Why I hate Good Omens 3, and why it’s not only about the ending
It’s been 8 days now and since then a lot of good points have been made regarding an oodle of plotholes and inconsistencies, so I won’t be focusing much on every one of them. It’s also been 8 days of real grief for me, and I found myself thinking, why am I so devastated? Why can’t I move on? Because it seems like an easy thing to do – the mess is so big it can as well just be ignored.
Here’s what bothers me: the characters who chose that ending were not Aziraphale and Crowley.
And I don’t mean any hidden clues here, any searching for meaning in parallel universes. The characters we saw in the finale were just so incredibly mischaracterized it feels personal. Yes, of course, I am a mere ficwriter and don’t claim to know them as if they were my own characters. But still, I spent years meticulously trying to understand their personalities and motivations, unlike, it seems, whoever it was that wrote that script.
On May 13, I got seated, jittery and prepared for the end of an era. But the very first scene, the Great War over a plot device called the Eternal Flame, instantly got me saying ‘I don’t like this’. The Aziraphale I saw there, let alone Crowley, acted in a way that filled me with unease. I had an uncanny feeling that I was watching some other show, so little it had to do with Good Omens, aside from the actors. I have to say, that feeling of unrealness stayed with me throughout the episode’s entirety. But in those opening moments, what I felt especially acutely was that this retcon of their early relationship was absolutely wrong.
Of course, it was somewhat retconned in season 2 with the Before the Beginning sequence, where Aziraphale introduces himself to the starmaker, in contradiction to their original first meeting in the Garden of Eden. The way they both act on the wall in Eden is undoubtedly written like a very first meeting. So that scene in season 2 was already questionable, but everything that was questionable in season 2, at least to me, left the benefit of the doubt because of the possibility of a future explanation in the finale.
Said finale does the opposite, making the magical dynamic between Crowley and Aziraphale even more eyebrow-raising. And it becomes really frustrating when near the end it turns out that the Great War scene is there for one reason – backwards writing.
To arrive at a certain point in a story, one needs to establish cause and effect. And this is why Good Omens 3 fails as a story – all plotlines leading to the (very trendy) universe reset are frantically installed during the film (one would think that this butchered script might’ve even been fed to AI). Somehow, Palpatine returned. Somehow, the Book of Life (Plot Device Number 1), ermmm… needs to be… stolen? But hmmmm… we need someone to do the reset, and everyone loves these two characters – Aziraphale and Crowley, soooooo… let’s have Plot Device Number 2 (Eternal Flame) be the instrument of destruction of the Plot Device Number 1 so that the Beloved Characters can arrive at the reset situation with Plot Device Number 0 (God).
The problem is, in order to make Aziraphale and Crowley arrive at that situation, one has to get them there through making several decisions. And these decisions are not the decisions that the priorly established Aziraphale and Crowley would make. I don’t just mean deciding to reset the universe, I mean basically every move they make.
I think it’s safe to say everyone was eager to see Aziraphale’s motivation for leaving at the end of season 2 explored in depth in the finale. Not only we didn’t get it, but we can also see him having regressed from all his previous character development, which he’d had plenty in both seasons, but mostly in season 1 – going from dogmatism to accepting his free will (yes, they both had free will all along. As did other angels, like Gabriel, and demons, like Beelzebub, and humans. Which was the whole point of the story). The faces he makes at the mention of Crowley, the way he behaves when he asks for Crowley’s help, the fact that he never shows that he realizes what exactly he did wrong, demanding Crowley’s forgiveness in order to brush their conflict off and move on to what the plot requires them to do, and ultimately speaking of Crowley as an angel, who he’s long ceased to be and never wanted to become again. This is not Aziraphale. Aziraphale is stubborn but kind, and no matter how badly he parted with Crowley in the final 15, he wouldn’t stop caring, wouldn’t neglect to check on Crowley in years, knowing the state he was in. This is not the angel who made a point out of discovering Crowley’s holy water heist and brought it to him just because he was worried for Crowley’s life. And at the core of it all, in spite of all his pro forma ‘you’re a demon’ remarks, Aziraphale loved Crowley for Crowley, not for his angelic past.
Crowley’s portrayal is not much better. Sure, many of us wanted to see his heartbreak, I did too, but the way it’s executed would be laughable if laughing at funerals was a thing people wanted to do. Backwards writing being, we need drama, so let’s make him homeless through ummm… losing his Bentley! And, somehow (Palpatine wink) his miracles! All that in order for him to be too drunk to realize it’s Jesus talking to him. And this is his excuse for missing Jesus – oops, I was too drunk. An ancient demon of his cunning, the original tempter, missed the key figure because he was drunk. Like just some guy. How very plausible.
Naturally, I have to remind everyone that Crowley is an optimist with an unlimited imagination and always, always slithered his way out of any pear-shaped situation. Let’s not forget that he was the one to propose averting Armageddon and insist on doing that despite Aziraphale’s initial objections. And it worked! Worked because humanity has free will. And you’re telling me I have to buy him saying, yeah nah, let’s restart it all cause there is no other way? For Crowley, there is always another way. There’s no way he would give up and doom the entire universe and the love of his extremely long life to destruction (“You’ve got to keep testing people. But not to destruction.” – Crowley’s quote from the chapter ‘Eleven Years Ago’).
I saved the part that hurts me the most for the last. And I think this is the reason why it hit me so hard and isn’t letting me be.
I can see no love between Aziraphale and Crowley in the finale. It is spoken of by a third party, in a mocking way no less, it is implied through some guys played by David Tennant and Michael Sheen who were married for 20 years off screen, but it’s just not in the story anymore. It was there in season 1. It was there in season 2. The chemistry between them was insane, with their infinite push and pull, their being so similar despite belonging to different factions. They were so compelling because they were an impossible pair of an angel and a demon. These characters shaped each other, in the world that they loved so much and that wasn’t easy to live in, but it was theirs. To the world, they say proudly, with deepest affection, in such a fitting ending in season 1. Their so-called decision in the finale is not what they are. To arrive at this decision, the writers turned them into Plot Device Number 3, now without any chemistry whatsoever, the shells of their former glorious selves that I, and I’m sure most of us, loved so much in the previous installments. For their love for each other and their love for the imperfect but wonderful world that was their home.
I feel sorry for their character assassination, in both ways. I do hope that I’ll be able to move on and forget this mess of a finale like a terrible nightmare, continuing my journey with Aziraphale and Crowley, the characters that have become so dear to me. And I’m positive that collectively we, the fans, will do them much better justice than was done by the people who clearly don’t give a single fuck about Good Omens.
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