Just a few of my thoughts (the journal factory exploded)
I understand why people loved the ending and I understand why people hated it. However, I cannot understand how people are saying that the ending was satisfying as it does not align with the themes of the story in S1 and S2 (or the book). This has nothing to do with the shortened runtime, to me it is just a fundamental misunderstanding of the material during the last 20 minutes.
The subject of “free will”:
While Crowley’s question for God makes sense (why make humans and be mad at them for being humans ?) this eventually evolves in conversation to his and Aziraphale’s wish for a godless world where humans can have free will. This is what leads to their sacrifice and is staged as the driving motivation for Crowley and Aziraphale’s fight for humanity. However, this directly opposes themes and world-building of the first two seasons and almost immediately contradicts itself:
There is no “lack of free will” for humans in this world. In fact, the whole point of S1 is that despite all of heaven and hell’s intervention to ensure Armageddon, humanity’s (specifically Adam’s) free will prevails and undermines their plans anyway. This is further shown in the S2 finale when Nina and Maggie tell Crowley off for meddling in their lives and we see that anything that may come is due to their decision and free will.
Proof by contradiction ensues almost immediately. They give up everything to have a world with no god and this alternate universe is THE EXACT SAME as the normal world they were in. Taking out the angels and demons changed nothing. Humanity still achieved their best and worst history all on their own. This proves that free will was there all along. This should not be surprising as it is well known that heaven and hell are extremely incompetent and humanity is mostly ignored by them anyway. It is stated multiple times that they come up with the most evil and good ideas all on their own, heaven and hell need not interfere.
The whole world-building of Good Omens serves the purpose of religious satire. By assuming (Christian) religion to be truth, we are shown that heaven and hell are not equated to good and evil, God is not “good” and most likely does not care about any of us, and that many biblical details are just plain ridiculous. This is the basis for the story, and in several ways this is scrapped completely by the ending:
The whole point of the storytelling is to show the ways in which a Bible-accurate world would differ from our own, while also highlighting how this must imply apathy from God and heaven to allow for humanity’s history. However, the finale ends with God creating a godless universe. Which is basically saying that a godless universe is not possible as it still must be created by God?
The characterization of God is completely different than from the rest of the series. Before, God played the role of an omniscient narrator and absent parent (perhaps with the exception of Job’s trials). God is not necessarily an active character, but more of an idea or concept within the story. This is not the case for God’s final appearance.
The ineffable plan is mentioned too many times to count throughout S1 and S2, and is even used as a loophole by Aziraphale and Crowley for Armageddon, and we are led to believe that this greater, unknowable plan not only goes beyond the Great Plan, but actively goes against it. Not only is the ineffable plan never mentioned, but God just goes along with the Great Plan and lets everyone and everything vanish from existence. What.
While their actions speak differently, heaven and hell mostly hold up the stance that they stand for good and evil, though Crowley, Aziraphale, and the audience know better. This builds throughout the series in a way that demands confrontation. We even have the heavy foreshadowing of Crowley stating the end-of-the-world battle is more likely to be humanity vs higher powers rather than heaven vs hell. This is never resolved because everyone is just erased from the book of life near-simultaneously. And to top it off, we never get a full realization from Aziraphale that he does not stand with heaven, and that heaven is not very different from Hell.
While I had a lot of fun watching a majority of the finale, I was extremely frustrated with the ending because it was mischaracterizing the story itself. All of these choices were completely unnecessary to wrapping up the plot and resulted in a lazy, unoriginal ending that forgets what the characters were even fighting for. At its beating heart, this has always been a love story. We get to see Aziraphale and Crowley fall in love with humanity and, through their love of humanity, fall in love with each other. It was always supposed to be them and the world, but the story ended in tragedy instead.
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