I had to resort to imagining a and c walking in the park and brushing hands accidentally, not acknowledging it but then the next time. the next time they /accidentally/ brush hands Crowley goes for it and neither of them will look at each other but Aziraphale is smiling at the asphalt and Crowley is blushing and doesn't trust himself to speak. they walk the rest of the way in companionable silence, and they don't mention it, and they don't let go until they have to. let us all gaslight ourselves like it is summer 2019 again. only way we are going to get out of this
AUGH YESSS I JUST WENT WEAK IN THE FUCKIBG KNEEEESS
(If you aren’t in a place to read some GO3-critical analysis, this isn’t the post for you. No criticism intended! I have friends I like and respect very much who disagree with me on this subject. Curate your experience! Mute these tags, block me, whatever you need to do. I won’t take it personally.)
Because of who I am as a person, I can’t stop noodling about what the Good Omens Finale was actually trying to do. Temporarily setting aside whether I liked it (I did not) — what was it trying to do? What was the writers’ logic and thought process in the decisions they made?
Okay, let’s work backwards from the dramatic climax, and see if we can follow the critical plot path. What had to happen so that the climax could happen?…
Aziraphale and Crowley sacrifice their existence, because apparently that’s a necessary condition to create a world without God judging people for their choices, which seems to be Crowley’s definition of “real free will.” (This condition has never been so much as hinted at before, but okay, sure. For the sake of argument, let’s accept it.)
Aziraphale and Crowley have to be able to summon God using the Book of Life so that they can negotiate their sacrifice.
Michael’s Book of Life rampage has to happen, so that Aziraphale and Crowley have a reason to summon God.
Aziraphale and Crowley have to be together when Michael’s Book of Life rampage happens, so that they can negotiate the sacrifice together.
Aziraphale has to come back to Earth so he and Crowley can be together when the Book of Life rampage happens.
Heaven has to lose Jesus so that Aziraphale can have a reason to come back to Earth.
The Second Coming has to be planned so that Heaven can lose Jesus.
Aziraphale has to go back to Heaven to plan the Second Coming because ???
This is where working backwards falls apart for me. If the ultimate goal was to get A & C together in the same place for the climactic Book of Life destruction… they were already in the same place at the end of S1. Why did they need to be separated and then brought back together?
Ordinarily, I’d think it was done to ramp up the emotional stakes for the poignant climax. You know, give them a happy reunion, really give them hope, so that the sacrifice hits that much harder.
But the reunion isn’t written as happy at all — it’s bitter and angry and cold. If anything, it lowers the emotional stakes for the sacrifice, because their getting back together already feels hopeless.
So, narratively, what was the breakup and reunion for?
Maybe there’s an argument that Michael losing out on the Supreme Archangel promotion is what set off the Book of Life rampage? So Aziraphale had to get the promotion? And the breakup was just a side effect of that?
This gets hazy. Was that actually what set Michael off? And why was Aziraphale’s promotion needed for that to happen, as opposed to someone else’s?
All I can come up with is that the entire F15 breakup existed so that the ultimate sacrifice scene — where Crowley sacrifices their chance at happiness for the greater good of humanity — could be a callback to an earlier scene where Aziraphale had been the one wanting to make that sacrifice.
Something something, Aziraphale is foolishly willing to sacrifice their happiness for a pointless reason, all in the name of being “good” and “angelic,” but in the end we get the ✨ ironic twist ✨: Crowley the demon is the truly good and truly angelic one, because he’s the one willing to sacrifice their happiness when it really helps humanity.
I don’t like it. But setting that aside, it’s all I can come up with for what the thought process might have been.
Temporarily accepting for the sake of argument that Aziraphale had to go back to Heaven, we can start working backwards through S2:
Gabriel has to run away with Beelzebub so that Aziraphale can get promoted so that Aziraphale can go back to Heaven
Gabriel has to lose and regain his memory before running away with Beelzebub so that ???
It’s unclear what any of that Gabriel amnesia plot was needed to set up.
Why not replace the whole “hiding amnesiac Gabriel from Heaven and Hell” plot in S2 with a “hiding Jesus from Heaven and Hell” plot? Then A & C are together when they need to be. It also gives them the realization that their happiness can never really be safe while Heaven and Hell still exist, because they’ll always be dragged back into the power struggle. They realize that all of humanity is in the same boat. That no one can ever truly be free. That sets up a motivation for their sacrifice.
