American Gods Episode Three: “Head Full of Snow”

We open “Somewhere in America, ” which we pretty quickly find out is Queens. An elderly lady is in her kitchen, music-of-doom playing as she tries to grab something from a high shelf and nearly falls. But whew! Looks like she made it, and continues making food for her undeserving offspring. Except, just kidding, because knock knock, who’s there, ends with: “Hi! It’s Anubis!” As it turns out, this lady was raised by someone who told her stories of the old Egyptian gods, so despite the fact that she has been nominally a Muslim, her secret belief in those old tales is enough for Anubis to claim her as one of his own when she dies. He takes her to a series of doors, and she makes him choose which one she’ll walk through into which afterlife (because she thinks he is a “nice boy”—bet Anubis doesn’t hear that one often). She walks toward it, despite last-minute doubts about following the wrong god. But too late—she’s sucked away into whatever fate he’s chosen for her, and Anubis walks off across the sand.
Then, we’re somewhere else in America—Czernobog’s house. Shadow’s asleep after his death-by-hammer checkers game with Czernobog, so I guess he didn’t call that bet in right away. He hears something and goes up to the roof to find a lady in a white nightdress doing some stargazing. It’s the midnight sister, Zorya Polunochnaya. She tells him a legend about the Big Dipper, and all its different names—“Odin’s Wain” feels like the one we should remember—about how there’s a monster up there that needs to be watched constantly, lest it escape (hence the sisters’ dawn, dusk, and midnight names). She pretty quickly cottons to the fact that all is not well with Shadow, and in the guise of telling him his fortune, she gives him some excellent life advice (“Uh, stop putting yourself in situations where people can kill you, maybe?” I may be paraphrasing). She also plucks down the moon,, which manifests as a silver coin (I’m just reporting here, guys), and hands it to him. She tells him he gave away the “father, the sun” coin of protection, but not to give away this one. It seems to be some kind of protective device, though weaker than the one he had before. Also, she kisses him to see what it would be like. (Verdict: “It’s disgusting, but in a nice way, like blue cheese or brandy.” Aww, how…sweet?)
Shadow awakens and thinks maybe the encounter with Zorya was a dream—but nope, there’s that moon-coin she gave him. He takes her advice about keeping it safe, but not the second part, about but not the second part about not asking people to kill him, because he then asks Cznerobog for another game—goading him into it by calling him an old man too weak to kill Shadow with one swing while flashing his considerable physique in the old man’s face. It’s not subtle, but it totally works! They play, and this time, Shadow wins. Czernobog will come with him and Wednesday to the meeting we keep hearing about. Well played, Shadow. Well played. Though, based on Wednesday’s rather sinister walk with the dusk Zorya sister (which makes it clear that they have a history—a sexy history, if you’re asking me), maybe it’s something Shadow doesn’t want to be involved in. Zorya figures out Wednesday is up to something, and, after a little make-out session, foretells doom and loss in his tea leaves. There’s a lot of portentous lighting and Wednesday admits “war” is coming. So, sunshine and rainbows, per usual with this guy. Shadow and Wednesday meet up in the light of day, at which point Wednesday’s version of good morning is: “We’re gonna rob a bank. You want some coffee?” 
Somewhere else in America, Mad Sweeney’s having a bad morning. He’s shot at by a bar owner after waking up totally drunk. This, shortly followed by the extremely unlikely death of a kind stranger who picks him up while he’s stumbling down the side of the road (there is impalement involved). He figures out he’s missing something important, which turns out to be that coin he gave Shadow back at the beginning of his journey. He tracks down Shadow and Wednesday and asks for it, and after some back-and-forth, Shadow finally tells him he put the coin on his wife’s grave in Indiana, and Sweeney heads out. We’ll check in with him again later.
