In the American Gods Season 1 finale, this cast of characters was all dressed up with nowhere to go. As is often the case with these split on-screen adaptations, the best parts of the story are often not in the arbitrary “ending,” but in the added material - the parts of the source material that are given a chance to stretch out and breathe in their on-screen adaptation. If you’re not fundamentally changing the story in its adaptation, but you’re only telling a portion of a story that is meant to be told as a whole, then you get an ill-defined shape, an aborted narrative, an incomplete picture. Watching the Season 1 finale of American Gods was similar to the experience of watching the first half of a book’s film adaptation that has been split into two separate movies ( Mockingjay Part 1 is a great example). In this age of adaptation, it’s not so uncommon for on-screen adaptations of popular books to struggle when it comes to giving a story shape in a new medium. It was more wheel-spinning without the sentiment to offset the plot redundance. Because of this, I didn’t care much for an ending that didn’t bring much to the table intellectually. My interest in Shadow’s journey and the fight between the New and Old Gods is more academic. I care about Laura and Mad’s complicated frenemy-ship. I care about Salim and his search for the Jinn. Intellectually, I’m often fascinated by these characters and this story. This ending might have been saved by making us care about the characters a bit more, but this show (and, I would argue, Neil Gaiman’s work in general) has never been primarily concerned with emotional connection. In this moment, I wanted to jump ship and join the New Gods’ coalition and I couldn’t quite figure out why Shadow wouldn’t want to, too.
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It was an odd moment to empathize most with a New God who has been treating as an antagonist of sorts throughout the first season. Instead, it is Media who is shown to be horrified by Ostara’s actions - which, let’s remember, will probably lead to the most vulnerable of people going hungry. There may be a difference between confusion and anger, but it’s hard to believe that Shadow wouldn’t at least be a little angry after seeing Ostara literally kill all plants within a 100-mile radius. When Shadow realize all of these fools are gods - after Wednesday explicitly spells it out for him in the middle of Ostara’s party - he wanders around in a daze, making conversation with White Jesus (who, by the way, was pitch perfect and the true highlight of this episode) and staring gooily at Ostara. He both somehow doesn’t believe in the existence of gods until the eighth episode and also has no idea that Wednesday is Odin. And this was one of the main problems with adapting such a short section of the book for this first season: Shadow comes off like a moron. We may have all known who Wednesday truly is, but Shadow (somehow) still didn’t have a clue. The Wednesday reveal relied heavily on how Shadow reacted to it. However, we live in the age of the internet, when all you have to do is Google “Wednesday,” “ravens,” and “lightning” and you’ll have found the answer to Wednesday’s identity before the end of the first episode. The Odin reveal was obviously a moment that would have hit a bit better for the non-book reader who didn’t know who Wednesday was. What of the Odin reveal? American Gods has to walk that fine line between telling the story for the book reader and telling the story for the non-book reader. This time, it doesn’t matter how prettily it is written or how prettily Ian McShane says it we’ve heard it all before. It was riveting stuff… the first time we heard it. Wednesday bites back with a bitter observation about the difference between distraction and belief.
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The New Gods say that Wednesday’s day are numbered because people have forgotten him.
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Both sides were trying to win Ostara over to their side, but the conversation was too similar to the one they had only a few episodes ago when we first saw Wednesday and Mr. The anti-climactic vibe of this entire Season 1 finale was most reflected in the final confrontation between the Old Gods and the New Gods, which saw Wednesday facing off against Media, Tech Boy, and Mr.