I fully believe that Shane and Ilya cannot agree on an anniversary. Shane says it was the All Stars weekend because that's when he thought they were both 100% serious about the relationship because that's when he was, Ilya says it was the cottage when they said "I love you'' because he didn't believe in it until that moment. They find this out the first year with Shane's anniversary date when Shane plans an elaborate secret date the last night of All Stars and gets Ilya gifts, and Ilya has no idea what its for. They agree to disagree on the date, "We will just celebrate twice a year, I guess." It happens again with their wedding anniversary, Shane says its when they legally got married, Ilya says it was when the twins married them because he doesnt care about about being officially married in the eyes of Canadian law he cares about the first time they said "I do". They find this out when a reporter asks them about their wedding and when they had it and they both gave different answers. Once again they agree to just celebrate twice a year. They say it is because the date doesn't really matter and both of them are right in some way, but in reality it is so they can compete on who plans the more romantic, thoughtful, and elaborate anniversary date. And so that they don't fight about who's planning the date this year or making conflicting plans by accident.
I will preface this analysis by sharing I am an a-religious religion scholar, literature scholar, and linguistics scholar (to a lesser but significant extent) through higher education and on-going self-directed study. I'm also an author IRL, again taught the craft of fiction through higher education, post-college study, and self-directed education.
Michael Sheen and David Tennant give an incredibly moving performance. What sits wrong in my gut about the final installment of the TV version is how it contradicts and rewrites what exists in both the novel and how Good Omens 1 and 2 accurately represent what's in the novel. This post explains my interpretation. Fiction can have many equally valid interpretations based on facts from the text.
I'm going to begin by quoting every mention of free will from the novel, some of which contains relevant information about other aspects of the novel that GO3 contradicts or rewrites.
And that'd be that. No more world. Just endless Heaven or, depending on who won, endless Hell. Crowley didn't know which was worse.
(...)
But there was no getting out of it. You couldn't be a demon and have free will.
***
It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.
***
And just when you'd think they [humans] were more malignant than ever Hell could be, they could occasionally show more grace than Heaven ever dreamed of. Often the same individual was involved. It was this free-will thing, of course. It was a bugger.
Aziraphale had tried to explain it to [Crowley] once. The whole point, he'd said (...) was that when a human was good or bad it was because they wanted to be.
***
[Humans had] come up with some stomach-churning idea no demon could have thought of in a thousand years, some dark and mindless unpleasantness that only a fully functioning human brain could conceive, then shout "The Devil made me do it" and get the sympathy of the court when the whole point was the devil hardly ever made anyone do anything. He didn't have to. That was what humans found hard to understand. Hell wasn't a major reservoir of evil, any more than Heaven, in Crowley's opinion, was a fountain of goodness; they were just sides in the great cosmic chess game. Where you found the real McCoy, the real grace and the real heart-stopping evil, was right inside the human mind.
***
I DON'T UNDERSTAND, he said. SURELY YOUR VERY EXISTENCE REQUIRES THE END OF THE WORLD. IT IS WRITTEN.
"I dunt see why anyone has to go an' write things like that," Adam said calmly. "The world is full of all sorts of brilliant stuff and I haven't found out all about it yet, so I don't want anyone messing it about or endin' it before I've had a chance to find out about it. So you can all just go away."
***
Then [Adam] said: "I don't see why it matters what is written. Not when it's about people. It can always be crossed out."
***
Humans have free will according to Good Omens. True free will, but the thesis of Good Omens 3 is that they don't. The actual issue is that angels and demons are beholden to the toxicity of Hell and Heaven toward them. Aziraphale and Crowley don't have the freedom humans do to "be on their own side."
God's ineffable plan is always framed in GO1 and GO2 as separate than the Great Plan the Metatron tries to push through. GO3 makes God complicit or, perhaps, the architect of the Great Plan. This conflation retcons what is already well-established.
In GO1, both Gabriel (head archangel and lacky of the Metatron) and Beezlbub (Duke of Hell and Satan's lacky) argue the Great Plan is necessary, Heaven and Hell's final war to prove, once and for all, which side is stronger. It's to take place on Earth as the apocalypse that will destroy Earth.
As Adam says in the novel, humans wrote this idea themselves and can cross it out. In GO1, Aziraphale questions Gabriel and Beezlbub whether the Great Plan is God's ineffable plan. The answer is clearly no, and both sides stand down. The God of the novel and GO1 is not the God portrayed in GO3.
