Artist, writer, and sometimes human... **Find my AO3 ** https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarthBreezy **Find my Art store ** https://www.redbubble.com/people/rebelpencils?asc=u
The 'Bookshop Scene' at the end of the movie was a giant 'Fuck you' from the writer. It was literally the total anti-thesis of the first two seasons, everything from Crowley 'giving up' and Aziraphale being the ultimate 'company man' to Job's children.
Just Bullshit.
For all this time, we were promised a HAPPY ending for our Ineffables - lots of kisses - teasing the South Downs Ending that was SUPPOSED to be an ANGEL and a DEMON in retirement.
We got a monkey's paw. We got the South Downs, with new children.
Something stinks.
A LOT of somethings Stinks.
I have no proof - just a gut feeling that the writer hid a massive trap in his release contract. Something along the lines of final script approval to go along with his head writing credits. He's far from a stupid man - he would have gone over that contract with a fine toothed comb, considering how much future revenue he was giving up. Why not poison the well?
*sigh*
The test for allyship isn't how you treat an oppressed person who is your friend, family, spouse. It's how you treat an oppressed person you absolutely can't stand who is vile and loathsome in every way.
Do you gender trans people correctly even when they're being absolutely terrible people? Do you refuse to use the r-slur against someone who suicide baited you but is neurodivergent? Do you refuse to snark at a mentally ill person who is being genuinely unpleasant, "go take your meds!"
Do you allow members of marginalized groups to be terrible people without judging their entire demographic for it? One of the most invisible yet vital forms of privilege is the right to be terrible people as an individual rather than as a group. Do you acknowledge that there are bad people in every group, that it doesn't make their group less worth fighting for? Or do you shake your head if you happen to get mistreated by some who belong to a group and insist the entire group is awful and not worth your allyship?
Oppressed people can see how you treat those of us you like, but do you still treat the worst of us with the basic dignity you treat the worst of other groups with?
If empathy is a muscle, this is how you get SWOLE. This is how you grow BEEFY. I’ve got stacks of empathy muscles. I’ve got an 8pack of empathy and love for humanity’s flaws.
Once upon a time I felt I was a useless pit of a person who did not deserve to live. To fight this voice, I found the “””worst””” people I could and defended them in court regardless of what charge, what they could pay, who they were. I wanted to prove to myself that everyone is worth defending, because if everyone is worth it, so am I.
Pleased to inform you that everyone is worth defending. Human rights are worth defending. Humans are worth helping, even though a lot of them fail and fall even with help. And it’s worth it standing up for oppressed people always always always.
I am GenX which SHOULD clue you in a little.
Caitlyn Jenner is an absolute peice of privileged human garbage who is the epitome of 'rules for me and none for thee' .
I grew up with them on a 'Wheaties' box.
She's still a self absorbed bitch.
Hey, so, remember the teaser for S3? The one that was all a pun on the phrase setting the stage, meaning to set up what is to come? And that ended with a redheaded girl of about twelve opening the bookshop?
In true Good Omens form, the S3 teaser Clues were given to us before the season started but it ties to the ending in ways that we wouldn't have been able to understand until we saw S3. It also then took us further into the future than the end of S3 by ending with a flashforward to give us a glimpse of the world Aziraphale and Crowley make for themselves in the wake of the nightmare.
The big thing here happens as a result of these two fellas and the director's chairs...
As we know from the story? Bookshop, as a word, is really just Crowley and Aziraphale and wherever they're making their life together. If they ever moved anywhere else, that place could be called the bookshop between them, even if it was just a house. I bring this up because we obviously know now what these chairs in front of the bookshop in the teaser are referencing, right? The chairs in front of the South Downs Cottage.
The camera angles even are a play on this because they first showed us the Chengs' restaurant (which, according to the compass in the bookshop, is south of Whickber) and then swung the camera down a bit in the next shot of the bookshop-- south downs.
There is also that stars are people, metaphorically and euphemistically, in this story and between Crowley and Aziraphale. So, visually referencing Asa-Aziraphale and Professor Anthony looking at the celestial bodies in the sky by putting a pair of chairs side-by-side on the sidewalk in front of the bookshop, facing the people of Whickber Street, is echoing that South Downs Cottage scene, right?
