The Mourning of a Universe: Why Season 3 of Good Omens is a Philosophical and Narrative Contradiction
(I am french, english is not my first language so I am sorry if I make mistakes)
The Impact of an Unforgettable Work
At the end of 2023, I discovered Good Omens on Amazon Prime. At the time, the only work of Neil Gaiman’s I was familiar with was Lucifer, but I had no idea he was involved in Good Omens, nor did I know anything about Terry Pratchett's work. Usually, I do not invest myself emotionally in TV shows. Works like Sherlock or Hannibal had deeply moved me and influenced me on a creative level, but I watched them long after their original broadcast.With Good Omens, , it was different. Experiencing the wait in real-time, speculating with the fandom, enduring the anxious uncertainty during the hiatus at the end of 2024... All of this etched the series into my heart.What won me over was its tone: a sharp, quirky satire capable of addressing heavy, profound themes with lightness without ever defusing the actual high stakes. Heaven and Hell were ridiculous yet genuinely terrifying. It was a true love letter to humanity, where even a character like Shadwell, introduced as a grumpy, misanthropic old eccentric becomes endearing through his relationship with Madame Tracy, without needing an artificial redemption arc. The show successfully avoided the trap of simplistic moral binary: Heaven was not purely "good," Hell was not just "misunderstood," and humans remained masters of their own free will, even outdoing Crowley in horror during the Spanish Inquisition or World War II.
Yet, watching Season 3, I found absolutely nothing of what made the essence of Good Omens. After initially trying to rationalize this bittersweet ending just to comfort myself, I had to face the facts: this finale is a disaster in terms of writing. And I am no longer a
“fan who goes along with the end as far as she can”.
I. Budgetary Constraints That Shatter Immersion
The 90-minute finale suffers from a blatant lack of resources, which severely hinders its ability to deploy its stakes. A deserted Soho, a Hell emptied of its demons, and the near-total absence of Aziraphale’s bookshop create a sanitized, deeply unsettling atmosphere. The behind-the-scenes features actually reveal that the eternal flame scene and the cottage scene were shot right next to each other in a tiny studio space.This lack of time and budget led to poorly executed antagonists. How are we supposed to care about the threat posed by Brian Cameron or Misty? Crowley knows them, but we do not. In a span of 90 minutes, their warnings ring entirely hollow, completely lacking concrete actions to back up their dangerous nature.
II. The Psychological Deconstruction of Aziraphale and Crowley
The very heart of the series relied on the alchemy of our duo, bickering like an old married couple. In this finale, that quick-witted, back-and-forth dynamic completely died out.The reconciliation process is nonexistent. Crowley rattles off complaints in the Bentley without ever showing his vulnerability, while Aziraphale walls himself up in an unprecedented level of pretentiousness. His famous “I forgive you," far from being an acceptance of apologies (which were never even offered), serves as a lazy narrative shortcut to sweep the plot under the rug. Even the highly symbolic Apology Dance was brutally cut short.More troubling still, the scene with God betrays Aziraphale’s core characterization when he self-proclaims to be "the best of the angels." Aziraphale has never considered himself good enough; he has spent his entire existence blaming and hating himself for falling short of his own high moral standards. We are light-years away from the character who, in the Job minisode, collapsed into tears upon realizing the gravity of his rebellion:
“I lied. I lied to thwart the will of God. [...] I’m a demon. That’s what I am now.”
III. The Destruction of Crowley’s Philosophy: The Collapse of a Rebellious Optimist
The Season 3 finale achieves the unthinkable: it destroys the very substance of Crowley's character, turning him into a cynical being whose actions contradict his deepest convictions.Throughout the book and Season 1, Crowley is depicted as an observer fascinated by humanity, someone fundamentally "optimistic" about the capacity of humans to choose their own destiny. He is the first to recognize the absolute power of free will. He knows that humans need neither Heaven nor Hell to achieve either the best or the worst. This is the exact meaning behind his famous tirade where he admits that humans completely outdid him by inventing the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition or the atrocities of World War II. For Crowley, Earth is precious precisely because it escapes the rigid, predictable plans of Heaven and Hell thanks to human choice.To see this very same Crowley declare in Season 3 that free will is nothing but "rubbish" and actively accept the creation of a new world is an absolute psychological contradiction. That is simply not him.Crowley has always loathed mass destruction and the sacrifice of innocents to serve some "higher purpose." From the very beginning, during the Deluge, he shouted his incomprehension at divine cruelty while watching Noah's Ark:
Crowley is the demon who refuses the slaughter of the innocent, whether in Noah’s time or during the trials of Job. So, how can this same character now validate a plan that erases billions of human beings and condemns to non-existence the children, adults, and friends he spent centuries alongside? He who refused to let a single child be harmed under the Old Testament now agrees to sacrifice the entirety of humanity just to secure his own artificial safe haven. By making Crowley an accomplice to this cosmic tabula rasa, the script breaks his moral compass and betrays his finest quality: his rebellious humanity.As for the choice not to include a real kiss in the final timeline, it leaves an open wound.
