American Gods: 5 questions we have after ‘The Bone Orchard’
By Ryan Wrenn
Image Credit: Starz
1. What in the hell happened to Freddy Rumsen?
Things went from bad to worse for Mad Men‘s Freddy Rumsen. First, he got fired from Sterling Cooper after urinating himself, and now he’s been, ahem, swallowed whole.
Look, American Gods is on premium cable, which more or less obliges it to include a sex scene — even if it must be constructed out of thin air, seemingly without context or connection to any of the characters we’ve met up to this point.
In “Bone Orchard”, that scene comes roughly half-way through the episode when we’re transported from the Midwest to Los Angeles. Rumsen — actually Joel Murray in the delightfully-named role of Paunch — is on a first date with a beautiful woman and is instantly smitten. Cut to: her bedroom. Things have progressed rapidly, let’s say, and quickly we get to the obligatory nudity.
Whereas tamer shows like Thrones might simply keep this at sex, American Gods takes it to another level. Paunch’s lady — revealed to be named Bilquis, perhaps the Biblical Queen of Sheba — demands his adoration and worship and gets it in short order.
As he falls for her and prays to her honor, the scene begins to shift. She is suddenly much larger, he much smaller, and slowly she begins to consume him — through her vagina. And then we return to the adventures of Shadow and Wednesday.
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That brief tangent, while not clearly connected to anything else, is clearly setting something up for future episodes. Is Bilquis a villain? Is she somehow connected to the man Shadow meets in the VR limo? Only time and more episodes will tell.
What the scene does do definitively is establish that not all of these American gods are drinking buddies like Wednesday or Mad Sweeney. Some might just might be predators.