What’s the point
I am trying to move past the grief of the final outcome to figure out why this season/episode felt so…off. Like, I think the characters deserved better, but the audience deserved better too.
I can’t say that the production team didn’t care, or that no one put love into making this, and I’m not disregarding the fact that they had significant barriers to getting this made at all. But I can say that, to me, S3 felt like it could have been written by someone with only a surface level understanding of previous canon.
A good narrative doesn’t have to ONLY repeat the themes in the previous seasons, and it doesn’t have to go exactly the way it “should” go based on what was already set up, but it DOES have to keep the things that came before relevant. It still needs to be connected to its own canon and should not just preserve central themes but build on them. Not abandon them. I want to be surprised by an ending because it was creative and took the story I knew and made it better and more interesting than my armchair critic brain could have come up with. I don’t want to be surprised by an ending because it just doesn’t make any sense.
I can accept a tragic ending where the heroes don’t win. Good doesn’t always conquer evil, sometimes people die, and endings are allowed to be sad. But I would still like it to be done thoughtfully. Self-sacrifice has to actually affect the outcome, otherwise it’s just death.
So what foundation of plot, theme, and character development was set up in S1 & 2 that felt fully thrown out? Well…quite a lot actually.
S1 was all about avoiding the war, and avoiding the apocalypse. The finale of S1 was Adam refusing to be the antichrist, refusing to play his role, standing down the devil and saying “no, I’m not going to end the world, I am going to reset the world in a way that works for me and the people I care about and I’m not going to play your games. You, Satan, are irrelevant.”
The apocalypse in S3 could have been the mirror of the first one. Like, it’s super set up to be thematically similar. Jesus is the son of God (rather than the son of Satan) and everyone expects him to end the world, but he doesn’t want to.
But instead of getting to face his celestial parent and say “no, I don’t want to play your games and I don’t want to kill anyone, and you can’t make me”….he just disappears without any significant interaction with central characters. Joshua/Jesus’s relationship with Harry the Fish doesn’t affect the plot (unlike Adam’s human relationships which are central to his decision-making). His divine powers don’t affect the plot (unlike how Adam was able to use the powers given to him with evil intentions and repurpose them for good). In fact, this character who was set up to be pretty dang important simply doesn’t affect the plot at all. He just takes up screen time and then vanishes.
It’s also set up that, as the mirror of the first apocalypse, God is just as bad as Satan. That it doesn’t matter which team tries to end the world, the outcome is the same. Specifically, “when heaven ends life here on Earth, it’ll be just as dead as if hell ended it”. Remember that???
A lot of time, actually, has previously been devoted to the audience and the characters accepting that god is not good, there is no side of good, and divine intervention is callously indifferent at best, and murderous at worst.
So then why have the apocalypse caused not by god or heaven, but by one rogue & grumpy angel? The Great Plan didn’t end the world, god didn’t smite anyone, and the Second Coming that Aziraphale fought so hard to change wasn’t actually relevant. It’s just Micheal being a bit of a shit.
Not only is god not put in the role of the bad guy here, but she’s actively called on to save the day. Because by asking her to reset the new universe, that’s exactly what they’re doing. Praying to her to fix things.
Which fully abandons all our character growth. In S3, they’ve learned nothing. It bothers me so much that at the very end, any one of the shared experiences or their human knowledge or their relationship could have been brought in as a way to find a resolution. But what do they do instead? They summon god and ask her for help. The same damn thing Crowley said wouldn’t matter in S1 and that Aziraphale tried and failed to do in S1.
Why show that them writing in a book has the power to summon god herself, but then have their shared history and memories and time on Earth experiencing world history not be relevant? Why show that power just to abandon it and cede power back to god?
Why have god talk about life on Earth like a story in a book that just ends, for Aziraphale’s love and knowledge of books to not be relevant?
Why show Aziraphale outwitting the mafia boss with human skill (and it feeling like a callback to the S2 magic trick with the Polaroid) if they don’t even TRY to find a human way to fix things at the end? They don’t look for a loophole, they don’t even attempt to outsmart anyone.
WHY, after all the struggle to be on their own side and the fight to show that heaven and hell both suck and that divine intervention is bad, WHY just let the end of the world be “solved” with divine intervention? Why just have god end up still in charge and using HER powers to “fix” things rather than letting the characters fix things themselves? Why did all the lessons we learned along the way have zero impact on anything at all?
A HUGE recurring point is that any time god directly intervenes with anything, people die and it’s bad. God wanted to punish Adam and Eve, God sent the great flood, God wanted to kill Job’s children.
Learning this lesson is a CENTRAL part of Aziraphale’s character development. We were shown this many times.
God being cruel is CENTRAL to Crowley’s trauma and his desire to save humans. We were shown this many times.
So then WHY THE FUCK, at the end, do we regress to “ok god, I trust you to keep your word and reset things the right way, and I’m willing to die for that”?
Why even bother with character growth if none of it makes a difference in the end? Why give characters skills and bonds and experiences if, in the end, blind fate and a higher power get to win.
How did we end up with cruel tragedy?
