i think the main reason i didn't fully enjoy good omens 3 (besides the weird pacing, which is understandable because they had to cut the runtime way down) is the way they showed god, and in all honesty i think that moment was the moment it started to go downhill.
[rambly analysis under the cut]
[all mentions of 'god' refer to the abrahamic god]
my perspective as a christian (feel free to take this with a grain of salt): i don't like how they showed god playing games with aziraphale and crowley, and i do NOT like the way that she was at some points downright cruel. like, that's not God!! and i get that good omens uses christianity solely as a plot point, but i personally found it really helpful for my faith, as a queer person, to see christianity and queerness together in a positive light (thank you, nanny ashtoreth). i felt so wrong for being this thing that a lot of people who share my faith said was so evil and sinful, but then i read about aziraphale, doing things angels 'aren't supposed to do' (eating food, listening to music, living on earth at all) and still having god's love and living in god's power. good omens (the book) was in fact baby's first fandom, and my first exposure to the concept of being gay ( i am now also gayer than a treeful of monkeys on nitrous oxide, thanks pterry). i don't like how they made god so uncaring of aziraphale and crowley's love after all that meaning that terry poured into the book and the showrunners put into seasons 1 and 2. and i especially do not like how god was giggling with lucifer. like. that is the great adversary!!! the beast of the pit!!! she would not banter with her chud son at the end of all creation!!!
my perspective as a writer (please take this with slightly more salt): so. that ending. in some ways it was very good (i really liked them meeting in the bookshop, and it was so sweet and lovely to see an elder gay marriage on screen) BUT while anthony and asa are nice and all, what about aziraphale and crowley? what about crowley's question? what about all the people in the old universe? why did lucifer show up for like three seconds and then immediately become irrelevant? they had laid what could have been a good foundation for him to be the big 'final confrontation' in the bookshop ('even further downstairs', the backstory about the rebellion, crowley losing his miracles etc). maybe god seemed like a more interesting choice? the problem is though, once you introduce god as a character rather than a plot device, you can't deescalate from that and make her back into what she was. i do think that someone in the writers room must have come up with the idea to have god make an appearance and then had no idea where to take it from there because, as i said, once you introduce god as a character, you can't really leave her as one-dimensional. you have to give her motivations and and arc, which...you can't really do well, because god in the cultural mind is this all-powerful all-knowing all-loving being, and characters in stories are intrinsically made to be relatable. there's always going to be a disconnect, which will always end up in a fundamentally mischaracterised god-character (just look at supernatural). and when you have a character who is so canonically powerful, and so mischaracterised at the same time (and this is especially true in such a character driven story as good omens), then everything else will become slightly enshittified in the process, simply because of the power that this character has over the canon universe. also, just from a story point of view, it makes no sense. why introduce this new major player, right at the end of the episode? why not let aziraphale and crowley, the actual main characters, be the driving force behind the grand finale? did they just want tanya moodie in that amazing bedazzled coat? did we exchange the fabled aziracrow kiss for tanya moodie in that bedazzled coat? am i too mad about that last part (no, not really, it was an amazing coat)
tldr: god should have been a cameo, toby jones should have been allowed to chew the scenery to his heart's content, and aziraphale and crowley should have been able to choose humanity AND themselves
