Here are my observations on the first forty-five minutes of the episode:
- Laura has a boring life–she basically works at the casino and comes home to her cat. Every day its the same old thing. One evening, we see her sitting in the hot tub with the cover closed, spraying bug spray and inhaling it. It appears she has a problem.
Ugly uniforms make me mad, too, Laura.
- Shadow thinks he’s smooth, but he’s not. He tries some petty theft at Laura’s blackjack table (she’s a dealer) and she sees him coming from a mile away. She warns him he will get caught and be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
- Laura doesn’t seem surprised to see Shadow waiting for her after her shift. Also, Shadow is not good at flirting, but apparently Laura doesn’t care. When he says “Take me the fuck home, then” as a pickup line, she’s happy to do so.
- Laura doesn’t have a face that shows expression. (Disclaimer – I like Emily Browning, who plays Laura. And I get what they are doing.) As we watch, I am thinking, “Is she channeling Kristen Stewart? Bad idea!” I mean, even as she’s having sex with this hot guy, she looks bored AF, until she slaps him and it gets rough. Even then, she doesn’t look that into it. At one point later on in the show, she’s staring longingly at her hot tub while they are getting it on.
- Shadow also thinks he’s smooth at card tricks until Laura shows him otherwise. Go girl!
- It looks like Shadow has moved into the house with Laura. When did that happen? Or how did that happen?
- We meet best friends Robbie and Audrey at a backyard barbecue. Audrey is envious of Shadow’s devotion to Laura. They seem like good people.
- This is a REALLY LONG montage of boring work/gym days for Shadow and Laura. We see them in bed at one point, having a conversation about the afterlife, which Shadow believes in and Laura doesn’t. There is some switching back and forth between them in bed, and them getting married, with this convo in the background. Laura is bitter because her parents believed in everything and the world is not rainbows and unicorns. He looks at her, and she tells him to stop looking at her like a lost puppy. This is where the nickname Puppy comes from.
- Robbie offers Shadow a job being a boxing coach at his gym, and its more of the same –work and gym, then home, etc. One day, Laura gets bored and has a plan. How do we know she’s bored? Well, it’s not by her facial expression, because that won’t tell you squat. I am telling y’all–she’s got the most expressionless face ever.
- WTH? Laura wants to rob the casino. She swears her plan is perfect and he won’t get caught. Cue the doomsday music, because guess what? Shadow gets caught!
- Shadow won’t name her as an accomplice, so he does the jail time on his own, because chivalry. He wants her to wait for him, and she says she will. We all know she’s a dirty liar.
- Why are we seeing more montage? I despise this when it’s overused.
- Six years of collect phone calls goes by fast. Somewhere in the middle of this, Laura’s cat dies and she’s pissed. Robbie comes to bury it and he and Laura decide to become intimate. I feel like this was deliberate on both their parts. She was lonely, and he was attracted to her.
- We see Laura talking to Shadow on the final phone call from prison, and Welcome Home Shadow decorations. Then Robbie shows up, desperate and wanting Laura to leave Shadow. Negative, Ghost Rider. Not gonna happen, except this one last time (little do they know!)…
- I am slightly uncomfortable watching Dane Cook (as Robbie) being pleasured as he’s driving. It’s weird.
- That’s a bad wreck. I am glad Starz didn’t decide to show details of their deaths, because that would be pretty gruesome, and honestly, I don’t want to see his peen bitten off in her mouth. That’s too much for me.
- Too bad for Laura that she doesn’t believe in the afterlife, because she finds herself in the desert with Anubis and he is going to weigh her heart. She says NOPE, she’s good. So he tells her that since she believed in nothing, she will go to nothing. Cool effect with the hot tub and bug spray sitting there waiting for her, but Laura’s not having it. Laura asks if she has a say in this, and Anubis tells her “Death is not a debate. How many do you think have come before you? All with promises and threats and offers of glory, gold, love? Who are YOU to misguide me from my duty? You are but a man –not even one I should remember. You will go into the darkness, and I will forget EVER having met you.”
- Hey! She just got whisked away into a golden light in the sky, and Anubis is surprised. Thanks to Mad Sweeney’s lucky golden coin, she is back on earth, and I am shocked to see that it is Laura who killed Technical Boy’s posse of baddies when they hung Shadow. I actually didn’t see that coming, and it appears she’s superhuman, or at least “other,” and can’t be killed by them. This is the only time I noticed Laura actually looking like she had any emotion besides bored.
THEN we get to the interesting part of the show!
Laura has lost an arm in the altercation and is carrying it down the street to her house. We see the ‘Welcome Home Shadow’ decorations, then she takes a shower. At some point, she heads to a craft closet in someone else’s house (Audrey’s!) to sew on her arm. We hear her stomach start gurgling and she’s bent over like she had bad Mexican food the night before. Then Audrey shows up and starts screaming hysterically, because there’s a dead lady in her house, duh. Laura has big cajones, because she asks Audrey, who is “hiding” in the bathtub if she could please use the restroom, even though she understands that this would be embarrassing under any circumstance, but particularly under this one. Audrey is still hysterical, but hey when you gotta go, you gotta go. We see more than we want to as Laura sits on the pot. It’s gross.