Then there’s another “Somewhere in America” interlude (this time downtown NYC). A man in a business suit strolls through Manhattan, unsuccessfully trying to have a meeting with someone to sell him “gidgets and gee-gaws.” He eventually gets into a taxi to go back to his hotel. He hears the driver speaking Arabic, which he understands, and two converse. It transpires they are both from Oman, though it slowly becomes clear the taxi driver is from there…a lot longer ago. He is an ifrit, a spirit with fiery eyes out of Arab legends, and the man is drawn to him, in more than one way—he invites the driver up to his hotel room and they have half-real-world, half-spirit-world type sex, with the ifrit seeming to transition from one dimension to another. When the businessman wakes up, the ifrit  is gone and has taken all of the businessman’s things with him—but left the taxi driver identity behind. The businessman is thrilled; the ifrit told him he doesn’t grant wishes like people say, but he has—all this man wanted was to be free of his old life, and now he is.
Most of the remainder of the episode is spent with Shadow and Wednesday and the aforementioned bank robbery. It’s a two-man con. Wednesday pretends to be a security guard collecting money from an ATM’s “broken” nighttime drop-box; Shadow backs him up when the police call to verify the fishy situation. During this caper, they also continue their conversation from last episode about what’s real and what’s not—Wednesday tells Shadow to think snow, to try to make it snow, and he does. Did he really make it snow or not? Wednesday leaves it up to Shadow to determine—despite Shadow directly asking him—talking about the nature of belief rather than answering the question. (Though perhaps that’s an answer in and of itself.)
Shadow and Wednesday head to a motel for a well-earned (ill-earned?) rest, a scene intercut with a visit by Mad Sweeney to Shadow’s wife’s grave. He digs her up, only to find her coffin is empty. Not just empty, but with a coin-sized hole burned through the top. Cut to Shadow’s room to find out why—Laura seems to be standing there, looking very much not dead. “Hi puppy,” she says—and we go to black.
Our Reactions
Meghan: This is the episode where I think the show might lose some viewers, especially non-readers. It felt really disjointed, and it was the first time I was kind of bored with the “Coming to America” vignette. The one at the start, with Anubis and the woman, wasn’t in the book, but I loved it a lot. The second vignette wasn’t great, even though it came from the book! The scene illustrates how hard it can be for an immigrant to make it in America, but I don’t think it worked on film. It felt too long and too weird, and I don’t think it explained enough for the non-book audience. It also broke up the action of the main story when all I wanted to do was get back to the heist I knew Shadow and Wednesday were about to pull off. I shouldn’t be asking myself “when will this be over?”
Thankfully, Shadow and Wednesday’s bank heist was just as awesome as I expected. I loved how funny Wednesday looked with his giant earmuffs, and I laughed out loud as Shadow, standing by the pay phone, shouted an agonized “f–k!” when he saw the cops pull up. Shadow meeting Zorya Polunochnaya was also lovely and dreamy. She was sweetly funny, and it felt very Stardust-y, to reference another Gaiman work. That genie vignette though…I worry.
Kelly: I agree, this was not a well-constructed episode. One of my hobbies is reading 1,000s of pages of paid-by-the-word Victorian authors, and books where the whole point is character analysis, plot be damned, and while I liked that side of things last week, I felt it illuminated the characters while moving the plot forward. This episode, on the other hand, rambled and wandered a great deal, accomplishing much less of both plot and character development. The pacing was off, and even the fun parts felt ponderous. The heist was totally wasted—why not take advantage of your ‘70s road-trip/weird Tarantino vibe when it’s most appropriate? The only parts that genuinely worked were the scenes with Mad Sweeney. The out-of-nowhere dark humor of his scenes delivered where the rest of the episode didn’t.
That said, I actually love the ifrit scene. It’s one of my favorite parts of the book, and while works nicely as a short story, its placement in the episode annoyed me, because most people will end up seeing it as a plot blocker, rather than appreciating how good it is. It’s disconnected from the main plot, so why not throw it in later, to give us a chance to breathe after an action sequence? Honestly, it felt like a waste of great material. Last week was a bridge episode, showing Shadow’s growing understanding of this world—I didn’t need another one this week.
Book vs. Show (Kelly)
We mentioned some of this above, but the changes this week where were a lot of small-to-medium “oh, this happened in the book, but not this way” moments. Some examples:

• Yes, Shadow does go up to the roof and talk with Zorya, the midnight sister. But she comes to get him, and their conversation is a bit different. She also seems more serious and ethereal, and less childlike and quirky, than the show makes her out to be. Also, no kissing.
