Gaiman’s description of the undertaker as “cranelike” and lighter-skinned than his partner (who was seen as “exotic and dark, but not colored”), but mostly thanks to my own youthful failure to consider the erasure of characters of color, I imagined Richings playing Mr. Ibis. But casting an Oxford-born actor as a Lakota trickster, just two episodes after Mr. Nancy’s announcement that there will be no Whiskey Jack (or Wìsakedjàk or Wiisagejaak), seems like a mistake.
That mistake is offset a bit, though never enough, by the changes wrought in Sam Black Crow (Devery Jacobs). In the novel, she’s a hitchhiker and a hanger-on, eager to catch a ride with Shadow, glad to dine on his tab, and reluctant to let him drive off when she reaches her destination. (I’m taking Sam’s pronouns from the character bio provided by Starz; she tells Shadow she is “two spirits in one body, both masculine and feminine.”) In “Muninn” Sam walks into Jimmy’s Gas N Fix while Shadow is gladhanding the cashier, spots his quick-change scam in an instant, and blackmails him into gassing up her old heap. It’s not the same car from the novel (Missy Gunther’s nephew’s purple Jeep that reeks of bananas would be hard to shoehorn into this episode), though it’s got the same WASH ME plea written in its rear window. But this time, Sam—brash, confident, and game—is in the driver’s seat.
“Muninn” feels more like the outline of an episode of American Gods than an actual episode. There’s a lot of small action, none of it particularly interesting, like ticking off a to-do list. Replace Media? Check. Fetch Odin’s spear? Check. Introduce Sam Black Crow? Check. Mad Sweeney is bitten, burnt, and about to hurl his lanky frame into swampy waters? Check, check, check. Odin pontificates about sacrifice? Check, check, check, check, check already.
Deborah Chow’s direction, embracing the darkness of its underworld and the bright wide open of the outdoors, makes “Muninn” look and feel smoother, smarter, and more confident than its action alone could. But she can’t make its heart beat, because “Muninn” doesn’t have a heart. It’s just a scattering of characters chasing down objects and objectives in a florid scavenger hunt of divine proportions.
Like Laura Moon in “Muninn,” season two of American Gods is falling apart. Like Laura Moon, it’s struggling valiantly to hold itself together despite expert help. Like Laura Moon trailing after her widowed husband, there’s no animating force, no center that tells us what’s important or why. And like Laura Moon, losing vitality a quarter-ounce at a time to rot and maggots, American Gods needs to figure out what it’s doing, and fast, if it’s going to make it. But with its animating spirit stripped away, three episodes in, American Gods is just plodding after a beacon it’s already lost sight of.
Stray observations
Doctor Who episode gone terribly wrong.
52 Comments
“How the fuck is that an upgrade?”That is some rock-solid meta, but should we give credit for facing the situation head-on, or condemn for basically throwing Kahyun Kim under the bus?
I like it, overall. The first season had Media and Technical in a cautious, grumpy truce, where they each had their place. But Technical and New Media being at each others’ throats from the get-go, for fear of becoming “redundant,” is a solidly relevant update to the material, in this era where there’s so much overlap between the two domains.
It makes absolutely no freaking sense, though. The new media need technology to exist, it’s just a basic, undeniable fact. It’s not an overlap nor a conflict nor a redundancy, it’s just a relationship between content and infrastructure.
But Gods thrive of belief not facts, these days we take our tech for granted we only notice if our always on high speed internet isn’t working, when it does it’s business as usual. New Media could supplant the God of Technology when viewed in that light.
Even if it isn’t throwing a new actor under the bus, I feel a bit insulted that the show is acknowledging that the situation sucks without apologizing. It’s giving me a shrug and saying “We kind of tried. What are you going to do, stop watching?”
Argus as the pupil in the eye of tech wiring was a really good visual even if the ‘hook up’ (pun not intended but I’m sticking to it) was a little too bland and on the nose to work either as plot or as titillation. I really enjoyed the changes to Sam.