But look at what's happening here... unlike the first and last scenes of the teaser, both of which are done so that they could be from the show itself? The bit where the guys set the chairs down? It's in front of a bookshop that is very much a set. It's not real to us here, visually-- we can see the top of it. We can see the wires and rigging and electrical. It's a construct. It's fake. But, as soon as they put the chairs that represent the end down, what happens?
The lights come on upstairs in the bookshop, then in the rest of the shop, as if people are waking up, and a spotlight holds on the A.Z. FELL AND Co. on front of the bookshop before, thanks to the camera angles? The concept of this place as a set retracts ahead of the final shot, which then becomes one that could be from the show itself. Why?
Because the teaser is representing the nightmare. It begins with a shot not of a set but of the darkened bookshop at night back in reality with abrupt music warbling and cutting of during it that signals a shift to the non-reality of the dream. The music then changes and it shows the set near the Chengs' restaurant for the middle part of the teaser. It moves the camera back to show us the lanterns expanding up the street and that Goldstone's is gone and the like to represent the changing Whickber Street of the nightmare in S2 & S3. But then...
...it cues up the South Downs scene where S3 winds down by putting the chairs in front of the bookshop set, signaling that the South Downs scene isn't real, just as it echoes the Aziraphale waking up of the final shot.... and then it goes a step further than S3 actually did to give us what is actually shot to be a scene as if from the series itself. A flashforward to the future. How can we see it doing that? Go back to the chairs...
The very last shot in S3 is the chairs from behind as we go up to the nebula in the sky-- synonymous with Crowley, who invented them-- and the whooshing sound begins. We hold on the nebula in the night sky-- hold on metaphorically Crowley, to whom Aziraphale will be returning momentarily. The sky around it snaps away, turning black, consciousness rushing back up behind Aziraphale's eye as he begins to wake up. This was echoed in the teaser by what happened when the director's chairs were put down in front of the bookshop. The lights went on and the set began to retreat-- like a person waking up and leaving their constructed dreamscape. And why the chairs anyone can sit in but which are known as director's chairs, of all chairs?
Well... the ending images of S3 made a point to show us the chairs from the back, just in case we didn't see enough of them from when Asa-Aziraphale was sitting down to notice what kind of chairs they are because it matters-- these are what are known as Adirondack chairs.
Adirondack means tree eater and a dack is an old word for a duck so there are other humorous levels to this but the main thing is actually just in how it breaks down to: a dir on dack/deck, with dir being the abbreviation for director, and on deck meaning what comes next. So, adirondack = a dir. on deck... the S3 chairs referencing the chairs from the teaser and saying they are actually what comes next. It's pointing us back to the teaser for help with answers to the ending of S3.
It is saying that, off of these Adirondack chairs-- off of Aziraphale waking up after this dream? What comes next is that he and Crowley get metaphorical director's chairs-- making their own destiny, not this terrible ending. It doesn't end with the Adirondack chairs in this obviously fake, creepily subpar world. This is the end of the nightmare, not the end of the story. And emphasizing that? Is that the teaser then gave us one more scene-- one that was filmed to not look at all like it was on a set but from the show itself. It's a flashforward to the future.
The set fades away after the chairs and the lights indicating waking up and the shot resets. For the last shot, the camera refocuses on the bookshop front door-- a common, recurring shot from the show. It moves in a bit closer as we see a person come in from behind the door on our right. We can't see her clearly but we can see snippets in the window.
She has red hair and a white graphic t-shirt, like a band shirt. She has a silver, non-wedding ring and pink nails-- with pink being used throughout Good Omens as it usually is, a color of love and good health. Seeing pink in Good Omens is a good omen. And we're about to see several bits of evidence that this is not meant to be a crew member on a set...
We see her hand come in front of the door and she takes the bookshop's closed sign between her fingers in a way that is, as some of us noticed when this first came out, how Crowley lifts things, as we saw in 1941...
She flips the sign over to open and then we see her from the side as she walks away, further back into the bookshop, for the last scene of the teaser-- and the real last scene of the series. We realize she can't be a crew member. Why? Because she looks to be about twelve years old, if that. As she walks away, we see her profile and realize she's a child.
