American Gods Episode 4
“I lived my life, good and bad. Definitely not light as a feather,” Laura tells Anubis when he attempts to weigh her heart. Laura may not always like herself, but she is sure as hell not going to let anyone else judge her for the choices she’s made — not even a god. This is the most likable quality of an (on paper) unlikable character. It’s hard not to admire someone who looks into the eyes of an irritated, rude (if not honest) Anubis and tells him: “Fuck you.” Bryan Fuller promised a fleshing out of the novel’s female characters in the TV show and he delivers on that promise, giving one eighth of this first season to Laura. A gift she makes good use of — just like she does her second chance at “life.” “Git Gone” is a break from formula for American Gods, giving us the backstory of how Laura ended up in Shadow’s hotel room at the end of “Heart Full of Snow.” It’s a bloody story, so buckle up…
Laura: Pre-Death
One of my favorite parts of Laura’s story is that it starts before she meets Shadow. We get to know this character before the show’s protagoist saunters into her life. It gives us a baseline for who she is as a person, as well as acts as an acknowledgment that Shadow is only a piece of Laura’s larger identity — a novel concept popular cultures isn’t always so good at conveying when it comes to female characters. Female characters have a life outside of their relationship to men. Who knew? Shadow is one of those guys, but he is one who sticks around, like a stray who followed her home one day and who never went away. We all know the relationships where one person is much more in love than the other. Shadow and Laura are that relationship. Sure, Laura loves Shadow, but like a person loves their “puppy.” She’s bored. Too bored to see anything past her own self-pity. I’m not saying it isn’t somewhat valid self-pity — she’s stuck in a predictable life she hates, unable to break free of it no matter how she tries — but it results in a self-centeredness that often leads to self-sabotage. (Her explanation to Audrey for sleeping with Robbie, for example: “”It wasn’t even about you.”) “When you see [Laura] in her everyday life kind of struggling and going through this mundane routine, I think it’s slightly easier to empathize with her and the shitty things that she does,” As Emily Browning told Den of Geek. This is why it’s so important for Laura to get to tell her own story rather than to be defined in relation to the male protagonists of the narrative. Laura might make selfish choices, but we understand why. “You will never get caught … How did you get caught?” This is how Shadow and Laura’s failed casino heist is depicted. That ellipsis is how the heist is portrayed. No Oceans Eleven-type montage. American Gods is capable of showing an entire failed heist, but that’s not what this show — or this episode — is about. It’s about Laura’s lack of faith and how she learns to live again. Instead, we see Laura’s life slowly fade further into routine and loneliness in Shadow’s absence. When Dummy dies, she begins an affair with Robbie — not because she loves him, but because she is bored. Because he is her latest high, her latest form of self-destruction, her latest form of worship (or saying “fuck you”) to all of the deities she doesn’t believe in.
Laura: Afterlife With Anubis
After Laura dies, she ends up with Anubis. Unlike the woman we saw in “Head Full of Snow,” Laura doesn’t get a gentle guide from the world of the living to this one. Anubis doesn’t seem particularly excited about guiding Laura in general — doing his duty, but nothing more. Laura is similarly irritated at meeting Anubis. “Who the fuck are you?” she asks. When he outlines an eternity of darkness and Git Gone, Laura goes from irritated to downright pissed. This isn’t the afterlife she signed up for. She believed in nothing, not An Eternity of Darkness. Those are two different things. Laura’s anger is not just at Anubis, but at a lack of belief that failed her. In this moment, perhaps, she begins to believe in magic again, but it is seemingly too late. Laura panicks — not only because of the Darkness, but because of the tragedy of that realization, the implication that she was cheated out of a life of magic, a life where she believed in something. Ironically, it is dying that seems to bring Laura to life…
Laura: Post-Death
Laura is pulled back to the world of the living not by Anubis, but by Mad Sweeey’s lucky coin, left on Laura’s grave by a grieving Shadow in the first episode. Even after death, Shadow is a puppy that can’t seem to stop following Laura around. Now, it’s Laura turn to follow Shadow — he is literally the light of her life. Of course, when she has a chance to present herself to Shadow, she hides — both at the scene of the lynching and, later, when Shadow returns to their house to pack up his things. Perhaps this is an example of be careful what you wish for? Laura may be living an interesting life, but she is also a corpse. She loses her arm at the shoulder in the fight for Shadow’s life. She is already beginning to rot. While Laura’s spirit may be ready to life the live she never quite embraced before, her body is now unable to do so. “Care and maintenance is needed for your dead body,” Mr. Ibis tells her as he and Mr. Jacquel (Anubis’ other form) make her “presentable” (i.e. human-like) again. She gets a spray tan, a more substantial arm-reattachment than Audrey’s craft supplies can supply, and picks up a bug-catcher somewhere along the way to Shadow’s hotel room. “Was it love?” Mr. Jacquel asks Laura. “It wasn’t… but I suppose it is now.” Is it too late for Laura to belief? The world of American Gods doesn’t seem like a particularly kind one, but is also one that has shown itself capable of producing unexpected miracles. And Shadow is a man with a mysterious power of his own. Perhaps a third chance at resurrection isn’t in Laura’s fate, but, by Wednesday’s metric, Laura has already escaped the worst possible fate: to be forgotten. “You, I remember,” Anubis tells her when Audrey and Laura almost run over Mr. Jacquel and Mr. Ibis. Whatever else may happen to Laura, she will not be forgotten — especially now