In the prologue of GO2, Aziraphale informs Angel!Crowley that the universe will be shut down after 6,000 years. This introduces a new element that seems to be part of God's ineffable plan. In and of itself, it's a problem that can be solved according to the philosophy wrought through the novel and GO1.
GO3, however, frames the issue as humans not having true free will due to the interference of Heaven and Hell and, ultimately, God. This frame directly contradicts the novel and GO1's philosophy that humans indeed have free will, that God doesn't "play games with the universe."
The frame of GO3 should've been, to be consistent, about the dissolution of the Great Plan, dismantling of Heaven and Hell's bureaucracy, and God -- Her presence expressed through Her voice rather than as a physical manifestation -- agreeing not to end Her creation after all.
Jesus, after experiencing humanity again, likely would've (or should've) been part of arguing the case with Crowley and Aziraphale. Theologically (as Christianity eventually developed), Jesus is also God, one who had a human experience and compassion for all humanity.
Because of the compression of a six-hour story into ninety-six minutes, plus a rewrite by people other than the original novel's authors, GO3 was unlikely to be a continuation and ending consistent with GO1 and GO2. This phenomenon isn't unique to the Good Omens TV series but many TV series where the original creator and showrunner leaves (for whatever reason).
At the end of GO2, the story promise is that the Second Coming will be Heaven's attempt to carry out the Great Plan. As Crowley tells Aziraphale in GO1 after they helped thwart the apocalypse, the next attempt will be all of humanity against Heaven and Hell. Not God. Heaven and Hell.
Adam in Hebrew means man as in human. Genesis in the Torah uses adam to refer to humanity and to refer to a specific human, Adam. The choice of naming the Antichrist in the novel Adam is not about reflecting the first human but all of humanity. Adam is human at his core. He has ultimate free will, and he understands humanity also has true or real, to use Crowley's GO3 word, free will.
Jesus and Adam Young in the original six-episode GO3 had a subplot. I hope that Adam's conversations with Jesus were largely about human free will and were consistent with the Adam of the novel and GO1.
Unfortunately, Jesus is essentially irrelevant in GO3. Remove him from the story, nothing changes. Truncating his role doesn't fulfill the promise of GO2, where his return is clearly meant to be inextricably connected to the events and outcome of GO3. The Book of Life replaces Jesus's role as the potential catalyst of changing Earth and existence as a whole.
Instead, Michael's anger at her lot in existence, at her lack of control, becomes nihilistic. Aziraphale seems to have circumvented the Great Plan once again, and Michael is the one who destroys existence by destroying the Book of Life. This character arc or plotline may well have been part of the original six-episode GO3, but its development and execution was likely different.
Aziraphale and Crowley need not have sacrificed themselves had GO3 remained true to the source material and the story setup in GO2. They needed to risk challenging God, yes, but the ask would not be to make human free will real. It is real. The ask would be been to restore creation without the arbitrary 6,000-year time limit, without Heaven and Hell's interference or existence.
The consequence -- the sacrifice and reward -- to Crowley and Aziraphale would've been the loss of their divinity and immortality. God wouldn't tell them as such, only that they would experience death as a consequence of their request.
Their disintegration would be a fake-out. We'd think they're gone, but Aziraphale would awake in his bookshop, Crowley in his Bentley, both utterly confused. They'd find each other and Aziraphale would say, "I thought we were supposed die."
Crowley, realizing the truth before Aziraphale, grins. "Oh, we will. Just not today, Angel."
"Do you mean ... ?"
"We're human. Completely flawed humans -- " he laughs -- "with the free will to be as stupid or as brilliant as we want."
"Our lives are our own," Aziraphale whispers. "To do good because we believe it's the right thing to do, not because it's an order."
Crowley says, "Well, what do you want do to now? Adopt a dozen orphans or something like that?"
"I want to dine at the Ritz." Aziraphale grasps Crowley's hand. "With you."
Crowley gestures to the Bentley. They enter. Next scene is the two former angels dining at the Ritz, a parallel to the end of GO1. They toast to the world -- "and," Aziraphale adds, "to us."
Then the show flash-forwards twenty years to their cottage in the South Downs. Nightingales sing. Crowley and Aziraphale have aged and their wedding rings are present, just as they are in the GO3 that exists. Their conversation is both mundane and profound.
