“You can’t just give up because the fuckin’ road ends.”
In the season two premiere, American Gods gets the gang together. In “The Beguiling Man,” they’re immediately broken up again. After a meager wake for Zorya Vechernyaya in Hotel America’s parking lot, Shadow’s companions break into pairs, each heading in a different direction. And the show’s scant sense of community fractures with them.
Before they split up, Salim takes a moment to pray. Even in crisis—especially in crisis—his faith is unshakable. Using a cardboard box as a makeshift prayer rug, Salim begins his devotions with measured calm. It’s a portrait of faith making do with what’s at hand, finding a way to commune with the divine in the bleakest of moments. In the dangerous, magical world of American Gods, Salim is the one person not only capable of unflappable faith, but steadied by it, and Omid Abtahi portrays him as quiet, abiding, and strong. It’s more than a testament to the power of prayer: Salim, who is neither a god nor an enchanted corpse, is a steadfast source of the one thing these assembled gods need and crave for themselves.
Laura might scoff at gods and at religion, but she’s more single-minded than any zealot or old god. She might not pray, but like Salim facing Mecca, she knows the direction her devotions take her, and she follows unwaveringly. For Laura, that beacon is Shadow Moon.
Just who is Shadow Moon? “The Beguiling Man” does more than any previous episode to tell us the nuts-and-bolts, flesh-and-blood history of the boy he used to be, explaining how Shadow came to be who he is: a quiet, introspective, well-read young man with no family, no friends, no bonds holding him in any one place, as. Mr. Town (Dean Winters) reveals. And how that young man grew defensive, guarded, and closed off from the world.
The nuts-and-bolts, flesh-and-blood history of the boy Shadow used to be is sketched out in flashbacks, all in line with his history in the novel: a globetrotting childhood with his mother; a brief return to the States that turns into a lifetime after her death; a quiet, introspective child growing into his size and his solitude.
The casting is good, and the performances are fine, especially considering how little these actors and characters—one entirely new to the audience, another the stand-in for a charismatic lead—have to work with. Gabriel Darku doesn’t especially resemble Ricky Whittle, but it’s easy to imagine Shadow’s youthful self in the furrow of his brow, the sway of his shoulders, the line of his jaw. It’s easy to see him growing into the Shadow Moon we know, and easy to slot the younger actor into the character’s life history.
Unfortunately, that history is hammered out here in the broadest terms possible. Flashbacks like these are necessarily sketched out, necessarily brief glimpses into a life. That doesn’t mean they’re necessarily constructed from the blandest of clichés or stripped of nuance in morality, motivation, or character. Young Shadow and his unnamed mother (Flashpoint’s Olunike Adeliyi) feel oddly vacant, as if their characters were smoothed down to avoid any distracting idiosyncrasies, so buffed down that all the specificity is rubbed away, too. Shadow’s mother (she is given no other name in the dialogue or the credits) speaks in rich, round tones, her voice and eyes deep with meaning, but the lines she’s given are (woefully accurate) platitudes about liberty and bigotry and fear, more like pronouncements than conversation or even advice.
Young Shadow is neither the bashful boy spoken of in the novel, earning his nickname by slipping from room to room in his mother’s wake, nor the “shrimpy little kid” that Mr. Nancy describes. At first, it looks as if Shadow’s teen years could be catalogued by the books he’s reading at each milestone (each title a nod to religion), but even that modest conceit is abandoned quickly. Shadow’s mother keeps telling him “You are different” and “Your light is strong, my beautiful son,” but we are not shown anything different or illuminating about this child growing into a man.
But Laura Moon sees that light, and her pursuit of Shadow makes up “the Beguiling Man”’s best segments. Emily Browning and Pablo Schreiber are a joy together. Even the contrast in their sizes emphasizes the clash between these two characters who are pushed into working together, and who pretend to begrudge each others’ presence. It’s a good reveal, and an episode-saving swerve back into the specific, the weird, the tongue-in-cheek wit that American Gods does so well, when Laura and Mad Sweeney follow Shadow’s beacon until the road dead-ends into a field of flowers.
And just when the buddy-heist energy of their travels seems to reach its peak, as they dangle, Sweeney’s limbs gangling, from a bridge… that’s when they pull a train job. Laura’s nonchalant step off that bridge, and her assured landing on the roof of the train carrying Shadow, is the most surprising, strongest piece of action in the episode, capped by Sweeney’s comical cross-eyed annoyance as he follows suit.
