American Gods: 5 questions we have after ‘The Bone Orchard’
By Ryan Wrenn
5. How great are those opening credits?
Okay, so this doesn’t exactly get to the heart of Amerian Gods‘ mystery, and it’s kind of a rhetorical question, but it has to acknowledge that the opening credits caught your attention, right?
Look, we’re living in a true golden age of opening credit sequences right now. There’s Game of Thrones‘ iconic Lego Westeros and triumphant string section. The apocalyptic gloom of the first few minutes of every episode of True Detective’s first season set the standard for basically every other HBO production that came after it, including The Night Of and Westworld. Then you’ve got scrappy underdogs, like Halt and Catch Fire’s brief-but-excellent prog-rock burn.
American Gods credit scrawl deserves a place in that pantheon.
Like Thrones, it’s telling a story of sorts, even if we don’t quite understand it yet in the context of the show. Book readers will appreciate this seemingly unrelated imagery though, and they will know how it all fits together later in the story. Suffice it to say, for now, the credits will get better and more clear the deeper into the show we get.
Like True Detective, it’s setting a baseline surreal tone that will be carried into the show itself. You can draw straight lines between the style in this 90-second clip and what we see later in “Bone Orchard.” There’s the titular bone orchard itself. The alligator-tooth bar wherein Shadow re-meets Wednesday and brawls with a leprechaun. And then, of course, there’s whatever the hell happened in the last ten minutes of the episode.
And, like Halt, it’s catchy as all hell.