American Gods “The Lake Effect”

You know something…if a mortal is determined enough and armed correctly, even a god can die.

That comes to pass here as Shadow solves the mystery of the missing Lakeside kids while Laura makes good on her promise to put Odin’s spear to good use.  Laura’s work is planned out, and given a lot of factors, how planned out is something to consider.

Shadow, he just acts.

American Gods in both the novel and television versions have done a good job of making the old gods look as shabby and unimpressive as possible.  They can still, as need be, do some rather impressive stuff, but for the most part, they aren’t.  Take Wednesday for example.  Most of the time, he gets what he wants with a series of cons and not through the use of some kind of divine miracle.  Sure, he can do some impressive stuff when he has to, but he needs worshippers to gain power, and he just doesn’t have that many.

But there’s still the mythology that created him and that still counts for something.

So, if Odin’s spear is the one weapon that can kill him, then it will kill him.  Laura just needs some lessons on how to throw it, and it looks like Liam the Leprechaun is happy to help out there for some reason.

To be fair, Wednesday has angered just about everybody.

Meanwhile, Shadow’s own budding divinity helps him get to the horrifying bottom of the missing Lakeside kids.  Sure, one suspect turned up dead of a potential suicide, but Shadow thinks it’s something else.  Especially since he finds evidence that kids go missing from that town every couple of years around New Year’s Day.  Then some vision of Ganesha takes him to that clunker on the ice, the one everyone has put money on to see who can win a raffle when the ice cracks and down it goes.

And there’s a dead teenage girl in the trunk.

And when Shadow falls through the ice, he sees a lot more cars down there with a lot of teenage ghosts hanging around.

Yeah, it turns out seemingly harmless busybody Ann-Marie Hinzelmann was some old deity taking human sacrifices to keep the town’s good fortune going.  A member of Wednesday’s pantheon, she took Shadow in as a favor to his father.

Oh, the sheriff was there and nobody notices, so he tried to first arrest the not-really-old-woman and then put a few bullets into her.  That just made her mad.

Shadow, grabbing a sacrificial knife from the wall, the same one used in an earlier episode’s cold open, does slit her throat.  And she bleeds fire as she dies.  Shadow and the sheriff barely escape.

More dramatically, Wednesday with his current righthand man Czernobog meet with Mr. World for peace talks.  These…do not go well as World only offers the old gods survival if they stay quiet.  But Laura is outside, armed with Odin’s spear and Mad Sweeney’s lucky coin.  And though Czernobog tries to defend the Allfather, a leprechaun tossed the lucky coin can make an equally good defender.

But as Wednesday gets hits…did he look serene there?  Like…he knew that was coming?

Well, it may not matter since there’s only one episode left.

Regardless, we have two dead gods from the looks of things, and that may not go well.  However, it does say that a god can die if the right methods are used.  That’s probably a theme of some kind to this series…