The only kiss the audience will ever have witnessed remains the one from Season 2: an act of desperation, a painful last resort. The contrast feels incredibly cynical when one recalls Amazon Prime’s marketing campaign on Instagram, which tried to sell the romance of the script's stage directions for the garden scene just to mask the utter lack of emotional fulfillment in the actual broadcast.
IV. The Betrayal of Job: Replacing is Not Repairing
The greatest shipwreck of Season 3 lies in its philosophical message, which completely tramples on one of the most beautiful moral lessons of Season 2: the Job episode.In that biblical minisode, Heaven and Hell cruelly agree to destroy Job’s life, kill his children, and then simply "give him new ones" as if they were nothing but commodities or interchangeable objects. Faced with this bureaucratic horror, Crowley and Aziraphale unite and rebel. Why? Because they refuse to let those children die. They understand that a human being is unique and irreplaceable. Giving Job new children does not repair the loss of the old ones; it merely masks a crime under the illusion of divine generosity. For Crowley and Aziraphale, the entire purpose of their existence on Earth has always been to protect, preserve, and repair what already exists, never to destroy in order to replace.Yet, that is exactly what they agree to do in the Season 3 finale. By acquiescing to the creation of a "new universe" to run away from their problems, they surrender to the cold, accounting logic of Heaven that they once fought against. It is the return of Archangel Gabriel’s doctrine: We are replacing the dead world with a new one, what’s the difference? The difference is humanity.This narrative choice also revokes the ending of Season 1. When the young Antichrist, Adam Young, faces the Apocalypse, he uses his boundless imagination to save the Earth. Fortunately, he does not create a perfect, sanitized, brand-new world: he restores the old universe back to normal, complete with its flaws, its chipped teacups, and its imperfect humans. Crowley himself displayed this rebellious imagination by driving through the flaming M25 at the wheel of his Bentley. In Season 3, this imagination has burnt out. Worse still, God explicitly offers them the option to put everything back in place to *repair but they refuse and choose creative destruction instead.
At one point in the finale, when they want to call upon God, the script tries to give a nod to Season 1 by showing that imagination and will can still bend reality: if you decide a blank notebook is the Book of Life, then it becomes just that. This rule is reintroduced with great fanfare to make us believe our heroes have found their creative power again.But the illusion deflates immediately. Five minutes later, this very same logic is thrown in the trash. When it comes to saving the old world, preventing the genocide of humanity, or preserving their own memories, suddenly, imagination no longer works. They become utterly powerless and resign themselves to destruction.This is a glaring logistical inconsistency (or rather, a clumsy narrative convenience): imagination works only when the script requires a brief "magical" moment or a quick trick, but it shuts off the moment it threatens to solve the actual problem and prevent the tragic ending the writer was stubborn about executing. It completely reinforces the reality that this finale is rushed and contradicts itself from one scene to the next.
V. The Erasure of Characters and the Paradox of the Absurd
While Aziraphale, Crowley, and Muriel are fully aware of the cosmic transition taking place, the fate reserved for the rest of the secondary characters is a piece of narrative violence. Major figures who grounded our attachment to the show like Maggie, Nina, Anathema, Newt, but also Beelzebub and Gabriel, as well as Shadwell and Madame Tracy (whom I love so dearly)were wiped out in an instant, stripped of their memories, their past, and their very existence.Granted, the story shows us that they "find each other again" in some form within the new world. But from a writing standpoint, this choice is an absolute failure that runs into a double, insoluble paradox:
-First option: If they possess the same soul in the new world. If these characters are destined to meet and lead the exact same life without having chosen it, it means the new world is governed by absolute predestination. Free will is dead, and humanity is nothing more than a puppet show orchestrated by God.