The car that smells of bananas and the stoner purple Jeep are two different cars. Shadow doesn’t buy the Jeep until he makes it to Lakeland.
Here’s hoping we got some poignant, tasteful, engaging sexuality in future eps, cause that techno-dildo and random stripper #1 is not the American Gods I fell in love with.
I, for one, would like more fiery Djinn sex or some Bilquis buffets.
Well we are now in Cario so we might get the Shadow and cat lady hookup.
My girlfriend happened to catch a moment of that Argus field scene, and asked me if I was watching Doctor Who. It definitely had that vibe, somehow.Also, in the scene where Laura had to choose between traveling with Wednesday and traveling with Sweeney, I could practically see the modern adventure-game choice prompts in my head. Would have been nice to have the options, because I would have preferred to see her in the Sweeney branch of the story.
They definitely knew how New Media was going to go over with people based on how the episode treated her. It is impressive watching Technical Boy and New Media trying to out insufferable each other though.
Does anyone actually get any of this?
I was hoping the influx of fresh-faced female gods might lead to at least one of the Porn Palace’s dancers being revealed as a god, old or new.I know they don’t have the rights to the comic, but I was hoping for at least an homage to that issue of Sandman where Delirium and Dream visit one of Destruction’s old goddess girlfriend (I think she was Ishtar) who’s working as a topless dancer and, in the final pages, she self-destructs dancing to Iggy Pop’s “Sister Midnight” and taking everyone in the club – with the exception of her friend/co-worker.
I was just hoping one of girls would be dancing to “Sister Midnight” as like a little wink and nod. Like how Delirium shows up in the novel.
American Gods has managed to kill off or sideline all of its older women for three episodes running.Maybe I’m wrong, but I just didn’t see this. It wasn’t a fulfilling episode, but transitory. New Media, who sucks just like techno boy and hopefully Media reincarnates or eats her, their two gods in this episode as destinations were guys. The mythology behind both felt solid, storyline it felt like it worked. Primary the episode involved traveling and many different scenes which might not be possible with older actresses for budgetary or other reasons. It sucks they killed off Cloris Leachman (maybe?), but it included main characters and newer actors that were probably more flexible and cheaper. The show production was a shit show and all. I wouldn’t dismiss the use of any type of casting just yet unless it continues.
This episode had me thinking several times that I might nope out. McShane has oodles of dialogue, and it’s always great to let him spiel, but it’s seemingly babble with very little to tie it to reality. Laura Moon is cool enough, but hopefully she’ll hit a new gear with her Life Upgrade The actor playing New Media is not good at all. And the dialogue they gave her was ridiculous. Coupled with the irritating Technical kid, that is one skippable pairing. I was trying to think of who I thought Technical looked like, and then it hit me is was Future Marty McFly’s buddy from the viewscreen. I sure hope the season gets better than this.
I stick to really bad shows most of the time, but I did yell “C’mon” at my TV a few times this episode. I tried to temper my expectations, because let’s face it, there was almost no way any of us was going to like New Media, but this was expectation-shatteringly bad.
He does not look like Flea.
Maybe not Flea himself, but the guy they did Flea up as….yep.
Laura Moon is cool enough, but hopefully she’ll hit a new gear with her Life UpgradeHonestly, the moment Laura got boosted back to looking perfectly human, I just thought, “Right, so now that’s another budget item they managed to cut: Emily Browning’s zombie makeup”.
