American Gods Season 1 Finale review: 'Come to Jesus'

Mr. Wednesday’s war has finally come, but we’ve gotten his target wrong all along. Sure, he wants to unite the surviving old gods of the world’s various fallen faiths and pantheons against the New Gods of American hegemony—technology, the media, guns, commercialization, and the military-industrial-corporate-intelligence-government complex represented by the mysterious Mr. World. But attacking we the people is his way to win. In “Come to Jesus,” the eight and final episode of American Gods’ spectacular first season, the war begins — a biological war in which Wednesday recruits Ostara, goddess of spring, to destroy all the vegetation in the nation until people begin worshipping the old gods again. “Never once have they had to work for it,” he reasons, “give thanks for it.” His plan is to starve the pampered Americans into prayer.

Wednesday’s thesis, and by extension the show’s, is an even more fundamental misreading of American life than the series’ underlying assertion that in Americas centuries-long existence it hasn’t had room for legends, myths, and magic. Certainly vast swathes of America have been insulated from hunger, poverty, violence, and toil — though that swathe is getting smaller by the year. But the very idea that “never once have they had to work for it, give thanks for it” is the height of blinkered liberalism, a world view that recognizes the existence of injustice but always manages to locate it elsewhere. As of 2015, the year American Gods was greenlit, thirteen percent of American households are food insecure; in some states that percentage rises higher than one in five households. This pat assessment of America as a land of coddled weaklings who’ve never struggled may be true from where Neil Gaiman, Bryan Fuller, and Michael Green are sitting, but any Viking war god worth his salt ought to fucking know better.

Oh yeah — Wednesday is really Odin, the one-eyed all-father of Norse myth. Um, surprise? Anyone with a passing knowledge of mythology or experience with Gaiman’s book, which between the two groups is basically everyone watching the show, has known this all along. Shit, I had no idea it was supposed to be some big secret, did you? Like many writers, I’ve referred to Wednesday by his true name without thinking twice about it fairly frequently. But the show drops this revelation like a bomb, complete with swirling cameras, storm-god special effects, and whatever passes for shock on Ricky Whittle’s functionally immobile face. Well, it’s a bomb, alright.

The episode is full of miscalculations like this. When Media shows up to try and maintain the loyalty of Ostara (Kristen Chenoweth), whom she’s helped thrive via the commercialization of Easter into a pastel bunny and candy blowout. It took me a while to figure this out, and not just because Gillian Anderson’s Judy Garland is her least convincing impersonation yet. Media’s past incarnations were Lucille Ball, David Bowie, and Marilyn Monroe in unimistakably iconic outfits. We’re talking top-five all-time TV, music, and movie stars. Garland’s a huge fucking deal for sure, but that’s because of The Wizard of Oz and/or her subsequent status as a cult figure for the LGBT community, not because of “In Your Easter Bonnet.” It’s a big stretch, designed just to make the Ostara/Easter thing work.

Which is also a stretch. Media herself admits that people only care about the goddess of the dawn because her one-time feast day is now a Christian holiday. But…that’s Christianity’s doing, not the New Gods’, and the party is filled with a shit ton of Jesus's (including Jeremy Davies as “Jesus Prime”) from various belief and cultural traditions to prove the point.

If we were talking about Christmas, a far more thoroughly secularized holiday, maybe Media would be right to stake a claim on it. (She does, in fact, noting “St. Nick took the same deal you did.”) But the relative obscurity of her disguise is indication enough that the connection just isn’t there, and having the character explicitly say so even while her actions indicate otherwise is kinda sloppy writing.

While I’m picking bits, because what else is there to do here other than say “Emily Browning’s super talented and deserves a much better showcase for it than squeezing Pablo Schreiber’s balls until he confesses that Wednesday ordered him to kill her,” the irritating but loveable spider-storyteller god Mr. Nancy finally tells us the origin of Bilquis. You remember her from the first couple of times you seen her, I mean you cant forget it.

Apparently she was doing just fine until the Iranian Revolution raided the disco she was hanging out in back in ’79, at which point she came to America and found her attempts to continue the fuck-fest stymied by the AIDS epidemic. By the time Technical Boy finds and recruits her, she’s living on the streets, her face a scarred and diseased mess, since there’s no greater tragedy than for a beautiful woman to become undesirable sexually. Yuck.

Owing the newfound vitality of her powers (as Technical Boy puts it, “the Vagina Nebula”) to Sheba, the dating app the New Gods created in her name, she’s being sent to the big meetup of all the gods and demigods in Wisconsin as a double agent. And that’s that! No meetup for us, folks: Eight episodes is all we’re getting this year, and the grand conflict promised since the start has been saved for Season 2.