Or more accurately, a gift of what's on the phone. With her best days behind her, she is paid a visit by none other than Technical Boy, who offers her the gift of an iPhone. Through it all, the show hints at her identity, with her ability to make people disappear with sex.īruce Langley as Technical Boy, and Yetide Badaki as Bilquis in a still from American Gods The story is also constructed as an attack on all women by the world of men, in his own words, which serves as an allegory for the rise of sexism over time. You’re hooked.” It helps that Orlando Jones is a fascinating orator, from his enunciation to his mannerisms, but the story is equally fascinating.įrom the Bar’an temple in 9th-century BCE Yemen, where a queen participates in an orgy, and a nightclub in 1979 Tehran, which is stormed by Shi’a revolutionists, to her turn as a homeless person in the land of Hollywood, Nancy describes the fall of a goddess who had it all. He’s a storyteller by nature, and he starts off with the most traditional of openings: “Once upon a time… See? It sounds good already. Nancy, the alter ego of the African spider god Anansi, whom we first met in the second episode. The bigger reveal in the season finale was the story delivered by Mr. Sure, Wednesday finally uttered his real name upon Shadow’s insistence, but since the audience has always been so far ahead of our "hero", it didn’t come as a surprise to anyone.
It manages to bring together the disparate and separated cast together for a spring outing, but the show meets none of the usual expectations from a finale: there's no big revelation, nor a setup for the next season, nor even an offer of some closure.
The eighth episode, “Come to Jesus”, is far from an ideal season finale. During the first season, which ended this week, that has resulted in some fascinatingly unique episodes on television (“ A Prayer for Mad Sweeney”) and others that tended to meander for no obvious reason (“ A Murder of Gods”).
From its start, American Gods – from creators Bryan Fuller and Michael Green, with the author Neil Gaiman as an executive producer – has been unafraid to alter its written source, to either update it for our times, place a bigger emphasis on the book’s minor characters, or set things on a course that takes longer to come to fruition.