I think one of the things I most disliked about the Good Omens finale was how they made God both tangible and undeniably sadistic.
First of all, I never wanted to see God. I think God has to be an offscreen character for Her to work at all because the whole POINT of God in Good Omens is that NO ONE actually knows who She is or what She wants. It’s INEFFABLE. But what makes me even more upset is that they took away the mystery behind her motivations and just made her cruel.
In S1 and the book, you get the sense that God is well-meaning, but perhaps got a bit carried away as time went on. She’s a workaholic parent that might have started off with good intentions, but is ultimately an absent parent, and her children all suffer for it. Heaven and Hell don’t actually KNOW what God wants, they’re just doing what they think God wants because she’s left them all alone at home with no instructions and no babysitter.
God is a CEO with too many projects on their plate and doesn’t check their email, and Heaven and Hell are middle managers doing their best not to become the reason she starts checking it again.
And so in S1 and the book, it’s easy to see God as more indifferent than cruel- in fact, I’d argue that’s one of the main themes of the book, that indifference is often just as harmful (or even more so) than “pure evil,” if that even exists. The whole POINT of Good Omens originally was that there’s no such thing as “pure good” or “pure evil.”
But God in the finale is undeniably cruel, because she is fully aware of what she’s been doing and what’s been going on. She’s been watching gleefully through it all. She’s not the absent parent with good intentions anymore, she’s the parent manipulating and encouraging her children to fight and hurt each other for her own amusement. It’s sick, it’s evil. It’s cartoonishly evil. There is no way to argue that it was all “ineffable,” because she explains it quite clearly: she wanted to watch them suffer.
It’s like the CEO has gone from not knowing what happens in the office when they’re gone, to a CEO purposefully hiring terrible managers and underpaying staff so they can LAUGH ABOUT IT.
Now, of course, you could have interpreted God that way all along. But the point was that you had a choice- you, the reader/viewer, got to decide if God was aware of what was going on, or fully “checked out.” You were able to argue that God isn’t fully good or bad, She just is. But a God who sits there and knowingly, gleefully watches her Creation play out just for pure entertainment? That’s intent. She did this to keep herself amused when She got bored.
They tried to give God fangs, and in doing so, took away her claws. The whole reason God is so scary and wonderful in S1 is because you don’t actually know if She’s paying attention. You don’t know if She is listening or not, just like real life. You talk to Her anyway. And now we know that She was taking notes so She could use pain points against her children at a later date to see how they’d respond. God’s no longer scary or mysterious or anything like that, she’s just cruel, and that is the most boring interpretation I can think of.
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