They have a comedian in Dane Cook, so I guess they wanted to give him some comedic material? It’s a moment of humor that doesn’t land, and while I can see this being a way for Laura to exert authority over Robbie, it feels shoehorned in by the writers. (It pulled me out of that sequence because I just started thinking about Mark Zuckerberg being an asshole.) The religious imagery in the Band’s “The Weight” made it an interesting music choice for the moment before Laura and Robbie’s deaths, but I didn’t understand the decision to have her ask him to sing along. She’s resigned herself to this fate, and Browning’s performance highlights that detached boredom, which weighs Laura down until her death.Īs for the music, it’s strange to hear Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s main theme from The Social Network underscoring Laura’s unhappiness at the start of the episode. She has no control over the cards she’s being dealt, but she still pulls them one by one because she’s used to it. The thing she enjoyed about her work, shuffling cards, has been taken away from her by an automated shuffling machine, and the recurring visual of Laura pulling cards out of the shuffler is a fitting metaphor for how the character feels about her life. The name of the spray gives the episode its title, and Laura is looking for a way out of her life.Įmily Browning does strong work capturing Laura’s existential ennui, and she’s trapped in a routine that is draining her more with each passing day. She’s introduced as a casino employee who is so numb to the world, she passes time by trapping herself in a covered hot tub filled with bug spray. (The connection would be even stronger if Laura had a masculine nickname.) Fuller has experience writing women who are liberated by death, and Laura is the darkest of these three characters. Laura Moon completes the trinity of undead heroines in Bryan Fuller shows, joining Dead Like Me’s Georgia “George” Lass and Pushing Daisies’ Charlotte “Chuck” Charles. It’s a satisfying, self-contained narrative about a woman who finds a new purpose in life after death, and it ends with the final moment of the previous episode, merging the two stories together. The reasons behind Laura’s resurrection and the lynching she discovers immediately afterward aren’t made specific because they are still a mystery to her, and everything else is explained in enough detail that this “Git Gone” could stand alone.
There are references to events we’ve seen, but this could easily be someone’s introduction to the series and they wouldn’t be lost.
The pacing already isn’t especially quick - the show spent a lot of time in Chernobog and the Zorya sisters’ apartment - and now Michael Green and Bryan Fuller are adding an hour’s worth of material that wasn’t in the book.Īmerican Gods is taking a risk, but it’s one that pays off with “Git Gone.” For better and worse, the episode feels like a pilot for a different show. It’s a bold move to pause the main story this early and rewind the clock to focus on a different character. The first three episodes did this with the “Coming to America” and “Somewhere in America” sequences, but “Git Gone” is an entire detour of its own, an episode-length recounting of Laura Moon’s journey from suicidal blackjack dealer to superpowered zombie.
Photo: Jan Thijs/© 2017 Starz Entertainment, LLCĪmerican Gods isn’t a brisk novel, and the TV series is following the book’s inclination to break away from the main action and explore tangents that inform the larger world of the story.