when i watched good omens, i didn’t expect to love tv crowley, and it fuckin blindsided me. all at once, i thought, oh gosh, damn, and fuck, roughly in that order, and here’s why.
where tv crowley and book crowley most significantly diverge is the bookshop fire. in the book, “Crowley cursed Aziraphale, and the ineffable plan, and Above, and Below.” in the tv show, instead of cursing him, he calls out for him desperately before falling to the floor with a quiet “you’ve gone.” for book crowley, az is “Aziraphale. The Enemy, of course. But an enemy for six thousand years now, which made him a sort of friend.” for tv crowley, aziraphale is his “best friend.” naturally, in the bookshop fire, tv crowley is in fucking agony. this is not how book crowley reacts.
see, one of book crowley’s most basic traits is his optimism. “Because, underneath it all,” the book says, “Crowley was an optimist. If there was one rock-hard certainty that had sustained him through the bad times—he thought briefly of the fourteenth century—then it was utter surety that he would come out on top; that the universe would look after him.”
it’s a really beautiful passage. and i can’t relate to it at all.
after the fire, book crowley thinks he might “get completely and utterly pissed out of his mind while he waited for the world to end.” where book crowley only considers it, tv crowley actually does it. he does go to wait out the end of the world while drunk, and does give up, and he does break down, and he is not an optimist; he is a mess. that struck me. i’ve never seen a heroic character so blatantly need help before. but crowley gets help; he finds a friend and confesses how much aziraphale means to him; he gets back in the car and forges onward through the fire, even though he’s clearly Not Okay.
and there, on the flaming m25, book crowley and tv crowley diverge again. tv crowley is not an optimist; he’s not holding the bentley together with the hope that it’ll all work out. but he does it anyway. tv crowley doesn’t have optimism, but he has something that is, to me, even more important. in the show, “Crowley has something no other demons have, especially not Hastur: an imagination.”
an imagination. strangely enough, in the book, crowley admits to lacking it: “They’ve got what we lack. They’ve got imagination,” book crowley says. but tv crowley has that imagination, and that is what saves him–and that, to me, makes so much sense.
tv crowley is traumatised. when he fell, some part of him broke, and while he claims he “sauntered vaguely downwards,” he really took a “million-light-year freestyle dive into a pool of boiling sulphur,” and it hurt. tv crowley is hurt. and so am i.
i also give up. i also break down. i don’t, and can’t, ever believe that the universe is looking out for me–or for anyone. i am not an optimist. but you know what? i have imagination. i have friends. and if it came down to me to help save the world, that is exactly what i would rely on.
Book Crowley was written by two youngish men at the dawn of the post Cold War era. He is a young man because they were young men. He has optimism because that was the mood at the time. Optimism that decades of MAD was over.
TV Crowley was adapted by a man who is older, and more cynical, and has lost his best friend to Alzheimer’s.
^ Yes this.
Book! Crowley was written by young men with the world at their feet, and really, why wouldn’t you feel optimistic as your life starts out?
TV! Crowley was written by a man who lost his best friend to Alzheimer’s and no, it wasn’t a fire, but this man knew/ knows intimately that you don’t just pick yourself up from that straight away. You go and you drink and you mourn andyou grieve and you cry.
And only when that’s happened and you come to terms with the fact that this man is never going to come back, you shift to accommodate that loss and then you look toward what needs to be happening.
TV! Crowley’s reaction was so much more realistic for the relationship he and TV! Aziraphale had and it would’ve been out of character for him to just dust himself off and drive straight to Tadfield, because it would have been like saying those six thousand years meant nothing to him. But they did and so he broke.
I’ve lost someone I’ve loved very suddenly. I’ve had those final conversations, sitting by myself at a lonely table with a ghost. Sometimes there are things left to say, apologies to make. And if I could have said, “Where are you? Wherever you are, I’ll come to you,” and done one last thing to help them—I’d have done it. Even if it meant holding myself together through an inferno by the force of my imagination, even believing as Crowley did that I would still never see them again. He didn’t know Adam would give the angel back. But they had unfinished business, and he was going to finish it, if it was the last thing he did. Which it should have been. He didn’t expect a happy ending, he just needed an ending, one that wasn’t cut short.
i didn’t need my heart today.
