American Gods Review: Git Gone (Season 1 Episode 4)

American Gods Season 1 Episode 4, “Git Gone,” takes a woefully underwritten side character from the novel and devotes an entire episodes to them.

Doing an episode like “Git Gone” is a bold move. Either it works out perfectly and the audience gets insight to a character that they wouldn’t otherwise have, or you end up wasting an episode on something that no one cares about.

“Git Gone” follows Laura Moon (played by Emily Browning), Shadow’s wife who is killed early in the first episode, “The Bone Orchard,”and tracks her life from when she first met Shadow to the events that led to his to incarceration and her death and subsequent reanimation.

For the most part, “Git Gone” works far better than it has any right to. There’s no real reason to care about this character that the novel so haphazardly fridges, but American Gods creates essentially this new imagining of the character and explores more fully than any of us ever imagined at what makes her tick.

The end result is someone who is compelling with touches of darkness and sadness; someone who constantly attempts to find meaning in her life and has quite possibly attempted to take her own life more than once.

It’s an exploration of a woman who is woefully, detrimentally complex and yet at the center of her lies something wholly universal: a complete lack of understanding of what it means to be happy.

Laura Moon is the type of character that the audience would just be happy for her being dead so that she can have some semblance of peace (see: Marissa from The OC), but since this is American Gods that’s clearly not going to happen.

“Git Gone” also marks perhaps the first episode where things begin to make a modicum of sense of a plot level. If you’re paying attention, you kind of know why Laura was brought back, what’s going on with Anubis, and offers an explanation on what happened to The Technical Boy’s children after they hung Shadow from a tree.

Emily Browning’s performance as Laura is stellar. Bringing an unsettling amount calm, Browning really sells some of the more philosophical dialogue beats that Laura espouses throughout. Her eyes are perhaps her greatest assets as she is able to express a great deal subtly just by casually glancing across the room.

In one scene in particular, Laura discusses her existential beliefs, which are none, and what brought her to those conclusions, a monologue that is gut-wrenching and also entirely relatable.

Browning has a stillness to her that is at times off-putting, but also carried in such a way that you perfectly understand get why anyone would fall madly in love with her, which is part of the goal of “Git Gone.”

It needs you to buy into Shadow and Laura’s relationship so that it can do a cruel thing: that the whole thing was, more or less, a lie. That the way Shadow felt about Laura was not reciprocated in the same way. The show doesn’t demonize Laura for this. She’s just a profoundly unhappy person that not even love can fix.

That right there is the true crux of the character: an unhappy person that never figured out what it meant to be happy.

Perhaps the best thing about her character is that this was the most unlikely direction American Gods could have taken her in. Sure, she had an illicit affair with Robbie (douchily played by Dane Cook), but the writers could have easily painted her as someone who was simply lonely.

It went so far past that in the end that it’s worthy of little less than unadorned adulation and praise.

What did you think of this episode of American Gods? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!

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American Gods airs Sundays at 9/8c on STARZ.

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