I have no idea what’s going on on this show. The wait between seasons doesn’t help my investment in the show (it looks like the new norm is 10 episodes every 1.5 years for television, I am going to need more coherent and surprising television to care for that long). The Djinn and Salim side story has no body. I may enjoy watching them but it’s if there isn’t going to a story maybe they can just make web shorts I watch where they go in everyday tasks, like Salim and Djinn go shopping for health insurance. There are so many talented actors on this show and I keep expecting scenes to really develop something hearty to chew on but instead it’s just incredibly self referential (and the OA has really exhausted that premise with the latest season). Kahyun Kim was most fun to watch when she wasn’t a forced representation of her outfit. The … is it a sex scene? … was boring. Her snappiness was watered down with every sexual reference. Technical Boy was balanced by Gillian Anderson. I don’t think you can have two cynical sarcastic characters on screen. Mr World is sooo much less scary after watching Technical Boy sass him. This Argus plotline was unnecessarily complictaed for someone they intend to kill off. I don’t need to see Mad Sweeney get beat up to know he doesn’t have his coin. I am confused as to who’s side everyone is on. Ibis is a great character to visit. Seems like the less attention the show is paying to a character the more likely the chance the character will get to breathe and we can suspend our disbelief. I am not paying much attention to how many old women they kill off or how many of this demographic or that gets air time. Maybe they just left cause they wanted to play roles that they could understand within the storyline. I certainly don’t know what’s going on. Perhaps if people have read the book this is an amazing concept brought to television. One of the reasons I can’t be scared of Mr World or root for any God is because there are no stakes. If the new Gods are powerful because of believers then I need to see that. This show expects me to believe in this massive world but I feel like the stakes are so small. Great actors and I am sure the story is good but there is no world building here for me. There is no mythology on a show that’s whole premise is based on mythology. Pick two or three things to tell me over a season and tell the story. At this point Argus could come back to life and kill everyone and I wouldn’t be that much less invested. Maybe even more if I thought there was a story. I have nothing against smokers but everyone smokes on this show and I have this suspicion they are all getting high. Cause that’s what’s this show comes across as, a show being produced and televised by your high roommate from college. Salim and DjinnMad Sweeney and Laura Wednesday and Shadow The Amazing Race – I would watch that. Shout out to Sam Black Crow, a refreshing character.
You know, I have to agree. It’s a pretty show and I dig the concept, but we’re (almost) 1 and a half seasons in and it still doesn’t seem to have a thesis. There’s no point to anything, no underlying theme or reason for this story to be told.Am I supposed to empathize with the Old Gods? Is the point of the show to critique consumerism and modern excess, with the way it very unsubtly talks about worship and paints the New Gods as cartoonish supervillains (despite Odin being just as much of a conniving bastard?)Is it supposed to be presenting some more abstract idea about belief or forging our own path regardless of the forces (gods) in our way, as exemplified by Shadow apparently not believing in anything? If so, why is it trying so hard to get me to care about Odin and his fight in the first place?I’ve heard the weirdness with Technology/Media being separate gods is because the original book was written way before the modern landscape, but it’s still really hard to parse.Why not just throw out the stuff that no longer works?I want to like this show, but like you said everything about it just leaves me… confused.
It seems like we should care about Odin’s war because he’s cool. That’s it, that’s the whole case the show makes for it.Why shouldn’t Technology and Media be separate things? A blu-ray is technology. The film that resides on it is media. A hard disk is technology. The audio file I downloaded on it is media.
The show already having given Technical Boy Youtuber-ish styling doesn’t help maintain a distinction, though.
It’s Ian McShane. Only hoopleheads and cocksuckers don’t care about him.
Agreed. The only reason I currently have to care about Odin’s War is that McShane is cool. If I looked at it at all, I would say fuck all those gods. Subjugation and slavish worship doesn’t help anyone. If they only exist because they have followers, then they’re parasites and should go………And who is the Opposition here? Technology and Media? (is Mr World supposed to be the internet? Is he the embodiment of pragmatism? What is that guy?)This whole thing may have found it’s origins in that old Star Trek episode. I’m sure that can’t be the first time the idea came up
I think he’s supposed to be the god of the world because people believe the world… exists? I really don’t know where they’re going with him either, it seems so incongruous to the rest of the Gods being manifestations of actual, concrete belief systems.
Mr. World is Globalization, which is what’s achieved through technology infrastructure and a mediatic propagation.
One of the reasons I can’t be scared of Mr World or root for any God is because there are no stakes.Another reason is because he’s styled like the expendable one-off villain of some silly genre show from the 80s.But yeah, are the New Gods dangerous? So far nobody seems to really care except for Wednesday (who on the other hand always acts like he’s the coolest cat in the room, so we don’t even know if he’s actually worried). Is the thesis some deranged pseudo-Luddite stuff like “progress = bad, let’s get back to the old ways of worshiping anthropomorphic animals by means of ritualistic sacrifices”?
