American Gods focused solely on Laura Moon this week! She hasn’t always made the best choices, but she’s cheating death and back on Earth to find Shadow. Here’s our recap of “Git Gone” and a preview of next week’s episode, “Lemon Scented You”!
{100% Fresh at Rotten Tomatoes}
“Git Gone” focuses around Laura Moon. Who she was, how she met Shadow, her struggles with addiction and depression, her part in Shadow’s incarceration, her affair, and ultimately her death.
This backstory provides us with the ability to connect with Laura in a way we haven’t done before. We understand she has issues, and we still don’t know where/when they started, but she makes no excuses for her flawed nature.
She is who she is, and that’s that.
We find out that Laura worked at a casino, dealing blackjack. Her favorite part was shuffling the cards, but a device comes along that shuffles the cards for them and cuts the time down, so she’s regulated to dealing.
She hates it, and her life is monotonous. Laura goes home in the evenings to her cat, Dummy, and sits on the couch. One evening, she kills a fly with some bug spray, “Git Gone”, and she looks out to her hot tub.
She takes the bottle of spray and gets into the hot tub, closes the lid, and sprays the poison into the air. When she can’t take it anymore, she pushes the lid up, and gasps for breath.
I don’t know if she was attempting suicide or getting a high. The bug spray comes back into play over the episode, so it seems like death to me.
Her life changes the night Shadow comes into the casino. He’s trying to hustle her, but she catches him pretty quickly and tells him that he needs to finish his drink and leave. He’ll get caught if he stays because he’s not as slick as he thinks he is.
He follows her advice for the most part but sticks around to meet her outside. He asks her if she wants to rob the casino with him since she probably knows everything about it. She declines, but they go to her home together. This is the beginning of their relationship, and Laura lets him know that she likes things rough from the get-go by slapping him as they start to have sex.
It’s very obvious throughout their relationship that Shadow cares more about Laura than she does for him. Her nickname for him, “puppy”, is condescending, but he sticks with her. During their love scenes, she seems lost in thoughts or staring at the hot tub.
After they’re married, she comes to him with the proposition he made her that first night in the parking lot.
Rob the casino.
She’s bored and wants to do something. She loves Shadow, or so she says, but she’s bored in their marriage and with their life. Since she knows the casino so well, she thinks it will go off without a problem…
Unfortunately, it doesn’t go as planned and Shadow ends up getting caught. Instead of letting her take the fall, too, he says it was all him so she can stay out of prison.
The only thing Shadow asks is that she wait for him.
In the end, she doesn’t wait. She has an affair with Robbie with Robbie that will eventually lead to her death.
When Shadow’s return is days away, she tries to break it off with Robbie as they’re driving down the road. To ease his sadness, she offers a goodbye blow job, which is what ends up killing them when her elbow accidentally shifts the gears and they run head on into another car.
Since she’s dead, Anubis comes along to collect her…
When she sits besides Anubis in the desert, and he attempts to weigh her heart, she slaps his hand away.
“I lived my life. Good and bad. Definitely not light as a feather.”
Anubis tells her that since she believed in nothing, she will go into nothing.
“You will be done. There will be darkness.”
“And peace?”
“Darkness.”
In the desert, is a hot tub just like her own and a bottle of Git Gone bug spray. Laura tells him there’s no way she’s going in there, and Anubis lets her know that he’s not lost a soul yet.
“Death is not a debate. How many do you think have come before you? All with promises and threats and offers of glory, gold, love. Who are you to misguide me from my duty? You are but a man, not even one I should remember. You will go into the darkness and I will forget even having met you.”
“Fuck you.”
Then she’s pulled away and out of the desert, leaving Anubis to look around, wondering where she went. That lucky coin of Sweeney’s has given her a second chance.
After she crawls out of her grave, she begins walking. She’s still very much dead, but able to move, talk, think.
The first place she reaches after her escape from her grave is Shadow being beaten and lynched by the faceless men of Technical Boy. We didn’t know who saved him before, but it’s quite obvious now.
As she sees Shadow, he’s surrounded in light. She kills all the men, losing her arm in the process, then hides behind a tree so Shadow won’t see her.
Instead of seeking out Shadow right away, she goes home, takes a shower, gets clean clothes, and is almost out the door when Shadow arrives.
She hides in the hot tub until he’s gone.
Once the coast is clear, she goes to Audrey’s house because she needs some supplies to sew her arm back on.
Of course, Audrey shows up and freaks out. It’s the perfect levity to the situation because Laura’s having some severe reactions to all the embalming fluid inside her. So much so, she busts into the bathroom and sits on the toilet, expelling massive amounts as diarrhea.
In the end, it’s Audrey that ends up sewing her arm back on. Laura apologizes and says she feels badly about what happened, and in true Audrey fashion, she says,
“Fuck your feelings.”
Then since she’s so kind, she ends up driving Laura to find Shadow. In the process, Laura reads her obituary and isn’t happy with it. Audrey lays out some more hard truths:
“You had a shitty obituary because you had a shitty life. You were shitty.”
In the middle of the road, Anubis and his friend, Mr. Ibis, appear and stop the trip. From there, they take Laura to a funeral home, and properly fix her arm.
In doing this, they tell her that she is still dead. Her body will decay, and she’ll need regular upkeep if she wants to last long enough to finish what she’s there for.
Before they finish, Anubis makes a pledge to Laura…
Laura ends up in Shadow’s motel room and sets out some fly paper since they’re always around her now. As she sits on his bed, light comes through the windows and the cracks around the door, and Shadow enters.
We end the episode where we did last week, with Laura saying:
“Hi, puppy.”
*****
This Sunday, Wednesday and Shadow find themselves in a bit of a jam with the New Gods. Is there any way to stop the war brewing between them?
Trying to work things out with his dead and unfaithful wife, Shadow’s emotional reunion is interrupted when he and Mr. Wednesday are kidnapped by the New Gods. [via STARZ]
Take a look at these clips and stills for “Lemon Scented You” and let us know what you think!
The incredible Gillian Anderson will also reprise her role as Media on American Gods for “Lemon Scented You”! You won’t want to miss it!
Gillian Anderson stars as the New God Media in the critically acclaimed series “American Gods.” Media assumes whatever form will deliver her message most effectively and is often personified by iconic celebrities. [via STARZ]
