American Gods “Ashes And Demons”

So, I see the series tossed a new goddess in as some sort of love interest for Wednesday.  This one would be Demeter, Greek goddess of the harvest and all.  We got a nice little “how she got to America” story in the beginning and everything.

Now, a part of me suspects that had the series not been canceled after three seasons that Demeter would fulfill Easter’s roll in the novel since Kristin Chenoweth left the show after season one when all the problems behind the scenes started.  That was a bit too bad, but we have Blythe Danner as an older goddess who does not give a fig newton to anything Wednesday has to say, so I think it’s mostly a fair trade.

But yes, Wednesday is in love with Demeter…or so he claims.  She’s in a home for people with mental illness from the looks of things.  Yes, I would say claiming to be a goddess would get someone locked up in such a place.  They give her pills and everything, but Wednesday, he wants her to get out or at least he wants to spend time with her inside the place.  She doesn’t seem all that interested in either.  Then again, nobody seems to like Wednesday all that much, so I sure as hell am not surprised.

That said, as much as Shadow is doing Shadow things, looking for a lost girl and all, the real treat for this episode was the return of the late Laura Moon.  Oh, she’s not still a rotting corpse wandering around America and getting into trouble.  See, this is a show about religion, so naturally, we get to see the afterlife, and that’s where Laura went, namely Purgatory, a place that starts off as a scary elevator ride to a waiting room, and then you, well, see a movie of your life from the looks of things.  Laura isn’t exactly known for her patience, so of course she slips back into the endless hallway of doors to skip to the front of the line.  Thing is, Laura is acting like her cynical self, ignoring the advice she’s been given, and then narrates her own life story to explain her father started cheating on her mother because of little things Laura did to get back at her mom for not going on a family vacation.

Laura believes she’s basically an awful person…and I am not inclined to disagree with her.  I am not all that sure the entities she meets in Purgatory are all that inclined to disagree either.  What they do disagree with her about is that she wasn’t rotten from her childhood.  The story Laura told was a series of lies she’d apparently told herself.  She had nothing to do with her father’s being a dirtbag.

Laura looks…shocked.

I do so love that character, rotten as she is.  She gets to see all the really unusual places involved with the spiritual development of, well, America and all who reside there.  Granted, Laura being in Purgatory means she’ll probably find her way back to Earth at some point.

Then again, Shadow has his own issues.  He’s seeing Bilquis in his dreams.  Bilquis is showing guilt over her, um, worship methods since one, um, adherent dropped a cell phone with someone asking grampa to text back.  You mean she’s been doing this for thousands of years and she’s only now starting to feel guilty?  Then again, there’s a lot I don’t get about Bilquis in general, starting with “Why is she still so prominent on this show?” and “Why did people worship someone whose worship seemed to kill them?”  But that’s neither here nor there.  Shadow thinks he should go see her, and when he gets to her New York City apartment, she’s missing, possibly because something came after her.

But that sure does look like a shell-shocked Technical Boy sitting on the floor.