They so loved humanity that they become human themselves. But as themselves. That's the inevitable conclusion I see.
They've chosen Earth and humanity since the beginning of Good Omens. Thus, they choose Earth and humanity at the end.
today there was a “flash mob” set up by the seniors because it was their second to last day so they blasted the macarena over the loud speaker and did the dance in the main lobby but our headmaster knew about it so it wasn’t even funny but whilst walking past the elevator i found out why they really did this so called “flash mob”
I've been reading some stuff on punitive justice, and it made something click for me that I've observed a lot online but haven't been able to put into words before.
When someone does something wrong, that's bad, and the damage it does needs to be repaired while the person needs to try to do better in future to minimize repeating harm. We learn it in preschool - say sorry, don't do it again. If they keep at it, remove them from the situation where they can do the harm until they prove they're responsible enough to go back in.
So if it turns out someone DIDN'T do anything wrong, that should be a relief! There's no damage to fix, no internal errors to correct. Less work for everybody, literally no harm done. False alarm, all good.
The thing I've observed is, lots of people want them to have done something wrong. There's almost disappointment when it turns out there's no harm done. And I think that's because of this general undercurrent of punitive justice as morally righteous and desirable: someone does something wrong, you get to punish them. Turns out they're innocent? That's disappointing. Find another reason you get to punish them, or find another bad person you get to punish. But at the core of it is that desire to punish someone. Someone you can hurt in a way that makes you a better person for hurting them.
This particular brand of almost cannibalistic pseudo-justice is super common in tumblr, one of the most ostensibly liberal spaces on the internet; I see more borderline savagery in online discourse here than in the actually toxic parts of the internet that are just openly cruel for cruelty's sake. It's always thrown me for a loop, and has frankly also hurt me, because on the rare occasions I get personally dogpiled, it only actually stings when it makes me worry that I've legitimately hurt someone. If I did something wrong, or more realistically when I inevitably do something wrong, that would make it good and right for people to give me shit about it every day until I'm dead.
The thing that clicked for me most recently was this bit in Ijeoma Oluo's Be A Revolution:
Punitive justice is specifically, uniquely appealing to people who have suffered injustices. Of course it's the Tumblr zeitgeist. Everyone here is a marginalized person failed by at least one system. Punishing someone for perceived injustice is how someone the system has deemed worthless proves their value in blood, even if the person being punished hasn't harmed you directly - even if they haven't harmed anyone. "Righteous" anger isn't about the target in these cases, it's about the inflicter. This is how much my pain is worth.
And that kind of violent validation is so alluring and so very dangerous. It seeks an outlet, wearing the justification of justice. Who's in reach? Who's an acceptable target this week? What's a good reason to use?
Is there anything they could do that would make me stop?
folks would really benefit if they stopped framing hanleia’s premarital bickering in esb as a sign of an inherent flaw in their relationship and started viewing as what it really is: two people working to tear down the public facade of the other to get at their actual heart.
every argument they have in esb is either leia actively trying to dismantle han’s tough, cocky, and aloof outer exterior and get him to admit he’s not just working with the rebellion out of convenience but because he’s actually come to care for the cause and the people fighting it (her and luke) and instead of jetting off the moment it starts getting too comfortable, he should face his fears and actually do something worthwhile with that surplus of dumb luck and hotshot charisma he oozes.
or it’s han actively trying to get leia to admit that she actually doesn’t have it all figured out!! oh she might know him like the back of her hand but she’s missing the big flashing sign right in front of her. WHY ARE YOU SO OBSESSED WITH HIM, PRINCESS?? you think maybe its because you’ve got a big ol’ crush?? oh, sure! he gets it. the rebellion takes priority, she’s all work and no play… but if thats actually the case, would it kill her to stop hounding him about how he might secretly be a good guy?? or, simpler solution, why doesnt she just admit that theres clearly a spark here??
It’s also funny. It’s these two very strong willed people who are trying to flirt with each other and sort of failing, sort of speaking the other’s language.
It’s Very American Pride and Prejudice. No silent judgement or using Jane/Luke as a shield. Let’s yell. Chewie, take Mr. Collins into the back and plug him into the hyperdrive before he tells us anything more about the esteemed Lady Catherine de Bourgh.
What the heck! As of this reblog, this comic has 21 notes. Apparently a little reblog chain happened, but I don’t really remember noticing. Much higher numbers than my usual 0 or 1. My first taste of success, and I totally missed it!
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