![]() ![]() While all this gallimaufry has been brewing on screen, the real action has been behind the scenes. What’s more, she is not just alive, but super-strong: although having a frame so elfin a breeze from Lake Michigan could transport her to another state, she lifted a car up so Mad Sweeney could fix a puncture. Later, he wound up jailed after a botched casino heist and, just before his release, discovered his wife had died in a car crash.Īnd yet we find Laura Moon alive, driving around Illinois trying to find her abducted husband aided by surly leprechaun Mad Sweeney. He arrived as a boy from France to Brooklyn, too white for the boys in the hood, too black to avoid racist cop street hassle, too spiritual to fit in thanks to his late mother’s godlike demeanour. Helpfully, as Shadow Moon dangled topless, we cut to his back story. Whittle’s really targeted those pecs since season one ended a couple of years ago, while in the interim I have completely forgotten who he is. The season opener fetishised Ricky Whittle’s buff torso as his character Shadow Moon hung, Christlike, in some mobile Abu Ghraib, with electrodes on nipples, tortured for being Mr Wednesday’s bodyguard. Photograph: Jasper Savage/2018 StarzĪmerican Gods is Game of Thrones minus dragons. He notoriously summed up Game of Throne’s appeal with the words: “It’s only tits and dragons.” He has heroically held together franchise flapdoodle from Lovejoy to Deadwood to Game of Thrones, bringing his mullet and Manc sagacity to bear on all kinds of under- and overwritten dialogue. Like Avengers: Age of Ultron or Theresa May’s withdrawal agreement, it has a plot so baffling only weird life forms (11-year-old boys, swivel-eyed lawyers) could explain or care about.īut McShane is above such confusion, now and throughout his career. Which is why McShane was in a parking lot in Nowheresville USA, sweet-talking Kali.Īmerican Gods is like a Marvel or DC franchise with theological pretensions. His team so far includes Ghanaian trickster god Anansi, with his gobby patter and sharp suits, and Queen Bilquis, goddess of love and cleavages. But only if Mr Wednesday can recruit more members to his crack crew of tooled-up immortals. ![]() The immigrant gods from Europe, Asia and Africa are to be arrayed at some point this season against the new order imagined by writer Neil Gaiman as veiled approximations of Zuckerberg, Bezos and the spirit of Steve Jobs. His task is to rouse depressed gods who were worshipped before the neoliberal digital era and fight to restore the glory days. Wagnerians will recognise Mr Wednesday by his single eye, stirring bass vocals and unkindness to ravens as Wotan, Valhalla’s uber ruler. This will not stand.Īnd so it falls to Ian McShane, as Mr Wednesday, to take out the parvenu god trash. ![]() The US has been seduced by a gimcrack pantheon of new deities: globalisation (personified by Mr World), technology (represented by a god called Technical Boy) and pop culture (symbolised by the goddess Media, played by Gillian Anderson in season one but now, following backstage shenanigans we will address shortly, by someone else). Why on earth is Mama-Ji AKA Kali, Hindu goddess of death, destruction and, fingers crossed, excellent waffles, busting her hump at a diner? Because in American Gods (Amazon Prime) the old gods have fallen on hard times: nobody believes in them any more, so they have been obliged to join the precariat. “That is, if I can swap my weekend shift.” ‘I have no choice but to resume the lopping of heads and the drinking of blood,” sighed Mama-Ji, a waitress at the Motel America with the understandable weariness of someone steeling themselves for the martial fuss of a franchise’s second season.
0 Comments
|
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |