At the end of season 1, Mr Wednesday brandishes a newly forged sword, and fires the first big shot of the war between the old gods and the new by convincing the ancient god Eostre to roll back Spring and plunge the world into a barren land. "Shit has finally hit the fan!" the show bellowed proudly to the viewer "Watch season 2!".
The first thing the much anticipated season 2 does is clumsily brush all the shit back off of the fan and put it in a box, retconning every major event from the Season 1 finale. The World is no longer barren, and the show hopes you don't notice. Also the character Media has disappeared from the plot, not for any reason other than Gillian Anderson's lack of availability. Also, Odin's new super sword has inexplicably disappeared from the plot, with no any reference to its absence, and Odin now says he desperately needs a magic spear reforging before we the audience have permission to see any action. Welcome back to the waiting game.
By the end of Season 2, and we are nowhere near closer to resolving the story. If anything, it ends how it starts: That super spear Odin needs? It takes three episodes to sort that shit out, only for the spear to immediately become irrelevant again. Thanks for nothing! Likewise, the New Gods seem content to passively hang around a 1970s themed bunker, swapping speeches about how things are definitely about to explode, any second now, any moment now, just keep watching the show, keep watching the show! Media has been replaced by New Media - a funky amalgamation of internet culture, emoticons, and hentai porn - and again, she spends the entire show not doing anything of interest.
No one is doing anything! Even the B plot involving Laura Moon exists purely to kick the can further down the road. By the end of Season One she was a putrid corpse. By the end of season 2, she has been magically revitalised just so that she can go back to rotting away again later. We get one brief high-point in which one episode depicts the fate of Thor during the 1930s, but the rest is an utterly meaningless bit of television. I'd heard about the troubled production, but was there also another writer's strike going on I was not aware of?
The worst part is that I've read the book between seasons, so I know what's still left to come; the slowest, most boring part of the book in which our protagonist, Shadow Moon, dicks around a frozen sleepy town for god knows how long. My only hope is that the series doesn't make it that far and gets cancelled. I'm really annoyed with how American Gods has turned out; it went from a promising, surrealist spectacle, to a show with little to say and even less intention to get on with telling a story. It's premise of ancient huckster gods fighting it out in modern America is completely squandered for the sake of simply spinning out more episodes. I'm not sure I need any more.
See, I told you it Should Have Been One Season
At the end of season 1, Mr Wednesday brandishes a newly forged sword, and fires the first big shot of the war between the old gods and the new by convincing the ancient god Eostre to roll back Spring and plunge the world into a barren land. "Shit has finally hit the fan!" the show bellowed proudly to the viewer "Watch season 2!".
The first thing the much anticipated season 2 does is clumsily brush all the shit back off of the fan and put it in a box, retconning every major event from the Season 1 finale. The World is no longer barren, and the show hopes you don't notice. Also the character Media has disappeared from the plot, not for any reason other than Gillian Anderson's lack of availability. Also, Odin's new super sword has inexplicably disappeared from the plot, with no any reference to its absence, and Odin now says he desperately needs a magic spear reforging before we the audience have permission to see any action. Welcome back to the waiting game.
By the end of Season 2, and we are nowhere near closer to resolving the story. If anything, it ends how it starts: That super spear Odin needs? It takes three episodes to sort that shit out, only for the spear to immediately become irrelevant again. Thanks for nothing! Likewise, the New Gods seem content to passively hang around a 1970s themed bunker, swapping speeches about how things are definitely about to explode, any second now, any moment now, just keep watching the show, keep watching the show! Media has been replaced by New Media - a funky amalgamation of internet culture, emoticons, and hentai porn - and again, she spends the entire show not doing anything of interest.
No one is doing anything! Even the B plot involving Laura Moon exists purely to kick the can further down the road. By the end of Season One she was a putrid corpse. By the end of season 2, she has been magically revitalised just so that she can go back to rotting away again later. We get one brief high-point in which one episode depicts the fate of Thor during the 1930s, but the rest is an utterly meaningless bit of television. I'd heard about the troubled production, but was there also another writer's strike going on I was not aware of?
The worst part is that I've read the book between seasons, so I know what's still left to come; the slowest, most boring part of the book in which our protagonist, Shadow Moon, dicks around a frozen sleepy town for god knows how long. My only hope is that the series doesn't make it that far and gets cancelled. I'm really annoyed with how American Gods has turned out; it went from a promising, surrealist spectacle, to a show with little to say and even less intention to get on with telling a story. It's premise of ancient huckster gods fighting it out in modern America is completely squandered for the sake of simply spinning out more episodes. I'm not sure I need any more.