that she is the narrator of her own story. Is there any sadder place to spend your time than a casino? “My grandma always had cats. She said they could see ghosts when you can’t and warn you of thieves.” Laura has her grandmother (and Dummy) to thank for her chance at an afterlife. “I went to be every night in a world filled with magic where anything was possible. And then, one day, you find out that Santa’s not real, and then the tooth fairy isn’t real. And there’s no farm upstate for old dogs. And then I started reading history books and Jesus isn’t real and it’s like everything that made the world anything more than what it is is just stories. Just snake oil. Because worse because snakes are real. I wanted to get that magic back so bad, but one day I just accepted the fact that I couldn’t because life is just not that interesting.” Dane Cook is perfect in the role of Robbie. “Something went wrong. Somebody fucked us.” What happened with Shadow and Laura’s heist? Did someone tip off the establishment? Was it Wednesday? Anubis goes to rip out Laura’s heart and she bats his hand away with cat-life reflexes. One gets the impression that Laura is no stranger to men trying to feel her up. “Do I get a say in this?” “Death is not a debate.” This had echoes of the conversation Audrey and Shadow had in the first episode, when Audrey bemoaned her inability to get in a fight with a dead Robbie. “Oh my god, that’s disgusting.” Laura has some great reactions to being a rotting corpse. “Is this a haunting? You haunting me?” “Not on purpose. I needed craft supplies.” “Anger and grief have really just made me vulgar.” As with the first episode, Audrey is absolutely amazing here. Hilarious and human and empathetic. She is yet another example of a female character who gets a lot more to do in the TV show, improving the entire story. “I feel terrible.” “Oh, fuck your feelings.” “Shitty obituary.” “Well, you had a shitty obituary because you had a shitty life.” “That’s unfortunate. Love always leaves you at a disadvantage.”
title: “American Gods Episode 4 Review Git Gone” ShowToc: true date: “2025-08-15” author: “Kenneth Soliz”
1.4 Git Gone Laura Moon has filled the first season of American Gods without actually being on screen all that much. She was all Shadow wanted to have back when he got out of jail, and her phone calls clearly kept him going while in jail. The loss of his wife and best friend in the same moment of betrayal took away his post-jail life and put him directly into the service of Mr. Wednesday. Shadow’s been consumed with Laura, and with his grief over her, this entire time, but we haven’t really heard or seen anything from her, aside from the occasional delusion. Or what might have been assumed to be a delusion. As it turns out, Laura Moon has been watching over Shadow all this time. Even now, after an affair, a horrible traffic accident, and death, Laura’s still keeping an eye on her puppy. Fortunately, it’s not a literal eye, it’s just a detatched arm, which she can sew back on by borrowing Audrey’s arts and crafts supplies. In her own way, Laura was as lost as Shadow is now when she was alive, but after death, she finds a purpose. Shadow is, quite literally, the bright spot in her world, and we see Shadow less as a person and more as a point of light in the distance, drawing Laura to him. Prior to that, we see her sleep-walking through her job at the casino, feeding her cat, and attempting to kill herself with a can of insecticide in the hot tub. The attempt fails, leaving Laura a coughing, hacking mess. It’s not until Shadow comes into her life that she finds something to smile about; after all, she believes in no afterlife, so all she’s got is life. She and Shadow make friends with Robbie and Audrey, and ultimately, she comes up with a plan to do more with her life by having Shadow rob the casino. They’d bonded over his failed attempt at fraud, and her catching his attempt at fraud, and it was that growing urge to misbehave that sent Shadow up the river for three years and that ultimately caused her death in the car accident. Laura is both Shadow’s happiness and his downfall. Shadow is her pet and her beacon in undeath. The cycle of this behaviour is enforced strongly by the symbolism of the bug spray (the Git Gone of the title). She uses it to kill a fly, she uses it to try to kill herself, and she uses it to continue to kill flies after she returns from beyond the grave. No doubt because of her body’s decay and the death of her nerve cells. Craig Zobel has a lot of fun with zombie Laura. She tears the door off Audrey’s bathroom. She pulverises the droogs, slamming her fist through chests and kicking one so hard his head pops off and takes the spine with it, like filleting a fish. This comes at a cost; her body will no longer repair itself, hence the arm falling off after getting hit in the shoulder with a crowbar. Emily Browning is so tiny that it makes her zombie strength all the more funny, but she imbues Laura with a lot of inner strength, particularly in the scene where she essentially yells at Anubis (Chris Obi) and gets sucked back down to earth and pushed back into her autopsied body. She might not have had a purpose when she was alive, but after death, Shadow is her reason for sticking around. Her scenes with Audrey are also particularly funny, with Betty Gilpin feasting on the phrase “You zombie whore!” Michael Green and Bryan Fuller, as they have all season, get the credit for the script, and it’s good to see that an episode without Shadow or Wednesday can still be something noteworthy. Laura’s morose nature comes through, and the dry humour throughout works. Anubis’s brief, angry response to Laura’s request to go back to her body is a little sprinkling of brilliance, the high-mindedness undercut by her rapid disappearance and the hilariously confused look on his face. The punchline to the scene comes later in the episode, and hits like a truck. It’s a brilliant bit of call-back comedy. US Correspondent Ron Hogan loves a good zombie, especially when it overlaps with great writing and top-notch special effects. You don’t get a lot of that on TV anymore. Find more from Ron daily on Popfi.com.