I still don’t like this storyline. I would still argue that Aziraphale and Crowley would never give up on their universe. That thematically, the whole idea of “sacrifice themselves to create a new universe” contradicts the book/S1.
To me, the ultimate thesis of the book and of S1 is that humanity has the power to save itself. That humanity’s real power lies in imagination, empathy, self-determination, love and friendship and family, and making our own meaning out of everyday joys. That this power is stronger than any god, if we only choose to claim it.
Aziraphale and Crowley sacrificing themselves, erasing their whole universe to get God to start over with a new one, making that decision for humanity… because humanity is helpless and hopeless in the face of God’s ineffable game, so helpless that humanity has already been destroyed … it contradicts everything I understood and loved about Good Omens.
But if S3 insisted upon a “noble sacrifice to erase everything and start over” storyline, at the very least it could have been coherent about it.
The only way I can make sense of it is to suppose it's all part of the fatalistic view that underpins the finale. Just as humanity cannot, apparently, have free will in a universe with Heaven and Hell, Crowley and Aziraphale can't ever truly be free/happy/together in that universe.
The biggest difference between S1 and the book is how they really do seem free at the end. Book Omens is kinda, phew, we got away with it, back to normal. Lunch? but dodging attempted execution and scaring both sides made C & A seem to have escaped. S2 did a lot of rolling that back; Beelzebub could still summon Crowley bodily into Hell, Heaven had a claim on the bookshop.
You can't just resign from being an angel or a demon after all, any more than you can resign from being human. It doesn't matter who does what, the system will prevail. (You can't change anything.)
One thing the FF in S2 did well was showcase some fundamental difference between Crowley and Aziraphale. Their conflicting instincts of freedom v duty, fight v flight. S3 doesn't have the longed for reconciliation because a world with Heaven and Hell makes it impossible.
So their deaths are less a sacrifice and more a surrender. There is no hope for them, for this world. Burn it all down and start again.
In contrast, their human doppelgangers in the new universe have a easy, comfortable romance. It's sweet, I guess, if you read it as showing they've finally escaped the shackles of their original creation.
If 'be an us' simply meant 'be together' maybe it's a happy ending. But if "us" also means "ourselves" then it's a tragedy. Because they can only be together in another world, desaturated and stripped of history, then there really never was any hope for our Crowley and Aziraphale.
And yeah, it's not just poorly articulated, it's depressing as fuck, and wholly at odds with the quiet, stubborn optimism of the book.
Why the hell is the finale trying to tell us that we need permission from canon to keep creating fan content? That we need our AUs to be canon in order we can keep creating them? Canon is canon, fanfiction is fanfiction. We needed a canon and satisfying ending that would not treat characters as OOC and answer our questions, not the "beautiful-sounding'" "they met each other in every universe" and "all of your aus are canon now". I don't need my aus to be canon, I need to see the ACTUAL AND CANON UNIVERSE WITH A SATISFYING AND LOGIC ENDING.
Burning the mammoth flank just a lirtle instead of eating it raw gives grug more calorie to think. Grug thinking about color symbolism in silence of the lambs
angel in space who falls in love with an astronaut floating out in the void, not realizing they've been dead for years out there nor comprehending what death even is. is that anything
the angel starts leading them back to earth cuz they think that's what'll make them feel better, finally talk back to them, open up. it takes lightyears to get back to earth's atmosphere and when they do, the angel embraces them as gravity takes hold and pulls them crashing down. they both incinerate into ash and disappear. is that anything
i still don't think I've fully processed the implications of the Crowley-as-an-angel scene and how it shows that he's been trying to prevent armageddon since before time even began. he heard that 6000-year universal age limit and immediately knew what it meant. it was the first thing he did "wrong", the cause of his first and oldest and deepest wound, it's "you can't kill kids", it's his deeply held belief that it's not acceptable to create just to destroy. he tries to stop it before it even begins and he Falls, he tries again after the first 6000 years & temporarily succeeds. he says let's run away but he hasn't yet, and it's hard to imagine he actually will.