A casual observer might suggest that Mr. Town’s highly stylized torture is designed to showcase Ricky Whittle’s impressive physique while shoehorning in a techno-magical excuse for all these flashbacks. But a cynic would point out that it’s also a chance to shoehorn in some Christ imagery without having to explain (again) how Christianity intersects with the the old and new gods of this universe.
When writing about an adapted story, it’s always challenging to balance the story being told now with the source material. I’m trying to avoid spoilers from Neil Gaiman’s novel, only in part because the television series has departed from the novel. But there are some elements, some secrets, some plot points that we can be confident will not be removed completely, and those are the trickiest to talk about.
Like the history seen in Shadow’s flashbacks, Laura’s rescue of Shadow is adapted from a similar scene in the book. And like the flashbacks, a lot of the nuance is lost in its on-screen portrayal. In the novel, Laura disposes of Shadow’s captors single-handed, off-stage, with inhuman numbness. In the novel, Laura’s murders are brutal and graceless. In the novel, there’s no air of action-flick coolness to her violence and no Mad Sweeney tossing off quips. In the novel, her passionless slaughter of obstacles is just one more sign of her disintegrating humanity. But in “The Beguiling Man,” the camera lingers—clumsy but avid—on the blows she lands, and she swaggers up to Shadow’s chamber like a hero, until she sees his horrified face.
The most striking logical gap in “House On The Rock” is the ease with which Shadow—Wednesday’s driver, bodyguard, and bodyman—commands the attention of actual gods, cajoling them as even the wise concealer, the swift trickster, the father of magical songs (just three more of the many names of Óðin) cannot. And no one asks why, or how, until Mr. Town comes along. Why or how does Shadow fall in so easily with this divine company? Why and how does he do what they say, however illegal or absurd? Why and how, having seen the degrading depths they stoop to, the exalted places to which they can ascend, and the bloody price they extract along the way, can Shadow be shocked that his dead wife follows in their footsteps?
Between the vague, highminded flashbacks, the muddled fight sequences punctuated by clunky banter, and the devastating effect of splitting up its most interesting characters, American Gods is floundering just two episodes into the second season. But the high-flying energy and crackling chemistry of Laura Moon and Mad Sweeney’s adventures gives me hope.
“You can’t just give up because the fucking road ends,” Mad Sweeney tells Laura, the one person in American Gods as mulish and stubborn as he is, when she’s tempted to lie down and die. It could be a motto for the show’s beleaguered second season, and if season two of American Gods is half as much fun as their screaming, flailing voyage from meadow to train heist, it’ll be worth watching.
Stray observations
- SALIM AND THE JINN, THE JINN AND SALIM! We were promised sidecar adventures and I want sidecar adventures.
- Who else greeted Dean Winters with“My name is Mr. Town, dummy”?
- Another season, another showrunner.
- Next stop, Cairo?
72 Comments
9 ads from Netflix…Very iffy dialogue from Shadow’s mom but I still enjoyed getting to see her, even so briefly. And can’t really blame Bilquis for looking out for #1.
Although this season’s depictions of violence are no more explicit or over-the-top than last year’s, it struck me that somehow they are more gratuitous. More fan- and reputation- service, and less a stylistic choice.
Last season the gore actually matched the action. For example, Laura was saving Shadow from a lynching, and given how physically powerful she is, it fits that she could kick a spine & skull up through an opponent’s body (to be captured on camera in loving slo-mo detail) during the course of combat.
Tonight Laura was saving Shadow from torture, but given that her final redshirt-goon opponent was already down, it wasn’t necessary for her to deliberately squish his skull with her boot (to be captured on camera in loving slo-mo detail) before she went on to get to Shadow.
It wasn’t ‘necessary’ for Laura to pop the head, no, but I don’t think it was birthed as fan-service or whatever, it is more indication of her character. I thought it has been fairly evident that relative to Laura, and her flashback as the Irish girl, is that she is utterly a sociopath who hasn’t ever cared or given a shit about anything. She popped that head because she felt like it, just an impulse, without thinking how it would be perceived, then looking up to realize Shadow saw her do it and perhaps had the beginnings of the spark of the seed of shame. For the first time in her existence she ‘cares’ about something deeply, Shadow, if only because he is her own personal Jesus due to the coin and his unspoken, unconscious wish. I think she is ‘learning’ how to care by having this concern shoved on her magically, but is still dealing with being an utter sociopath.