• Yes, Shadow does play a second game with Czernobog, but Wednesday does not go walking with the dusk Zorya while they do it, nor is it clear in the book that they have any sort of special relationship, or that this Zorya deserves more screen time than the others. It seems like a scene added to give us hints about who these characters are, and to foreshadow plot developments  to come (and perhaps also an opportunity to give the women of the cast more to do than they did in the book). I kind of liked them giving these two characters a history—but I did not like the overly dramatic Romantic weather cues demonstrating how we should feel about it. The same things could have been revealed in a subtler way if the scene were played as nostalgia. I think non-book readers would have gotten it. Trust them!
• Shadow’s encounter with Mad Sweeney over the coin—in the book he encounters him already beaten to hell, having already figured out that he lost his coin; when Shadow tells him he lost it, Sweeney’s reaction is fatalistic rather than angry. The show’s Sweeney has a lot more fight in him than the book’s Sweeney, who’d already frozen to death under a bridge at this point (well, sort of anyway). If this is a way to keep him around, great, but I’ll be curious to see what they do with him.
• Also the snow thing, and the extended sequences of Shadow maybe or maybe not thinking it into being. This feels, like the Zorya/Wednesday scene, like something thrown in to take care of the foreshadowing non-readers might have missed. I’m not sure we needed it though—I think it offers too many hints too early, to be honest with you. 

There’s one more thing: Laura. Obviously, the timing of her reappearance has been vastly changed from the book. I’ve been waiting for her appearance since episode one. You’re late girl, but great to see you! The thing with Mad Sweeney discovering her coffin/coin situation did not happen in the book at all, and felt like it was intended to play up the shocking reveal to the non-book audience that she’s now perhaps among the walking dead. I guess they didn’t want to have to deal with this thread while still introducing the rest of the world, but it’s about time she showed up.
Kelly and Meghan Talk It Over
Meghan: I don’t know about you, Kelly, but I thought this episode was really uneven. It didn’t even have any standout music! I at least loved Shadow and Wednesday. Shadow’s shock at creating snow, the bank heist. It was great. The pacing just felt off.
Kelly: As I wrote above, I agree about the pacing. This thing just never got any momentum going at all—or if it did, it kept interrupting itself. I disagree with you a little, because I don’t even think the bank heist was that fun. It had none of the caper-y tone I was expecting, replaced with hints about dark forces and magic that, to be honest, could have been dealt with with a much lighter hand. It even wasted one of my favorite “Somewhere in America” vignettes. Ugh, sorry, this is a total “book was better” moment for me. I guess we were bound to have one of those.  Do you think this might be the writers changing up the pacing to make the story last past one season and not quite hitting the mark? Do you think that we’ll get back on track next week, now that the meeting we’ve been trying to get to for two episodes seems to be a go? There’s so much great stuff in that part in the book, and I can only hope those scenes work better than what we got this week.
Meghan: The heist was always a highlight of the book for me, so I was delighted to see it on film. I thought it was great. I wanted to get back to it so much.
I think the writers feel like they have time to break up the pacing because this season won’t make it through the whole book anyway. I see what they’re trying to do, they just missed the mark this episode. I continue to have faith.
Wisdom of the Gods (AKA Our favorite quotes)
“You believe in nothing so you have nothing.” – Zorya Polunochnaya, telling Shadow his fortune.
“I do not grant wishes.” – The Ifrit. But is he right?
“Sigh …yeah, I like marshmallows.” Shadow’s defeated tone here made me laugh so hard. Ricky Whittle is excellent.
“Think. Snow.” Mr. Wednesday commands it. Does Shadow really make it snow? All signs point to “maybe.”
“Did I make snow?” asks Shadow, tired.
“Did you make snow? Well if you chose to believe that you made snow, then you get to live the rest of your life believing that you can do things that are impossible. Or you can believe it’s a delusion.” – Mr. Wednesday, helpful as ever.
“Hi, puppy.” Hi, Laura!
Final Thoughts (Meghan)
It was a very uneven episode this week, and both Kelly and I are torn. I have high hopes for episode four, where we finally get more of Laura’s story. American Gods was just renewed for a second season, so no matter what happens, we get to spend a lot more time with Shadow and friends. See you next week!
Do you agree that this week, the book did it better?