[Discuss Thrower]

90% of tonight's episode is a "Coming to America" sidestep so that'll probably bore / aggravate a lot of folk.

Spoiler!

Green and Fuller confirm it in the post-credits, but Elsie Tregowan's story from the novel was pretty key to understanding what Gaiman was getting at through the whole novel. Apparently the decision to dual cast Browning as both Laura and Essie came after work had started on the show and worked because Browning has a mouth for accents (not that I could personally know when an Irish accent is convincing or not. Either way, Essie's story was a nice detour in showing how many American's ancestors came here and what they brought along with them. The episode itself spells everything out in that regard and I'm not going to unpack that.

As for the 10% that wasn't the Coming to America vignette, we see that Sweeney was responsible for Laura and Robbie's accident, Sweeney inadvertently gets Salim to bugger off and Laura, while dead and is willing to kill living people, is unwilling to accidentally kill white bunnies and nearly destroys the more appropriate means of conveyance for a a mobile rotting corpse. Sweeney, tying back in to the story of Essie, shows that the gods (or at least leprechauns) aren't unilaterally good or bad and uses his briefly recovered special coin to re-revenant Laura.

All of that being said, tonight is one episode that is totally devoid of Wednesday and Shadow (likely for dramatic reasons related to the end of episode 6 and the upcoming finale) so we lose there which is disappointing, but hopefully will be rewarded with an exciting finale.