Every torture scene where the torturer is so tender of the victim’s feelings they won’t strip them naked to humiliate them doesn’t work for me. It seems hopelesly fake, a pretense indulged to excite the viewer without giving the game away with nudity.
Never tortured anyone but maybe they didn’t want to see his dick just flapping around.
Half the reason people go into torturer field is to see some dick. It’s not the insurance plans, I’ll tell you that.
The perceived confidence by which you say (type) this makes me want to a. believe you and b. wonder/fear why and how you’d know that.
^^^^Translation: If they have pants on, we can enjoy the torture without a flapping dick making the kind of fun too obvious.
You must have loved the first season of Happy then, with its penultimate anal rape torture scene.
Happy looked so unpleasant I’ve never seen an episode. Dude, my objection isn’t to unsatisfying realistic torture scenes. It’s to the obvious point of the torture scenes being titillation, which is why the male actors aren’t shown with a flaccid penis.
Keeping the pants on keeps the mess contained.Mr. Town does not want Shadow losing control while he’s in the middle of a monologue.
I also wouldn’t want to look at that guy’s muscles while I torture him, I’d feel scared of the retaliation.
Christ imagery be damned. That’s a harp on a lamp, he’s the light. It’s painfully literal.
Lightbulb shape and everything.
Painful is the word. Parallels of Odin hanging on Yggdrasil, bang you over the head with the light symbolism, strap him to a freakin’ light bulb shape in case you missed it, and hint at an unknown father. All we’re missing is Aooooougah horns and a text crawl at bottom of the screen warning of heavy symbolism and fore’shadowing’ ahead…Just marking time until we get back to the Mad Sweeney and Dead Wife Road Show…
what about that horse in the final scene? Betty…and the music. Any comments?
I was trying to stay within the less spoilery relevant bits. Within the context of the review (and show, and book, and and and and) he’s the “light”. Between the “socket” of the bucket he’s standing on, the shape of the frame he’s in, even the representation of the threaded receiver for the lampshade.I love it. It’s appropriate. However, the Christ-like pose is just the extra amperage on the cake.
I’d really like some comments on the horse. What horse is that? Why? Without book spoilers, off course.
Where’s does Salim’s Abrahamic belief come into play here? Abrahamism is all about there not being any other gods, yet here literally there are dozens of them, how does that even jibe with him? His god never has even appeared to anyone, yet he still has faith in it?
Ricky Whittle is starting to get typecast as the guy who is strung up and tortured.
Not the most common image of torture I can conjure, however. The design and impact feels very fresh, and god-like while not being literally Christian.
Agreed – the most common image of modern torture is probably the figure in a jumpsuit, tied prone with a towel over the face.It could also be argued that this is a rip on the Incredibles, or any of a number of other properties.I just look at those two shots and it lays out why I can’t see anything other than the literal lighting fixture with the Christ-like pose. It’s not made any easier when he starts glowing like an actual goddamn lightbulb. It’s an out of context reaction – I just saw that and immediately leapt to “Oh my god, he’s a table lamp” and couldn’t stop giggling.
“It could also be argued that this is a rip on the Incredibles”YES!! Violet could easily scape. lol
Not floundering, it’s still as good as last season.
Without a doubt a Emily Browning and Pablo Schreiber‘s scenes were the only most redeeming parts of this episode. Their performances were enjoyable and the writing had substance. It’s not for lack of talent in the other scenes. I found the dialogue of Shadow’s mother to be cliche. Curious to see what happens with the Djinn. I have no investment in Mr World or his crew as an antagonist. The search for Media makes me think they are hoping Gillian Anderson is coming back. I haven’t read the novels. I would like something to bite my teeth into and at this point it’s two pairs of side characters.
That first flashback scene felt like a first rehearsal. Eesh, that dialogue was bad. I will still watch the show as long as we have Dead Wife/Mad Sweeney shenanigans, but there is so much wasted talent in the rest of the cast it’s a shame.
Gillian Anderson is not coming back. The search for Media is to justify the transformation of the avatar into New Media, which also justifies the re-casting (sort of – if Media can appear as anything, it could appear as Gillian Anderson as well, but oh well).
