I had an ox rib moment with Good Omens 2, and now I’m on tumblr.
Not actually Jane Austen, nor a brandy smuggler, but thank you.
she/her || old enough to know better
Header photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash
Apologies if someone has already pointed this out. I'm new to tumblr, and I'm still digging through all the amazing Good Omens metas!
Shax-in-disguise appearing and reappearing on the side of the road at the very beginning of The Hitchhiker felt really familiar to me, and I finally figured out why. I think we can add a Twilight Zone episode that's (conveniently) called "The Hitch-Hiker"* to the list of film and tv references we get in the season.
*I felt especially dumb when Google told me this episode literally has the same title as s2 ep4. In my defense, I don't know the names of any of the other Twilight Zone episodes I've seen, either.
Not sure you really need a spoiler alert for a 60+ year old tv episode, but I'll put a break in anyway. Go watch it if you can - it's properly creepy.
A brief summary: Nan Adams is on a road trip from Manhattan to Los Angeles. She's gotten as far as Pennsylvania, when her tire blows out and she runs off the road. The mechanic who comes out to put on her spare tire comments on how lucky she is to still be in one piece. (More on that in a minute.) As she follows the mechanic into town for a replacement tire, she sees a man in a hat hitchhiking on the side of the road and passes him by. She sees the man again at the service station after getting a new tire and mentions him to the mechanic, but the mechanic doesn't see him. Once she resumes her trip, she sees the hitchhiker on the side of the road again. And again. And again. And again. The farther she drives, the more she sees him, and the more frightened and paranoid she gets. At the height of her fear, she's convinced the hitchhiker is trying to kill her, and she attempts to run him over in order to make it all stop. She finally decides to pull over to a phone booth in Arizona and call her mother to try and ground herself back in reality, and we get one final big twist to end the story.
When I realized that hitchhiker!Shax appearing and reappearing in front of the Bentley reminded me of this episode, I decided to watch it again because I hadn't seen it in years. What do we hear almost right out of the gate?
So lucky! You could even say she dodged a bullet there. Oh wait...
(I think he says "Chalk up a win to the side of the Angel" here, but close enough.) Interestingly, "the side of the angels" really just means "the good guys" these days. In both these scenes, setting aside the fact that Aziraphale is actually an angel, it's used in the context of "you survived something that could have killed you."
One other thing I didn't know before is that the Twilight Zone episode is based on a radio play, also called "The Hitch-Hiker," written by Lucille Fletcher and first presented on The Orson Welles Show in... 1941. Probably just a fun coincidence, but really, why does it feel like all roads lead back to 1941?
As for the final creepy twist in Nan's story? Her mother isn't home when she calls. The woman who answers the phone tells Nan that her mother is in the hospital. She had a nervous breakdown when she found out her daughter had been killed in a car accident in Pennsylvania - caused when her tire blew out and she ran off the road. Nan goes numb and walks back to her car. She pulls down the visor to look at herself in the mirror, and she sees the hitchhiker sitting in the back seat. He says, "I believe you're going... my way?"
So there we go - a wink and a nod to a tv episode with the moral that you can't outrun your fate/Death, in a season that sure seems to have a lot of references to death in it. By the time Nan sees the hitchhiker for the first time, she's already dead, she just doesn't know it yet. She tries running, but it all catches up to her anyway. By the time Aziraphale sees the hitchhiker, Shax is just about ready to trigger the events that lead to where we are at the end of the season. The precious, peaceful, fragile existence of the last few years is already dead, and no matter how much Aziraphale tries to outrun that idea by acting like There's Nothing Wrong...
...it all catches up anyway.
I have a more nebulous set of thoughts about the "side of the angels" line being seen in the 1941 flashback, and if I can get them in any type of coherent order, I'll link to another post or put them here. Something about that line referencing a lucky escape that isn't so lucky after all for Nan Adams, and how 1941 so far looks like a series of narrowly averted catastrophes for Aziraphale and Crowley...and how it really feels like we haven't seen all of the 1941 story yet.
Someone asked in a reblog if this was only circling in [solid black and very dark grey] circles and I do not know. But I was hoping it would reach more of the fandom, as I know there's more than 750 people on Tumblr who are fans.