-Second option: If these are not their original souls.Then the conclusion is even more horrific: this finale depicts a senseless cosmic genocide. The entirety of humanity and the beings we grew to love were purely and simply killed, erased from reality. They were replaced by substitutes, carbon copies meant to populate a counterfeit world that thinks like ours, but is no longer ours.It is a deeply horrifying and cynical outcome. This mass sacrifice fixed nothing, achieved nothing, and completely diverges from the moral trajectory and evolution of Aziraphale and Crowley. It was all for nothing. It retroactively means that everything we followed from the very beginning never actually existed in our reality, stripping the series of all its historical and emotional weight.
VI. The Neil Gaiman Syndrome, or the Contempt for Comedy
This conclusion felt strangely reminiscent of the series finale of *Lucifer*, another show tied to Gaiman's universe. We find the exact same mechanics at play: a show that is initially comedic which, for its denouement, introduces a gratuitous, circumstantial, and pointless sacrifice, solely to buy itself a fake sense of gravity and give the illusion of high stakes.For Neil Gaiman, a memorable ending must apparently be definitive and completely stripped of comedy, as if the seriousness of a narrative can only be felt through absolute drama. This feels like an insult to the genre of satirical comedy that belonged so uniquely to Terry Pratchett. Here, humor no longer drives the story forward; it is relegated to a few disposable one-liners. By removing the lightness, you remove the very DNA of Good Omens.
VII. Love for the Cast and Crew Facing the Shipwreck of the Script
While the scenario of this Season 3 is a disaster, we must separate the text from the dedication of the technical crew and the actors.I want to commend director Rachel Talalay, who managed to deliver beautiful, inspired shots despite tight budgetary restrictions and a disjointed script. A massive thank you to Michael Sheen, David Tennant, Derek Jacobi, Doon Mackichan, and the rest of the cast. They agreed to reprise their roles despite the lack of budget, the controversies surrounding Gaiman, and the certainty that this condensed project would not be profitable. They did it out of respect for the audience, out of love for their characters, and out of loyalty to the memory of Terry Pratchett.The story of Season 3 that I choose to remember is not the one written in its script, but the story of the resilience of a crew and a fandom united to deliver a conclusion.
To summarize the violence of a finale that sought to flatten, crush, and replace the identity of its heroes rather than repair it, these few words from *Small Gods* resonate with profound sadness:
“ I could ground them into dust,” said Vorbis. “I would only have to say the word.”-No, thought Om. That’s worse than war.”
— Terry Pratchett
How Can We Change This? My Alternative: Repairing Rather Than Destroying
Faced with an official ending that breaks our hearts and denies the core philosophy of the work, what do we have left? As fans, we are entirely free to forge our own canon. Rather than accepting a tragic and cynical outcome, we can imagine a denouement that truly respects the heroes.In this ending which I came up with and which satisfies me perfectly after experiencing the show. Season 2 integrates harmoniously right into the heart of Season 1. After the failure of the Second Coming, Crowley and Aziraphale did indeed swap bodies to face their respective camps. It is at that exact moment, just before they find themselves back on that famous bench at the end of Episode 6 (specifically at the 45-minute and 45-second mark of Season 1, Episode 6), that all the events of Season 2 actually take place.In my rewritten version, the ending unfolds like this: Season 2 begins, plays out, and after Aziraphale departs for Heaven, he goes there off-screen to play his cards. Thanks to his genuine benevolence and eloquence, he successfully convinces the celestial authorities to definitively abandon the Second Coming, breaking the cycle of destruction once and for all.Once this is achieved, he swaps bodies with Crowley yet again. Being a smooth talker, Aziraphale is best suited to go down and convince Hell to abdicate in turn a diplomatic task far too delicate for Crowley's impulsive nature. With peace permanently sealed between both realms, the universe is saved.The story then catches up with its original course as the two companions reunite on the bench in Season 1 (at the 45-minute and 46-second mark). Far from being clouded by any heartbreaking goodbye kiss, this scene becomes a pure celebration of their survival. They then decide to head off to the Ritz to toast their victory. Even if Crowley's forgiveness toward Aziraphale is not explicitly voiced right then and there, their shared happiness foreshadows a certain reconciliation. As for whatever follows next within the privacy of the bookshop or the flat, it will forever remain theirs and theirs alone.
I still had so much to say, but unfortunately a blog post has a maximum number of words.Take care of yourself, don't forget all the good things Good Omens has brought.🩵
janainaart
theartofmadeline
baratheonpilled
ellievsbear
2087