I thought as much. You would think they would bend over backwards to keep a good showrunner and good cast members. Hope for the best going forward.
I feel like Browning is struggling with the American accent in S2 when she wasn’t in S1. Which is a shame. I just loved her in Legend.
Browning and Schreiber have picked up right where they left off in season 1. There are a lot of great pairings and ensembles within the cast— McShane and Jones are fun together, and I could watch Peter Stormare and anyone for hours— but Mad Sweeney and Laura just crackle every time they are on screen.
You see, here is what I don’t get : The powers that be stood back and looked at the works of Gaiman and decided “Hey this novel that has a beginning middle and end and doesn’t have much of an easy way to continue the story will make a good TV show! That much longer story that is much more famous that was a comic book and would translate wonderfully to a visual medium? Nah, let’s ignore that.”
Just because a work hasn’t been adapted doesn’t mean a TV network is free to pick it up, though — Sandman has been caught up in long-running attempts to make a film out of it (and the peak of excitement over the DCEU might have locked it up even tighter).Also, I’d say Sandman requires a fairly high budget to bring a lot of its imagery to the screen well, while American Gods’ low-key story would have looked easier to do on a TV budget, at least until Fuller got involved….
On the budget issue I can just point out – Doom Patrol over on DCUniverse is doing great stuff with a stroyline that is just as difficult to adapt as Sandoman… And DP certainly isn’t a high budget show.As for the rights issues… I thought they were mostly figured out a few years ago. Of course, considering my first paragraph there may be a reason it wasn’t picked up by a network… Could be DC and WB have plans down the road for it. If Doom Patrol is there then they may be considering something with it on their own little streaming network. I’d be cool with that.
I could agree with this, and I think American television could benefit from the foresight and control that British television practices by turning adapted works into mini-series with a well thought out ending in sight. The American model for television draws on our inherently embedded Capitalist oriented philosophies which draw on the opportunistic ability to ‘bank’ on the success of things by stretching them out for more profit, while the British model for television seems far more concerned with the integrity of the story arcs as a whole. It’s really a battle between Quantity vs. Quality. Which is why, I am excited to see what another upcoming adapted Neil Gaiman(/Terry Pratchett) work Good Omens will look like, especially since it will only definitively be six episodes long and is jointly produced by Amazon and BBC Two. I think if Good Omens does well in it’s execution, and benefits from being a miniseries as opposed to a ‘television show’ it will be a very telling example of the flaws behind the American television standard.Although streaming services like Netflix are already proving the American model to be broken, and inevitably revealing it’s exploitative nature toward it’s audiences.
Any creative work (for the most part) benefits itself by having an arc and conclusive ending in mind by providing a sense of proper pacing and satisfaction in closure to it’s viewing audience. The invested fans of any work of art are inherently deserving (due to their vested interest and admiration, which they didn’t have to have but were compelled to have) of a journey with a well thought out and executed end. Instead of selflessly stringing them along, straining their love for the project and manipulating their heart strings (through needless cliffhangers, or the ever more popular ‘splitting up’ of a standard length series across sometimes years) just to further squeeze any drop of profit out of them.
Get this, then: the Starz Powers That Be stood back and looked at the works of Gaiman and said, “Oh, how we would like to make a TV adaptation of Sandman! Alas, that is currently impossible due to complications with the rights belonging to AT&T Time WarnerMedia Entertainment & Whatnot, not to mention the astronomical budget required to do it justice, which unfortunately we can’t afford on our small independent cable enterprise. What about adapting this novel instead, which Gaiman himself is free to supervise directly, and whose world, which already generated a spin-off and several related stories, is large and rich enough to sustain several seasons at least?”
I don’t think that the budget would have to be that high. Doom Patrol is doing some good stuff with material that is just as hard to adapt and I don’t think that is exactly having millions spent on it per episode…
Doom Patrol is made by DC’s own streaming service. They don’t have to pay a single dollar for the rights. For comparison, do you think any network or cable channel or stream operator but Disney would be able to produce Avengers TV shows with the actual Avengers stars as the leads?
But that isn’t actually a very good comparison since Sandman would not require stars on the level of the Avengers. That seems like an apples and oranges comparison… especially because when it started, it didn’t take Disney to enlist Robert Downy Jr. for a Marvel production.
