Last week American Gods
emerged as one of this season's most promising and exciting new
series. This week it sealed its place as genuinely great television
with an absolutely outstanding second episode. The series premiere
was a tantalizingly mysterious introduction to a world we couldn't
yet understand (unless we've read Neil Gaiman's source novel...), but
which we certainly wanted to explore more of. Now that narrative has
started to unfold; still very slowly and very mysteriously, but in
ever more rewarding ways. We meet more of the show's massive ensemble
cast, and we start to see the pieces come together to reveal what the
show is really about. I don't mean in terms of the literal story arc;
that remains shrouded in mystery. I mean in terms of themes, and in
terms of just what the show has to say about America, both
historically and today.
The
beginning of this episode establishes what appears to be a structural
convention which every episode will follow: just as each episode of
Six Feet Under began
with an unrelated vignette which followed a stranger through the
moments before their death, it seems that each installment of
American Gods will
begin with a “Coming to America” sequence, showing how the
various gods of different cultures' mythologies were brought here by
newcomers to the country. This episode's “Coming to America”
scene not only establishes this as a fixture of the show, it also
reveals a huge aspect of what the show is (at a deeper thematic
level) about: the struggles, cultural hardships, and racial tensions
experienced by those who came to America as “others.” In this
case it is not a tale of immigrants, but of African slaves brought
here in chains; a scene which inspires a scathingly brutal monologue
about the 300-year history of systematic racism and oppression in
America, courtesy of the African trickster god Anansi. It is in this
moment that American Gods
truly proves itself as a new television masterpiece: the scene is
incredibly powerful, both in its mesmerizing storytelling and in how
concisely it connects the dots through American history from the
first slave ships to the present day's struggle against racial
violence and police brutality. We see here, for the first time, that
this show is not just about mythology and mythologized Americana, but
is about our world today, using the gods of immigrant cultures as a
mirror for the strife and division of the modern American experience.
Orlando Jones gives the performance of his career as Anansi (or Mr. Nancy, as he is sometimes known), bringing
a fiery intensity and grimmer-than-grim wit to the already potent
material. I was only familiar with Jones as a comic actor (I'm sure
he'd hate to hear me say it, but I remember him best from Evolution),
so I had no idea what to expect from him as one of the book's most
fascinating characters; suffice to say, my jaw was on the floor
within the first thirty seconds of his time on screen. He absolutely
steals the show.
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| That look you get when you realize that you're adapting a 16-year-old book, and somehow racism in America is more vicious now than it was then... |
It is worth noting that this scene highlights a major (and very upsetting) change in the way America struggles with race between when the book was written and now: while the book certainly dealt quite a bit with themes of racism and otherness, it was never THIS intense. The intervening years, the increased scrutiny on police violence against black Americans that those years have brought, and the further increased racial tensions that have followed have all escalated the magnitude of these themes within the story dramatically. In 2001 (pre-9/11) these themes were important; in 2017 these themes are critical, and we need characters like Anansi and Shadow now more than ever. Fortunately, the series is more than up to the challenge, and it has found the perfect voice in Orlando Jones. Then of course Anansi's monologue is mirrored by the struggles of Shadow, as he tries to find his footing in the turbulent existence of a black man recently released from prison. It is here that we see the first narrative pieces click together.
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| "I started using a hammer because I got tired of just throwing people into wood- chippers or cutting off their johnsons..." |
And
all of that is in just the first few minutes. From there things just
continue to grow and get more fascinating. While we deliberately
still aren't given much of a sense of who any of these people really
are – as Wednesday
says, “clues weren't part of the deal” – more members of our
huge ensemble cast begin to come out of the woodwork in strange and
interesting ways. The main addition to the cast is Peter Stormare as
the psychotic Czernobog, but there are a few other surprises as well,
at least one of which I honestly did not expect this early in the
series. Even for those of us who are already fans of the book, Bryan
Fuller and Michael Green are bringing a unique enough spin to the
material to keep us surprised and on our toes. Any one of the new
characters introduced in this episode could have stolen it out from
under the rest of the ensemble, but instead The Secret of
Spoon ends up feeling perfectly
balanced. A lot happens in this episode, and much of it is very
important, but none of it feels rushed; instead it all builds upon
itself to create an exceptionally strong and compelling piece of
television. The new actors are all outstanding – especially Peter
Stormare, because let's be honest, no one makes a better psychotic
European guy than him – but Ricky Whittle stands strong at the
center of it all, grounding it with a believable performance of
introspective intensity.
For a
show with so much going on, and with such a determination to keep it
all shrouded in mystery, it is pretty amazing how deftly American
Gods keeps everything balanced
in this episode. Fuller and Green's sure-handed work as showrunners
translates Gaiman's novel to the screen almost perfectly, both as an
adaptation and as television in its own right. And with an
ever-growing cast of scene-stealing performances, the series is
building up an ensemble of great character actors for the ages. Last
week showed us that this could be the next great television series;
this episode proves it beyond a doubt. This is truly essential
viewing.
Score:
-
Christopher S. Jordan
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