American Gods: 5 questions we have after ‘The Bone Orchard’
By Ryan Wrenn
3. Did Wednesday orchestrate Shadow Moon’s predicament?
Clearly, Wednesday knows what he wants from Shadow Moon. He needs a consigliere, someone to attend to his worldly business and drive him and his Cadillac around the Midwest.
That’s not all though, right? There are any amount of people out there that would clearly work for a god incarnate. What is it about Shadow Moon that makes him the ideal candidate?
Perhaps more to the point, is Shadow Moon so ideal as to have forced Wednesday’s hand? Was their meeting purely coincidental, or was this precisely how Wednesday planned it?
If it’s the latter scenario, then we’ve got the source of Amerian Gods’ inevitable conflict. Shadow Moon, when and if he ever wises up to the true nature of his benefactor, would have good reason to question just how much Wednesday controlled the circumstances of his wife’s death, and thus his early release. It seems doubtful that Wednesday could offer him compensation enough to make up for that.
All of which assumes something that we have no right in assuming: that Wednesday is indeed so powerful as to dictate who lives and who dies. Sure, we know he’s Odin, but he seems diminished somehow, or at least enough that he requires Shadow Moon for purposes unknown.
We could go deeper too. Assuming he had a hand in it, why did Wednesday have to kill Shadow’s wife? Were there not other, less devastating ways to recruit him?