Laura Moon was never a happy person.
The story of American Gods begins with Shadow going through incredible trauma. Released after three years in prison, he finds out not only that his wife is dead, or that his best friend is dead, but that the two of them were having an affair.
It's a pretty standard tale - the affair when a spouse is in prison - but what we find in this episode, "Git Gone," is that Shadow idealized his life with Laura long before his prison sentence. The episode goes way back to before Laura had even met Shadow, and we get a glimpse of her life - she's a blackjack dealer in an indian casino where they don't even want her to shuffle her cards by hand anymore - something she likes to do (and what I interpret to probably be the reason she got that job in the first place.) Laura literally attempts to kill herself that night, closing the lid on her hot tub and filling the enclosed space with insecticide, though she obviously stops before she succeeds.
She meets Shadow when he attempts to do a little sleight-of-hand grift on her, and what begins as a hypothetical pitch for her to help him do a heist turns into flirting, sex, and then a relationship and marriage.
And Shadow's into it. He gets a job at Laura's friend's husband's gym and is happy as long as he's with Laura.
But Laura is not. The underlying problem hasn't been addressed, and as much as she loves Shadow (which she believes she does, and... I think if you believe you love someone that's love, though it doesn't mean you won't do shitty things to them) her own depression has not gone away. Chillingly, during a montage of "happy relationship stuff," when Shadow is going out to the store Laura asks him to buy some bug spray, which for us and for Laura has some more obviously dire connotations.
Ultimately, Laura proposes that the long-abandoned plan to rob the casino is the only way she's going to feel happy - getting enough money to move somewhere better and quit her terrible job.
And it's this robbery that get Shadow arrested, and rather than have her plead for her part in the failed heist, Shadow instead takes double the sentence to keep Laura out of prison.
And then, her cat dies, and when Robbie comes to bury it for her, their affair begins - a totally unhealthy affair that Laura seems to know is a bad idea but won't stop. And it's this affair that gets both her and Robbie killed (thankfully not shown in the same graphic detail that we saw with Scott Thompson's random friendly recovering alcoholic last time.)
Now, the character details are clearly important going forward, but one might have inferred all that detail. This is where things get interesting.
Laura, after seeing her own dead body while her spirit hovers above the wreck, winds up in that crazy desert otherworld that we saw Anubis measuring the old Egyptian woman's soul in (also maybe the place where the cab driver was transported while the djinni was fucking him?) Laura is obviously not really tied to Egypt, which does make me quibble a little with the fact that it's Anubis that meets her in the afterlife, but ultimately, the death god informs her that her soul is heading toward darkness, because she has no beliefs. Darkness is represented as her old hot tub with a can of "Git Gone," which again, is filled with existential dread. (Side note: I really wonder what an agnostic would get as an afterlife in this show.)
But before Anubis can force her there, the lucky coin Mad Sweeney accidentally gave to Shadow yanks her back into her body, and she has to zombie her way out of her grave.
And now Shadow shines like a beacon for her in an otherwise colorless world. She tracks him down as soon as she's out of her grave and kills the "Children" who had lynched him (in the end of the first episode.) Hiding from him, her arm falls off, and she attempts to repair it at her grieving friend Audrey's house, where we get a simultaneously hilarious and intense scene where Audrey (who has literally complained to Shadow that she'll never be able to get any sense of closure because anything she says to Laura or Robbie will just fall on dead ears) finds her and reacts with exactly the same amount of abject horror as any normal person would.
As Laura sets about her plan to track down Shadow and actually tell her she's, you know, back, she and Audrey almost run into a man walking his dog. Except it's not a man and it's not a dog. It's Mr. Jaquel and Mr. Ibis - aka Anubis and Thoth. As undertakers, they are well equipped to more substantially repair Laura's body, though Mr. Jaquel warns Laura that when she is done with her task, he will take her into the darkness.
But in a way, her revival has changed something fundamentally in Laura. She has a purpose now, and Shadow is something to believe in. Her life before was defined by a soul-crushing routine, and it's clear that her affair with Robbie, just like the failed bank heist, were just desperate attempts to break that routine. But the routine is as dead as she is, and in finding and protecting Shadow, she has an active thing to do.
This version of events is elaborated a great deal more than it is in the books, and I'm really curious to see the Laura side of the story (even if I'm also slightly sad that we didn't see Mr. Wednesday this week - though we did see his ravens, Huginn and Muninn, flying over the SUV before the accident.)
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