Audrey and Laura have some bonding time. Audrey wants to know if Laura is haunting her. “Not on purpose,” she says, and tells her she needed craft supplies to sew on her arm. Audrey wants to know if Laura remembers the circumstances of her death. Laura doesn’t seem at all embarrassed by the fact that she’s a lying liarface adulterer. She’s just curious if Robbie is still dead. We get some of the best dialogue of the show now –and I keep wondering if someone else wrote the first part, because this is actually witty.
Audrey tells Laura, “I mean, he was. I haven’t seen him. I don’t know what either of you are up to now! You know, I guess I never did.” Laura goes on to tell her that she knew what they were up to, and Audrey says “I know who was in your mouth when you died. I do know that.” Laura wants to know if everyone knows this information, and Audrey tells her that she might have mentioned it a time or two at the funeral, and that Shadow knows because she propositioned him on Laura’s grave. Laura thinks that seems fair. Audrey then says “I’m not proud of myself. I had Robbie buried with his penis – you know you bit it off? – shoved up his ass. I was vulgar. I’m a vulgar woman. Anger and grief have really just made me vulgar. Laura I found out that you and Robbie were dead and having an affair in the same sentence. Maybe it wasn’t the same sentence. It was the same breath.” We get to see more female bonding, and Audrey made me think of Samantha from Sex and the City–she is very forthcoming and funny even when talking about something that pisses her off.
Laura lies and tells Audrey she feels terrible, and Audrey says “Fuck your feelings.” She really wants to know what Laura thinks about what she did. Laura tells her she thinks she did a shitty thing, but that it wasn’t about Audrey. Audrey responds that of course it wasn’t, and that she thought they were best friends, but that all that time, Laura was screwing her husband. Laura tells her “Not all the time.” (That doesn’t make it better, Laura.) Turns out Laura does have some emotion, because she feels guilty that she told Shadow she would wait for him. Oh, and she needs to borrow Audrey’s car.
I had to laugh when they are in the car together, and Laura is mad that her obituary was shitty. Audrey tells her “Well you had a shitty obituary because you had a shitty life. You were shitty.” Surprise–Laura thinks she wasn’t that shitty. Audrey asks her how she thinks she’s going to live with Shadow? “Presumably your stalking him will come to some fruition. I mean, what then? What? Happy family? Little zombie baby? Little zombie dog?” Laura says she will have her own private sunshine when she finds Shadow, and we see a giant column of light shining in the distance. Audrey tells her Shadow deserves better than Laura, but Laura insists “I love Shadow. Loved Shadow. I love Shadow. He’s the light of my life.” Audrey calls her on her shit and tells her no way. “You didn’t love him when you were alive. Come on. Not LOVE love him. He was like a pet. There’s a reason you called him Puppy.” Laura insists that she loves him now.
Then we see a man crossing the road with a dog. Audrey slams on the brakes, and its not a dog at all, but Mr. Ibis and Mr. Jacquel (who we have seen already as Anubis). Mr. Jacquel tells Laura, “You I remember!” with a smile. We see her walking into their funeral home holding her detached arm. Ibis tells her “We are a small, family-owned funeral home. What we provide is…continuity. There’s been an Ibis and Jacquel funeral home in business here for two hundred years!” She sits on their embalming table, and they stitch her up and paint her so that she looks alive rather than dead.
I hate to tell you this, but you look bad Laura.
Ibis tells her “We need to tend to your flesh as best as we can, as it can’t tend to itself anymore. Care and maintenance is needed.” Jacquel tells her “However, there is nothing we can do to lighten your heavy heart.” When she turns her head to look, Ibis tells her not to move, because she is still tacky. (funny!) “Your heavy heart sank you like a stone. Took you back to where you left off. Lived a life interrupted. Was it love?” Jacquel wants to know. She tells him it wasn’t, but that it is now. He tells her that love will always have you at a disadvantage. She says “I think death has me at a disadvantage!” He tells her that when she is done, he will do his job and deliver her to darkness. We can tell by her facial expression that she disagrees.
We see Laura putting fly strips out in a motel room, and then staring at a bright light outside the window while sitting on the bed. Then Shadow walks in, surrounded by light, and Laura says “Hi Puppy.”
If you couldn’t tell, I was not very happy with this episode. It was entirely too full of backfill to the story. We didn’t need forty-five minutes to figure out Laura was a probably-crazy sociopath/narcissist who didn’t really seem like she loved Shadow and who sent him to prison because she wasn’t as smart as she thought she was. I feel like we had a lot of time wasted on mundane details that weren’t necessary to the story.
I understand that the writers are probably trying to make us really dislike Laura, but I think the whole “Robbie’s dick in her mouth during a car accident thing” was enough to do that. I did, however, enjoy Audrey’s banter with Laura. I imagine anyone who has been in a situation where they’ve had a partner stray would LOVE to ask and say whatever they want to one of the offending parties.
What did you think of this episode? Were you as bored as Laura looked?
Catch all our American Gods’ Recaps
**All images courtesy of Starz**
