Nothing Lasts Forever: A Critique of Good Omens Season 3
I can hold two things in my heart. I can think two thoughts in my head. Two things can be true at the same time.
1. Good Omens' finale was made with love and under the tightest of constraints, and that love shows in so many scenes, performances, and moments. The music, the costumes, the sets, the acting-- all brilliant. I adored Jesus and Harry's dynamic. I adored Brian Cameron and his malicious air (felt like he made a better bad guy than Satan, tbh, and is easily the best villain Good Omens has ever had). The Whickber Street humans had so much soul. Muriel was a ray of sunshine, and I loved seeing them starting to make a tiny connection with Eric. And I even loved Asa and Anthony, and the simple, soft love that they got to share.
2. No amount of love can fix that the script they ended up using is full of plot holes, plot cul-de-sacs, and contrivances, and this ultimately destroys the message the season was trying to share.
The war in Heaven scene is pointless. Crowley and Aziraphale still don't know one another (Aziraphale has to introduce himself to Crowley *again* for some reason, and Crowley doesn't mention them meeting out in the nebula). Aziraphale tending to Crowley's wound shows us nothing new about Aziraphale's character. Crowley threatening Aziraphale with a harmless weapon shows us nothing new about him either. Crowley thanking Aziraphale for the help is nice but ultimately inconsequential. Crowley doesn't even keep the flaming sword or do anything to the eternal flame. The only "new" information is that Aziraphale was a general -- perhaps an explanation for why Metatron thought he should be Supreme Archangel? If that was supposed to pay off, it doesn't.
Metatron being offed in the first five minutes completely undermines any catharsis for his impact on the final fifteen, and the line that Michael drops that "he was always messing with the Book to make things go his way" is an infuriating moment of wasted potential. It sets up a shoddy murder mystery plot that ends up not being a mystery at all but rather an excuse to pad the runtime and set up a joke at Muriel's expense.
Michael is wasted as a villain. The scene where she is burning the Book hints at a coldness in Heaven that deeply affected her: she never got any thanks, she carried everything on her shoulders, etc. The tragedy of an eldest daughter to an unloving mother, desperately trying to earn approval she would never get that leads her to a cruel, petty level of ambition. But we don't see her pain until that moment when she is burning the pages. She never responds to Aziraphale taking her promotion. We never have a moment of her confronting Metatron and demanding to know why she was overlooked. We never have her one-on-one with Aziraphale. In fact, instead of killing Aziraphale with the Book right away, a decision that would make sense, she kills her two more-or-less allies to keep them quiet and then leaves to go destroy everything else. Of course killing of one of the protagonists would be problematic for the story, so in service of the rest of the plot, she acts irrationally instead. Not irrationally in a "seeing all the possibilities from the Book of Life drove her mad" way (another wasted potential), but in a "bad writing" way. The actress does the best she can (she is wonderfully menacing, and her moment where she realizes she can't forgive herself is devastating and real), but she isn't given much to work with.
Sandalphon is also wasted. As Heaven's pitt bull and most overt mirror to Aziraphale's compassion and hopes for universal happiness, he had the potential to be either a powerful antagonist or to undergo the greatest amount of character growth. Instead he grumbles about Aziraphale's plans, is demoted, and then killed off by Michael for no clear reason. How did he know she had the Book? Why was he motivated to tell Muriel? Did he not *also* want to see the earth destroyed, and thus would he not be willing to help Michael?
Dagon is also wasted, but the script clearly never intends for her to be anything more than a joke. Hell's emptiness completely defangs her and the threats of Hell waging war on Heaven. Since Season 2, we have had hints of Hell losing people (Furfur can't muster up a whole legion for Shax, the lesser demons are on half rations, etc), and since they didn't have the money to bring Hastur, Shax and Furfur back or fill the place up with more extras, Hell does not feel menacing. It feels like they have already lost. Could a hint that Metatron or Michael had been erasing the demons have helped? Perhaps, but that isn't in the script.