The Setting the Stage teaser? It didn't just set the stage for S3-- it set the stage for The World to Come beyond it. Open-- they pen more than one kind of book of life together...
This redheaded girl existing and helping out in the bookshop in the post-nightmare world means that Crowley and Aziraphale get their happy ending. She's family if she's opening the sign on the door. What we watched in S2 and S3 set the stage for her.
The Setting the Stage trailer gave us a flashforward glimpse of the bookshop in the future. It's still there, of course, as that was all a nightmare. The world only ended in Aziraphale's dream. The bookshop still stands and, one weekend day in the not-too-distant future? A girl that looks like them will be turning over the open sign of a shop that is now hers, too. That's how it actually ends. In true Good Omens form? They told us before the end even began.
It's not the only thing they flashed forward to, either...
If you read any of the linked posts in this post about the nightmare, you'll see that I came to the conclusion that Aziraphale will wake from the nightmare realizing that the biggest next step he can take to build this world where he and Crowley can live openly together? That is to reach out to Gabriel, as that's what his dream was emphasizing that had been considering doing in reality. The dream basically shows him, and us, how Gabriel is the key to the happy ending-- it starts as it ends, but it also ends as it starts, with Gabriel coming to the bookshop, as every ending is a new beginning, right? Well...
Funny then that we've had this photo of Gabriel talking to Aziraphale in the bookshop (those are Aziraphale's knees on the bottom left) since S1 without being able to understand what it meant until now. Nothing more Good Omens than giving us part of the ending back in the beginning of S1, in a way we couldn't find the lady on until after S3. 😉
That's probably Aziraphale's diary from 1827. Does Gabriel know there's a statue of him in Edinburgh? No? Would he like to go see it together sometime? Say, with Crowley and Beelzebub...? There's a little pub nearby...
It starts as it ends, and it ends full circle from how it started...
i hate that i’m not over the gomens finale yet. i want to be a much stronger person. i want to be like oh well it’s just a tv show and canon doesn’t mean anything and i am. i do. mostly. like 70% of the time. or so. idk. and then there’s a wave of grief just crashing over me again
Right there with you. It’s not “just a TV show,” is the way I think about it. It’s all the real-life things this story connects with, all of the real-life hopes and fears and sorrows, all of the pieces of ourselves.
I do love the book, but from the time I saw the show, I saw that These Characters As Portrayed were everything and must be allowed to be happy.
No matter how much projecting we are doing, the idea that these traumatised, lovely, clever, anxious beings that distanced themselves from their people because they couldn't go along with them, and who are exactly the kind that our society has less and less tolerance for-- that they could succeed and heal together happily? It was everything.
I don't know if it hurt more that they-as-themselves failed, or how they did, or how they were first contorted into uncanny imitations of themselves first to rip apart the parts of our souls who love them so dearly by not being who we think know they are and taint not only their present (recent?) selves but also themselves through the entire canon?
There's a post somewhere on Tumblr that through loving characters we identify with, we learn to love ourselves. What happens now?
My longstanding theory about Nina and Maggie is that somehow, when Crowley and Aziraphale both performed miracles upon Nina in Tadfield, the conversation they had influenced reality later. Nina mentions, when handing infant Adam over, that she wonders if he will remember her, later. What if he does? What if, when making up the world as he believes it should be, he remembers her-- and Maggie?
Aziraphale says "you must have had records" and Nina, hypnotized, responds "yes, we were very good at keeping records". Keeping. What does Maggie's record shop notoriously not do? Sell records. She is the record-keeper.
The nuns' records at Tadfield were destroyed in a (hell-made) fire. When the world is remade to Adam's preference at the end of S1, he restores the records and puts them back. He just puts them back .. slightly differently. It's an 11 yo child's understanding of records, tucked back into reality safely, placed right back into a space that had been destroyed by a fire.
Aziraphale's bookshop.
Nina not having a job at the nunnery except to provide refreshments-- carries over too.
Anyway.
There's so much detail and love in those damned seasons. I'm genuinely so furious that now I'll never know.
(Crowley’s shirt is based off of a design by Art by Veya, and the flags featured are the lesbian, gay male, genderfluid, bi, non-binary, intersex, trans, and demisexual flags. The fact that there are so many more flags that would work to include if there was more space says a lot about the characters, I think.)
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