So please share widely in these last hours! Poll ends around 6:30pm Eastern time.
Fear and Loathing at the Hotel California [Good Omens]
Featuring incredible artwork ^^^by the extremely talented schlgrl.
Summary:
Crowley gets stuck at an American desert hotel in the 1970s. Misery loves company, so he lures Aziraphale out there to keep him company. The trouble, of course, occurs when the other angels and demons show up.
“You gave the archangel Gabriel mescaline?” Aziraphale hisses.
Crowley shrugs. “Seemed like he could use it. Besides, s’not just him. I did all of em.”
“Good Lord. We’ve got to get out of here!” Crowley watches his eyes dart all over the place. Bad, bad. The angel’s gone paranoid. Not that Crowley blames him. Having the collected host of Heaven around while you’re stoned out of your mind - and still work for them - can’t be at all pleasant. Crowley isn’t feeling so hot himself.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Good Omens (TV)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Characters: Aziraphale (Good Omens), Crowley (Good Omens), God (Good Omens)
Additional Tags: Second Chances, Do-Over, The Ineffable Plan (Good Omens), Post-Canon Fix-It, One Shot
Summary: God did what Crowley and Aziraphale asked, and had a revelation. Now they’re getting a do-over.
Today Crowley’s cellular telephone rang, displaying the name Pipsqueak over a picture of, of all things, a grey feathered goose.
Even more confusing was the fond smile Crowley only half tried to smother before putting the infernal device to his ear.
“You’ve reached the patriarchy, weaponized incompetence and selective memory department,” his voice was just this side of monotone as he headed for the living room.
Curious.
From the device erupted a vaguely familiar vocal stream, steady and bubbling with loosely corralled enthusiasm.
Aziraphale didn’t decide to eavesdrop so much as realize that the books nearest Crowley were in need of immediate dusting.
“Hang on, hang on, they what?” Crowley sounded genuinely baffled as the stream bubbled along.
“And so you…” This prompting Crowley paired with a wildly impressive eyebrow raise, despite this cellular conversation being of the non-face kind.
And then, just when the stream reached its loudest, storm swollen volume, Aziraphale recognized the voice.
It was that delightful child Ms. Galadriel Moonchild. Pepper, he recalled she preferred. And come to think of it, by now she probably vastly preferred adult over child, as well.
It turned out that the outwardly prickly demon and the outwardly prickly (then) child had taken a liking to each other roughly around the time Pepper had calmly driven a sword clean through War herself.
Now that she was older and out in the world, it seemed she would occasionally experience immense, painful frustration as she learned to maneuver within the imperialist patriarchy that she despised and sought to dismantle.
Unsurprisingly, Crowley had a few thoughts on both being forced to go along with a corrupt system (as far as one can) and the most satisfying ways one might subvert it from the inside.
Listening to Crowley’s half of their back and forth, Aziraphale tried to get in as many adoring gazes as he could while his demon wasn’t looking. He couldn’t help it, listening to all that Kindness. And really, if Crowley didn’t want to be gazed at so soppily, he shouldn’t be so inescapably lovable in every conceivable way.
Aziraphale still didn’t like Crowley’s cellular device. He found the complete lack of schedule to its interruptions to be supremely irritating and he was jealous of how much of his Husband’s Attention it could commandeer. Aziraphale wanted all that Attention for himself.
But, well. He supposed he could make an exception for the times when a delightfully spirited grey feathered goose came honking.
Every time I see Fanart of Crowley and Aziraphale being themselves and happy in the 'present day' together, or a silly fluffy piece of fanfiction, the kind of art and fics that were all over the place post GO1, and I see that it was made after the Finale, whatever it's directly happening in a 'fix-it timeline' or addressing the Finale as a bad dream or not engaging with it's existence at all, it makes feel a little bit hopeful and very very thankful. I just want to go out to all of these creators and tell them, thank you, thank you for still believing in these silly little losers and their happiness, thank you for your part in not letting this 'Finale' take them away from us, thank you for keeping them alive. Thank you, thank you, thank you!!!
"In fact, I could entertain. I just need to get back into practice."
"No no no, please no, oh no no don't do your magic act, please, please, I'm actually begging you. You have no idea how demeaning that is."