But it’s not about the stars (though you don’t want Sandman made with a cast of second rate actors). The point is that the DC channel is able to produce Doom Patrol at that level because it’s the DC channel exploiting DC properties. That cuts a huge amount of the costs.
Perfectly valid points on your part.
And I’ll remind you – DC has WB behind it and that conglomerate is hardly is poor as you might think… 🙂
That’s exactly my point. Are you even reading what I write? I’ll simplify:Starz = poor = does not make Sandman, chooses to make what it can do reasonably well, like American Gods.DC = AT&T Time Warner = rich = does whatever they want, especially with their own properties, which include Sandman, which they won’t be willing to sell to minor & competing cable operators any time soon.This is in response to your complaint that Starz chose to make American Gods INSTEAD of making Sandman. You might rather want to ask DC why they chose to make Doom Patrol instead of making Sandman.
On the other hand, this novel does actually have a real concrete beginning-middle-end to follow along, as well as a sort of sequel-novel and two sort of sequel novellas to draw upon.
Which is more than you can really say for Sandman. Have you looked at the story of Sandman lately?
“Yeah it’s uhhh…about this guy who’s like a…uhhh sort of god of all dreams and he has those other 7 god siblings and he got himself trapped by a cult for 70 years and then he…uhh escapes and then he uhh… gets his magical McGuffins back in the first act and then he uhhhh…pretty much just kind of dicks about for 70 issues and a lot of these issues just tell one-off completely separate stories or arcs that have nothing to do with anything else and can take place literally anytime and anywhere because they are a product of whatever Neil Gaiman just wanted to fuck about with that particular day and…uhhh… the closest there is to an actual arc is the main character having the subtlest bit of character development across the series.”
I know that’s really reductive of Sandman, but while people already accuse American Gods of being meandering, Sandman by comparison is pretty much just one ‘ah, fuck it’ away from turning into straight up fantasy Twilight Zone.
It’s only now that we got American Gods, Doom Patrol, and Preacher in 2019 that we may even consider approaching the holy grail of comic book TV adaptations that is Sandman.
I get where you are coming from but Sandman was so so so much more than that. Personally I can see where it would easily equate to at least 5 seasons of TV (If I took out the volumes made up of short stories and maybe squished them into the storyline directly).I mean… In case you haven’t noticed, having lots of characters hang around and deal with intrigue and infighting is kinda in vogue now… *cough*GameofThrones*cough*… Sorry, I have a cold.
Having a sort of main arc for a character and a lot of dicking around in-between with vignettes is kind of the perfect recipe for a TV show and not so great recipe for a movie though.
I’m not sure I agree that Sandman is “much more famous” than American Gods. They’re both widely known examples of Gaiman’s work, and I’d argue that he’s more known as an actual novelist than he is a comics guy at this point.That said, your wider point stands. Sandman would work better as a prestige TV show than American Gods is so far.Though I’m more invested in the forthcoming Good Omens adaptation than either of those projects, but that’s because I want to see how much of Sir Pterry’s approach makes it to screen
I have to say – I am looking forward to “Good Omens” too.
Kinda like taking The Hobbit, which has a clear beginning, middle, and end and needlessly padding it with in universe lore and dragging it tirelessly into three films?
I actually kinda can understand the decisions behind doing that the the Hobbit. I mean, it screwed up the pacing and all and those movies were bad but I understand…For one, any LOTR movie is gonna have the expectations of being epic in scale after LOTR. And so Jackson and company felt the need to pump it up as much as possible for purely commercial reasons.And two… Jackson obviously loves his Tolkien. Personally I am somewhat less taken with that author (I am a philistine that read LOTR and said “With an actual editor, this was 100 pages long.”). But Jackson loves him. And so Jackson obviously wanted to do the Similarrion – and, well, many of the actors he’d need for that ain’t getting younger so he decided to do it now while he could.
It’s hard for me to ever take Dennis Duffy seriously. Every time he shows up in a movie/TV show I know he’s going to die some hilarious death.
Not a word about Shadows father? Could it be Odin? Another god?Was it Odin, giving him the coin?
You haven’t read the book, I imagine.
you’re Wednesday damn right!So, plse, dont spoil it…lolThats why I dont like when the reviewer have read the book (on any TV show), so they cant speculate, because they know things already.And I do love a theory.
