American Gods: 5 questions we have after ‘The Bone Orchard’
By Ryan Wrenn
American Gods / Starz
4. Just who is Mr. Wednesday?
With a little eye for detail and a bit of savvy Wikipedia-ing, we can answer this question pretty easy. But it only gets more complicated the deeper we dig.
Wednesday, is in fact, that days’ namesake: Odin. Yes, that Odin. The Zeus of Norse mythology, the leader of all the other gods now mostly familiar to us thanks to the Marvel Universe. He is on earth, moonlighting as your average everyday mortal human being.
American Gods nods to some particulars of Odin’s myth. Wednesday remarks he has one good eye — just like Odin. The noose imagery of “Bone Orchard” perhaps hints the story of Odin hanging himself on the tree of life. Then, of course, there’s the opening scene where the Vikings leave behind in the New World a carved idol of what we can safely presume to be Odin.
There are, of course, some perplexing differences. Though he was never known to stray far from Scandinavia, Odin now finds himself in the American Midwest. Far from ruling creation from on high, he’s instead scamming airlines for first class seats, drinking like a fish and appears to be in desperate need of a personal driver.
The crux of American Gods‘ plot will inevitably deal with how Odin came to be so human, why he finds himself in the wrong hemisphere and what exactly he has in store for Shadow Moon. For now, all we can do is catch up on our Norse myths in hopes of some clues as to what comes next for Mr. Wednesday.