Aziraphale rescues Crowley and the Bentley from Brian Cameron, they get in the car to go find Jesus, argue and drive around and park.... right where they left. The fact that they couldn't park anywhere else reveals the pitiful budget forced them to stay in a soundstage, and no ice cream truck disguise can save that. The show clearly wants Aziraphale and Crowley to have deep, meaningful conversations in the Bentley, seeing as they do this twice, but like the Bentley driving in circles and going nowhere until they blast off to stop Michael, well...
Crowley and Aziraphale's conversations also go nowhere. They spiral around and around Aziraphale's rationale for leaving and Crowley's pain at being rejected. Aziraphale at least seems to acknowledge that he hurt Crowley, bumbling and awful attempts at apologies notwithstanding, but Crowley either doesn't notice or doesn't care that he is hurting Aziraphale with all his biting and sarcastic retorts. It makes Crowley's forced "I forgive you," feel hollow and insincere, like he's only saying it to shut Aziraphale up or to placate him. He doesn't even speak up to defend Aziraphale when God calls him gluttonous and lazy. Neither of them ever voices to the other the root of their pain: "I missed you. I have been incomplete without you. I wanted you to choose us. We deserved better."
Jesus's interactions with the human characters, his passion for stories, and his drive to learn how to find the lady, while heartwarming and very authentic, are also ultimately pointless. The character even acknowledges this as he gets wiped from existence.
All of these dropped plots and missed potential lead to one depressing conclusion:
Crowley was right. It is all pointless. They were all just characters in Her story, and stories have to end.
To me, fiction is more than that. There is a universality to characters and stories. They are real, even though I know they are not. Stories have meaning to my life even if they are about people who cannot exist doing things that are impossible.
All the choices Crowley and Aziraphale made in Seasons 1&2 had meaning to me and to them. Season 3 feels like Neil Gaiman grabbing me by the face and shouting at me "no, it was meaningless the whole time! They aren't real! They're just dollies in a doll house, puppets on strings. They can't change their world because they have no power over it. They were never going to live happily ever after because they were never really alive in the first place."
And it sucks that the only way this story can conceive of making them be alive and free is by ripping them out of a world full of magic and wonder, adorable scriveners and menacing gangsters, silly angels and clever demons, cars that can drive through space and books that can unmake time, a lovable savior who shares pizza and people who are just fundamentally people, all things this episode did such a genuinely good job of showing us, with love and care and passion and brilliant acting and great music.... And putting them in our mundane world.
Don't come at me and say "but our world is filled with wonder, too!" That's not the point.
It's like saying fantasy itself is pointless. That fiction is pointless. It's like saying worldbuilding and storycrafting are an act of cruelty imposed upon our characters, no matter what ending you give them, because it robs them of their agency.
Which isn't a message I ever expected to see from Neil Gaiman of all people, and certainly not in Terry Pratchett's name.
Don't tell me about Pratchett's ideas of human self-determination and the underlying message of free will being meaningless if any supposedly supreme being can force you to change your actions against your will. We already live in a world where systems force us to do shit against our will all the time, and "people being fundamentally people" means some people have the power to impose their will on others. The book understood that, using Heaven and Hell as allegories for the USSR and the US and other Western powers during the Cold War. The show seemed to understand that with its exploration of the character of Brian Cameron, who uses no powers but still takes Crowley's car from him and keeps him from getting it back without angelic assistance. Is the show trying to imply that Asa and Anthony live in a world with no Brian Cameron's? No French executioners? No half-witted Nazi spies?
A six-episode season might have saved the lost potential, but I cannot judge the 90 minute movie on what the six episodes could have been. More money, more time, a universe where Neil Gaiman did not (for legal reasons: allegedly) assault women and therefore deserved to remain part of the project, maybe those could have fixed it. But we don't live in that universe, and that isn't what we got.
What we got was made by people who tried and people who cared and people who put their souls into it. But people aren't angels and they aren't demons, so they can't work miracles. And so in the end, Good Omens Season 3 fails to deliver on the message it is trying to convey about freedom and free will and love and instead says "nothing lasts forever."