I think a fundamental problem with the show is the sense that this secret war of the gods is going on, but it won’t affect the world everybody else lives in.
The writers need a coherent premise regarding the nature and function of gods in the world of the story, one that ties into how life is lived and experienced by humanity at large. The outcome of the conflict has to involve a possible (if subtle) change in the world. This is why, as a few commenters have pointed out, it feels like there’s no stakes involved anyone needs to care about. What happens to the rest of us if Odin & co. lose the war? What happens if the new gods lose?
I think they are dangerous in the sense that people are moving away from the “old” ways and forgetting them. The reasons we do things, the things we do revolve around technology now and as a whole we have lost that. I think it is more to do with not forgetting the past than not going along with the future, I think this is why Mr World keeps saying he is not their enemy. He is globalism and as such is the main God of the New, he can “rebrand” the old but should the old be forgotten and rebranded, or remembered for what it was?
I totally agree about the stakes. What are the stakes? When Easter spread the plague I got hooked, but then, she left the show and the plot faded.What will happen if the old gods win? or the new? Will it affect the humanity or they will just reborn?
The thing that hits me with Mr World is that if the new gods are to win then he is the one that really matters. If globalism wins then everything is straight back to him. Any God has to answer to him or they are retired or upgraded.
Personally I think the show has found its feet again. There were issues with the pacing and subplots, and maybe a few too many new gods were introduced only to be dispatched/left, but this felt like a step up from the past two eps.
I have things I gotta do and the first two episodes of the season were pretty rote, repetitive, and boring…is this show done, like can I clear my schedule?
I suggest to watch this one, so you’ll feel no remorse for going away.
ouch
“Grimnir is an instruments of death.
It’s Gungnir, not Grimnir. The former’s a spear, the latter is one of Odin’s names.
I’m taking Sam’s pronouns from the character bio provided by Starz; she tells Shadow she is “two spirits in one body, both masculine and feminine.”
In that case, it should be “they/them”
All Gods fall victim to their thirst for worship.Argus was reborn in America, as the God of Surveillance.Your broken window has signaled every God that has not chosen a side that my house is not in order.Tradition! We build the new world on top of the ruins of the old.Information will win the war for you.Trickster gods always seem to find a way.Man, these dialogues were terribad. Also, they’ve now started to talk about the gods as plain facts, without any residue of awe or mystery, like the special creatures of any cheap supernatural drama.
By the way, the episode is called “Muninn”, despite the namesake Odin’s raven himself appearing only briefly and doing the same thing he kept doing all along, because “muninn” means “memory”(or “mind”) in Old Norse, a reference to Argus’s memories.
The second season of this show can’t hold a candle to the first. I was hoping that the production difficulties behind the scenes wouldn’t result in a worse production but the writing, directing, and even the acting have taken a sharp downward turn. I don’t know if I can even finish these episodes.
“Are you eating me?!”
Been sitting out on this one, after the terrific S1 it seems like it’s not worth to go back to. What a damn shame, they had something amazing and ruined it.
Mad Sweeney was a trifling character in the book, but quickly became my favorite character on the show and I love the cooky road trip vibe when he and Laura are paired together. That said, Mad Sweeney still has to die. If he doesn’t die from bad luck by episode four or five, I’ll be very disappointed. And as much as I love her character, Bilquis too, needs to die.I understand that minor characters who often die early in books can become important long running characters in the TV adaptations. However, American Gods should not become the Starz version of Game of Thrones and linger on for a half dozen seasons. The plot needs to advance. Gods as well as mortals need to be sacrificed to appease the needs of the story.
As long a Emily Browning walks the earth, I will watch.
Emily, maybe you should try to explain things that happend or mean more, than ranting about the differences between the show and the book? Forget about the book and help us understand better the show, the gods, the meaning of things.Like you, thats my expectation and its not been met.
