I watched the Good Omens finale yesterday. I have some thoughts.
Specifically I have some thoughts as someone who has read Sir Terry books since I was 12 in the 1990s, and who first read Good Omens the book 25 years ago.
When S1 came out, I adored it. Still do. I have a physical copy of it and have rewatched it countless times. I have merch and I’ve read the fanfics. I’m not casual about it.
For me, in my heart, canon ends in the Ritz with ”To the world”. Season 2 and now 3 feel to me, in my heart, like high production value fan fiction.
What makes S1 so enjoyable to me is how they brought in the wit and whimsy of the original prose. One key device for that was the narrator. I’m sure there’s endless Fandom Discourse about the narration, so I’ll just say what I’m seeing.
The S1 narration has Sir Terry’s signature all over it. In addition to wit and whimsy, it also does a lot of heavy lifting in terms of pacing and exposition. And it’s completely missing from S2 and S3. I remember watching S2E1 and expecting the narration to chime in, and it never did. The end result, comparing to S1 (again, to me, in my heart), is flat, ham-fisted, and occasionally hard to follow.
The cast is doing the best with the text they have, but I don’t know why the production team decided to forgo the narration. Even if there’s no-one that can replace Sir Terry, I’m confident there are writers with even a passing resemblance to his style who could have helped out.
So for me going in, S3 was fraught with the loss of both authors, Sir Terry to Alzheimers and the other one to, you know. Destroying his legacy by being someone you really don’t want to be in a room with. I did not have high expectations, I was mostly hoping to have something that wraps things up.
To me, the finale felt like an homage to Sir Terry. The loss of pages of Life like they never existed. Solving things with kindness and empathy and forgiveness and courage – and those things being real even when angels and demons and God are not.
To me, it was a work of grief and love. We do what we can with what we have left. That’s all we can ever do.
I did feel soft about the bookshop AU ending. It’s not them, and it’s not 6000 years, and yet. The love we have is always love in the moment, anyway. I get the grief and anger people have about the burying of the gays. I think this version fit the narrative, and another version would have needed a different narrative.
So did I like S3? I think it did the best it could in a really difficult situation, and I have some grief about an alternate universe where things could have been different. Which is thematically on point, I suppose.