#zilla recaps

Rating: 2 WTFOL

Hmm … commercials before I get to watch my show. Really, Starz? It’s not enough that I had to buy a subscription, now I get advertisements as well?

I do all my best corpse prep to jaunty jazz records, played on my victrola.

I also do my best indentured servitude to groovy California-style elevator music

Where is this bonnie Irish isle? I must go.

I’m not feeling Ms Browning’s irish accent. Or her fake freckles. Or her wig. Pablo Schreiber is a much more convincing ginger.

Being a savvy consumer of modern entertainment media, I predict that young man listening to Essie’s story from the other room is going to be bad news. (Lemony-Snickett voice: he was)

I do all my best ill-advised candlelit scullery sex to doo-wop love songs from the 50’s.

That sea-captain gonna die. (Lemony-Snickett voice: The captain was not actually that important to the story, and so if he died at sea, we don’t know about it.)

Props to the makeup department for making Laura look just a little bit more dead in each episode.

You tell ‘em, Salim, you adorable thing. And come back soon!

That young Essie pulls down an impressive volume of olde timey dick, even with the terrible wig.

Dead mother and dead infant being tossed out the porthole might win most disturbing sight in a very disturbing show.

Oh, Laura Moon and her love of risky behavior. Flipping an ice cream truck isn’t quite the same as huffing bug spray in a hot tub, but based on the blissed-out smile on her face, it’ll do.

Some kinda Scheherazade thing going on here with our Essie. Apparently olde timey dudes just can’t resist a girl telling stories.

What’s this, American Gods? A happy ending for Essie McGowan?

Wow. Wow! In a fascinating development, Mr Wednesday may have just crossed his moral event horizon a bit earlier than expected. And Mad Sweeney became a sympathetic character avant he drinks himself to death. Out of all the deviations from the book so far, I like this one the most.

Is anybody else excited to see where Mr Schreiber’s career goes from here? Because he’s doing some spectacular work on this show.

The Essie McGowan story is the first Coming to America that feels like modern American storytelling. Probably because it’s the first one about a white character. I feel like I read it in a short story compilation or saw it at some museum exhibit dedicated to American history. Got a bit of a pioneer, wagons ho kinda smell about it. Familiar, and American, and not as challenging as the other material we’ve seen from this show. Grudgingly, I’ll allow it.

Rating: 4 WTFOL

Watching the opening segment, it occurs to me that I haven’t seen any think pieces or articles calling out the show for being “unamerican”. Now, I probably don’t get my entertainment news from the websites that would write said articles. But I wonder, are the people who feel that immigrants and LGBT people and people of color are somehow ruining their America even *aware* of this show? I feel like content that I see as “from a refreshingly different perspective” might illicit a different reaction in my conservative countrymen.

Oh yay. I was thinking just last week that all I wanted from this show was a roadtrip scene with Ginger Minge and Asshole Dead Wife. But I never thought I’d get one with Salim in the cab searching for his djinn boyfriend. This is delightful.

Hahahah Laura’s face during the djinn speech.

Hold the phone. When did Shadow get sliced open? And JESUS that tree spore is terrifying.

Eyes on the road, Salim darling. I know you’re in the middle of nowhere but you’re making me very nervous.

“He is my afterlife” is the most romantic thing I’ve heard since “I don’t need luck, I have you.”

Oooh I knew that music cue was bad news. I don’t care how unlikely it is, falling into a vat of something acidic or toxic or molten is one of my deep dark fears.

Disclosure: Zilla really, really does not like guns.

I get the feeling that Vulcan, VA is not a good place to be a black man. 

Speaking as a white woman, large groups of white people make me very nervous, even when they don’t all have assault rifles

Nooo! Betty!

Yay the gator bar! I hoped it would show up again, they spent way too much on that set to only use it once.

Here’s hoping Salim kicks the shit out of this homophobic leprechaun

Again, show? Again with the lynching?

Disclosure: Zilla isn’t much for hunting or taxidermy either. This show is doing a bang-up job of creating scenes that make me really, really uneasy.

“Not for you” -> ex-fucking-cuse me?

I think I need to go read my Ovid again. When I think of Vulcan, and Hephaestus, I think of the crippled son of Zeus and Hera, married to Aphrodite. I always envisioned him in my head as quiet and shy, more artisan than weapons smith. In other words, not at all like this really scary old white man while a mansion full of dead things and the guns that killed them.

I’m really confused about what Laura’s up to. The scene with her family was sad and poignant, but I don’t understand how seeing them again was enough to divert her away from following Shadow.

Wait a second … what? There’s no way molten metal would kill the gold of volcanos.

Rating: Just one 1 WTFOL this week

Rating: 4 WTFOL