In John Huston’s 1951 adventure classic The African Queen, Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn are thrown together by circumstance and unhappily bicker their way through the jungle before (spoiler alert) falling head-over-heels for each other, getting hitched and blowing up the bad guys. I’m reminded of them whenever I encounter an example that demonstrates one of the immutable rules of film and television: squabbling odd couples ‘ are always on the path to love.
For the first two seasons of American Gods, the Leprechaun Mad Sweeney (Pablo Schreiber) was the Bogart to Laura Moon’s Hepburn (Emily Browning). Initially forced to stick together just because his lucky coin occurred to be buried within her gut, a few humorous jokes and punches to the head later and dirty glances became lingering looks. Laura is looking for him in Purgatory when all this hits her, midway through this event, via a tear-jerking montage of her departed beloved doing what he did best: staring moodily into the middle distance and smoking a fag.
Laura doesn’t know it yet, but it’s Sweeney’s love that is going to yank her from this great beyond and deliver her ricocheting back to not-so-great Earth. Cast your mind back into the fifth installment of last year, The Ways of the Dead, where Sweeney took Laura to meet his old partner Baron Samedi (Mustafa Shakir). In New Orleans, Samedi gave Laura a vial of gris-gris with all the instruction that it might bring her back to life if combined with: “Blood, infused with love… two drops” Sure enough, once the vial breaks and the gris-gris mixes with Laura’s dusty stays, all it takes is a couple of drops of Sweeney’s blood and – hey presto – Laura’s an actual woman again. He did love her cute! However, as Laura soon learns, he’s also very dead. Where does this leave the reigning two-time queen of revival? Off to”see a man about a song,” she says. Her earworm is your classical song that has been haunting her memories. The AV Guy at Purgatory told it had been Schweiger’s ‘Requiem of Baldr’. Fans of Norse mythology will probably know that Baldr is not, as the name implies, a dating app for hairless guys but actually among the influential sons of Odin. Hey, isn’t Laura married to some guy like that?
Talking of Shadow (Ricky Whittle), this week he is learning that hardship makes for strange bedfellows. Back in the show’s very first episode he had been ambushed and lynched by Technical Boy (Bruce Langley), so he is not best pleased when he finds himself having to team up with the brand new God to monitor Bilquis (Yetide Badaki), that has been kidnapped by private security goons working for billionaire tech guy Bill (Gil Bellows). They’re upset because Bill was a missing person ever because Bilquis popped him up into her vagina nebula. The above goons torture Bilquis, which raises the question: who will the Celtics turn to sometimes like that? In Bilquis’ case, it’s Oshun (Herizen Guardiola) who answers her prayers. She is among the Orishas, the early African gods who’ve also been calling out to Shadow in what seems like the plotline that will end up revealing the most about our hero’s true destiny.
Wednesday (Ian McShane), meanwhile, is spending his time at a Viking metal bar called Valhalla, consoling his mate Johan Wengren (Marilyn Manson) about his dead bandmates. Later that night the bar explodes and Wednesday strips off his clothes and cavorts babbling down the street. A sudden bout of insanity, or could it just be a cute wheeze to get himself sent to the exact same corrupt mental institution that’s home to his beloved Demeter (Blythe Danner)? You can say 1 thing for certain, Wednesday’s certainly dedicated.
Hits And Myths
Valhalla, the Viking metal bar Wednesday and Johan get plastered and stabby in, made me quite nostalgic for Viking metal bars. I was sad they blew it up, but the neon sign out did say Valhalla East’ which raises the tantalizing prospect that there could be a Valhalla West still to be seen.
“Mmm, tasting. What a concept!”
Many McShane moment of this week: Laid out on a stretcher at the back of an ambulance, his eyes wild with confusion, Wednesday summons the strength to whisper: “A fighter shat in my pants.”
The devil has the best songs: The history of this tune feeling’ Good’ is fascinating: It was written by the English composers Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse for their musical The Roar of the Greasepaint in 1964, but it has been a jazz standard since Nina Simone recorded it definitively the following year. Muse had a hit in 2001, a version which in 2010 was voted readers that the greatest cover song of all time. 2010 was a crazy moment. All that is the preamble to saying that it takes something really special to generate a new version to stand out, but the great singer-songwriter Willow Robinson’s cap which plays over the final credits made every hair on the back of the neck stand up.
American Season season 3 episode 4 is on Amazon Prime Video.