Well, I haven’t read the book, but we see Shadow is accepted at Old-Gods-only gatherings, so I feel like the eventual revelation of his godhood is not going to feel like a huge surprise. And Wednesday is going out of his way to keep him close and present him to the fellow Old Gods, so we can assume he’s one of them/his. Plus, we don’t know who Shadow’s father is, and in this episode, his mother (who kept referring to him as essentially otherworldly) used the old trope of “your father is dead, that’s all you need to know”, which is narrative shorthand for “your father is alive but a piece of work, and you’ll meet him later in the story, i.e. the present of which these are flashbacks”.Now, Odin had many sons in the lore, and Gaiman could have easily gone with any of the most obscure ones. But if he did use one of the most famous ones, that could mean either Thor or Baldur. Considering we already have a hammer-wielding deity in Czernobog, and how much Thor’s name is already spent in pop culture, I don’t think he would go with him, it would feel like a weak, obvious choice.
Thats what I like, to speculate without reading the book. I would guess that Odin is the father too, even more for that scene where he gives the coin to young Shadow (Im not good on recognizing voices, was it McShane’s voice?).Also, that horse in the end (the car), what part of mithology is that?
I can’t be sure it was McShane either (did he even speak?), but it seemed like a Wednesday thing to do.Mythology-wise, they didn’t make any direct references to the ravens yet, but those are clearly Huginn and Muninn, Odin’s companions and informers.I couldn’t find any link to “shadows” and/or “moon” in Baldur’s lore. I still think Thor is unlikely, but I feel like the reveal wouldn’t have much impact if in the end it was some obscure Norse character with a name only scholars would know. No reason to build it up so much in that case. Although, both Thor and Baldur’s mothers were goddesses in their own right, so this would mean Shadow’s mother (purposely unnamed?) was a goddess too. She seemed to know more than she let on and kept Shadow unaware of his true nature, possibly on purpose.Then again, maybe the reveal will just be about the paternity, and Shadow will be revealed as an original creation, the product of Odin mating with a mortal woman or some goddess from a different pantheon altogether.
They used to sacrifice horses to Odin, the car (A iron horse) was the modern version.
But he named the car Betty. rigth?
Well, Odin does ride an eight legged horse named Sleipnir, I see no reason why a magic horse couldn’t turn itself into a car at will. And back again.Also, Odin is the ALL Father…
And he does tell that the horse changed over the years.
just occured to me: that car, was it an 8 cylinder??
Older Cadillac? That’s about a 99.999% certainty. Good catch. ;^)
I think it’s Thor. Because A. Shadow can think about precipitation really hard and it happens and B. when he’s getting angry on the train (right before Laura busts in), it starts thundering. Total Thor moves.
I highly recommend reading the book before continuing to watch the show. If there isn’t time to read the author’s preferred text, then the original version will do.
I was in graduate school in Madison, Wisc in the 70s and I can’t believe I never went to House on the Rock. Heck, I never even heard of it while I was there. And it was only 45 miles away.
American Gods is the perfect example of what happens when you take a book with a definite beginning, middle and end and then draw it out. And out. And out. And out. What was once bold and imaginative just becomes a bore, strung out from one week to the next.
It’s funny , but Ricky Whittle’s hair in real life looks EXACTLY life his younger self. You didn’t mention the first time he got his “coin”
I’m just excited that Baron Samedi is going to make an appearance at some point!
Interesting change in Mr Town’s character. In the book he was openly sceptical that the Gods were what they claimed to be – he theorised that they were just genetic mutations with a bit of psychic ability that could make people think they were gods. In this episode he’s quite open in saying he serves the modern Gods and that the ones Shadow works with are old relics. Perhaps it was a decision made to portray Town as more threatening; in the book he comes across as fairly pathetic, mixed up in things he doesn’t really comprehend.
The flashbacks were a miserable sequence of unenlightening tropes.Also, introducing Shadow to the U.S. with a vague speech about toxic race relations, then having his immediate and *only* significant interaction with other black characters besides his mom be to get his ass beat for no clear reason by darker-skinned boys—then equating that with police violence, which is sanitized down to Shadow getting cuffed along with his attackers and released, unharmed—was some tone-deaf, unnecessary shit.
At this point, I probably think of Mayhem before I think of Dennis Duffy, but I did think “I’m here to boff some chick named Mary” at some point during the ep.