He’s king of the old guys, that means, but it seems increasingly as if he is in a state of uncertainty. It was Czernobog who called him Wotan, AKA Woden, AKA Odin, AKA the one-eyed king of the Norse gods. Ian McShane’s Wednesday was pretty much present in every scene, but didn’t reveal much more of himself beyond a taste for disgusting bucket hats. Photograph: Jan Thijs/2017 Starz Entertainment, LLC Omnipresent … Ian McShane’s Wednesday with Peter Stormare as Czernobog.
Plus he has a hammer that bleeds all over the table – quite the dinner-party guest. Every hearty drag on a cigarette or drunken leer is slowly indulged, the whole character so greasy you can feel him sticking to your skin. Stormare, still best known for his turn as a bumbling but brutal killer in the Coen brothers’ Fargo, gleefully slobs it out as an eternal abattoir worker undercover in the Windy City. We got two strong cameo performances: first from Anderson, who gives just the right tint of menace to her convincing Lucille Ball (or Lucy Ricardo, as Media points out, everyone having a character to play) the second from Peter Stormare as Czernobog. This week’s was a slower episode – perhaps only to be expected after the opening firework show. The reason for the two gangs’ enmity is unknown perhaps they’re fighting for dominion over the realms of heaven or, I don’t know, the elixir of eternal grooming. On the other, there’s Media and perhaps the Technical Boy too (Media certainly seems to know him). On the one side, we have Wednesday, Czernobog and last week’s Leprechaun Mad Sweeney. We’re beginning to see that there are two rival camps scrapping over Shadow Moon, and with each other. Lucy (known as Media) refers to Wednesday and his pals as “the old guys”.
This Lucy, stuck behind a TV screen (and played by Gillian Anderson), defies the laws of physics and first pleads, then threatens, Shadow Moon to work with her. Then there was Shadow Moon’s encounter with a reincarnated Lucille Ball in a supermarket. His employer Wednesday, or Wotan if you will, has been easing him in with elliptical explanations and the odd bit of sorcery – like switching on the radio with a thrum of his fingers. That Shadow Moon has come to realise things are not entirely as they seem is not all down to him, of course. Nothing like a dose of dick hallucinations to make one a tad philosophical.įrom a lynching to cranial demolition by Slavic hammer, the opening instalments have not been kind to our hero Shadow Moon. It’s good,” he says ahead of the checker match. “If there’s a world under a world, fuck it. Shadow Moon now accepts that there is something happening to him that is out of the ordinary – supernatural in fact.
Maybe this is because his journey through Bryan Fuller’s spangly, bloody adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Hugo award-winning novel has sent the hero on a path of discovery. And let’s say the result of that game isn’t entirely optimal.įor a man about to have his skull destroyed by an implement the size of a railway sleeper, Shadow Moon seems pretty calm as the episode closes. Wednesday needs Czernobog’s hammer but negotiations aren’t easy – Shadow Moon is forced to wager his life for that hammer over a game of checkers instead. After that he joins Wednesday in travelling to Chicago where he meets Wednesday’s old pal, Czernobog.
This episode begins with Shadow Moon resolving matters in his home town, boxing away his belongings, and seeing visions of his dead wife and his dead friend’s penis. Don’t read on unless you have watched episode two.įrom a lynching to cranial demolition by Slavic hammer, the opening instalments of American Gods have not been kind to our hero. Spoiler alert: this blog is for people watching American Gods on Starz in the US and Amazon Prime in the UK.