So @Kumagoro and @SmartAleq, the car was not the 8 legged horse (forgot the name, Sleipnir?), but Odin calls it a berserker.Thoutghs?
There were a lot of horse noises during the first couple scenes of wreckage and that Christine style uncrumpling of Betty so maybe they’re gonna do something with that at some point? More likely it’s just another “ooh, this is cool let’s do it but never mention it again and gods forbid it actually tie into a storyline of any sort.” I wish I had more faith in this show but I fear its heart, soul and brain have left the building.
admittedly it’s been a while since I read the book & I wouldn’t go so far as to say the show is absent room for improvement…but I see a number of comments claiming the thesis of the show is unclear which I think are perhaps overly harsh…gaiman has a tendency to meander in his narratives & then draw it all together & tie a bow on it at the end…I like most (possibly even all) of his stuff to a greater or lesser extent but I think he seems to have the deftest touch when he goes the comic-book route…neverwhere for example “works” better as a comic than in prose or the BBC incarnation…so some of that narrative sprawl may be by design…as for stakes I think (since they’re ideas he makes use of in other work like the sandman run & various other stuff) in broad strokes the gods represent some unique facet of humanity’s experience or understanding of the world…one that becomes an article of faith in the reality a particular individual believes they exist within…& to the extent that abstract concepts are hard to kill they adapt but time lends them an appearance of immutability…if they die then humanity’s world shrinks by either degree or whole dimensions & if they are ascendant then the influence of the forces or mechanisms they represent is more pervasive & thus engenders stronger belief…so the prize is the default feedback loop…to some extent odin’s war is “for” the notion that history has a power not to be discarded & may be a surer guide to the future than those who claim to represent its bridge with the present…you may or may not think they’ve been successful at getting it across but in terms of belief the old gods are titans of industry brung low by the spiritual equivalent of the great depression & the new gods are the hasty, opportunistic self-starters that think everything is new & different & a whole new ball game they get to write new rules for absent any debt to the past…with shadow & laura (& to a lesser extent salim) being “ordinary mortals” trying to wrap their heads around it & figure out their own significance in a reality more convoluted than they believed possible…& not for nothing but there’s a phoenix-from-the-ashes thing with ragnarok being cyclical if I remember my mythology correctly…so whether the journey or the destination is the key is part of the question I’d argue the whole is posing…all in all I’d say there’s plenty of narrative hooks on offer upon which to hang a variety of stakes should one be so inclined…but I get that people’s inclinations are largely why YMMV is a thing…
Hey, two things: firstly, I am glad I am not the only person to notice how Hentai-esque New Media’s scene was with Argus… I saw the cable tendrils and instantly worried they might go that direction – cause American Gods prides itself in its darkness. I felt immediately uncomfortable cause they played with some terrible terrible Asian stereotype, and it was New Media’s first episode… Secondly, is anyone concerned with Julian Riching’s whitewashing of Lakotan god Iktomi? Or does he have native heritage that I don’t know about? His ancestry, at least online is Canadian Oxford-born? The source material describes him with dark-skin… Feels weird considering they have Sam Black Crow as part of the episode. Unless there is something I don’t know. Is Sam actually the real Iktomi and Julian some drug-lord poser?
I loved the scene where Shadow pulls the change scam at the gas station. Not only is he using one of Wednesday’s tricks, he’s mimicking his cadences and manner of speaking. It’s a prominent feature of the book that Shadow, often unconsciously, picks up the mannerisms of those around him, and I thought Ricky Whittle did a great job of it.Point of order though – Missy Gunther’s nephew’s purple jeep and the car that smells of bananas are two different vehicles, and the banana car was Shadow’s. It’s a piece of shit (Pee Oh Ess) he picks up on the road, and Sam writes ‘Wash Me’ on the window while he’s asleep. Shadow later buys the purple jeep in Lakeside, which Sam had convinced Missy Gunther’s nephew to repaint when they were both high. Shadow later gives her the jeep for safe-keeping.