I was trying to put to words my feelings regarding S3 and it’s honestly difficult to voice them in a discussion in such a way that it wouldn’t diminish others’ enjoyment of it so I decided that maybe I should simply give writing it all down a try.
To start with, I did not like Season 3 (or the Finale or however else someone might wish to call it). I understand that some did and found it very satisfying and I’d urge them to hold onto that feeling and consider whether they want to read any further.
But to first address the elephant in the room. That ending was not satisfying for me at all. The fact that I abhor ‘it was only a dream’ endings might have something to do with that but I’m afraid it goes deeper than that. First of all, I do not accept restarting the universe without God and angels and demons as the necessary solution. I understand some people view that as necessary because the systems were broken but what history taught me is that whenever someone loudly proclaims the need to do away with the old system and create a new, better one, it always Ends Badly. Most of the improvement human civilisation had achieved was through people trying to find a better way, not a clean slate. Additionally, I never viewed Good Omens universe as flawed for being what it was - accepting it was a willing suspension of disbelief on my part just as it never bothered me that the struggles and dilemmas of the characters I followed were occurring on a flat world sailing through space on the back of a great turtle. I would have loved to see the characters finding ways to improve their world. Ways to prevent Heaven and Hell from interfering on Earth. Even ways for them to step back, retire and allow the humanity to sort out their own problems
What I didn’t want was a bad-faith preachy depiction of a thesis that God is manipulative and that Heaven and Hell are bad, culminating in the destruction of the entire Good Omens universe. Don’t get me wrong. That human AU that got slapped on at the end was cute. I would have watched three seasons of that story alone, as an alternative universe spinoff. But those weren’t the characters I wanted to get their satisfying resolution. And I cannot accept that anyone could comprehend the ending of Season 1 with Adam understanding that the solution wasn’t to destroy the world but to mend it and think that this was a good resolution to the story.
And speaking of Adam… For all my misgivings regarding S2, at least it left alone the characters that had already left the stage. The remaking of the world robbed us of many characters we grew to love that were shaped exactly by being from the GO universe. There is no Adam Young any longer. That is, maybe there is a son of Arthur Young. Maybe there is a son of Thaddeus Dowling who never discovered his love for tropical fish because he grew up knowing about American football. Maybe there even is a human who looks something like Adam Young of GO universe, who has a different name, never had a hellhound who was the best dog a small dog could be and who never had the Them as friends. Not that their childhood would have been the same, growing up in Tadfield cut in half by a motorway. But if there even is an Adam Young, he was forever robbed of his very important choice to simply Be Human that was so significant in the story. That choice had been forced on him. Or rather, he never had it in the first place. So much for celebrating the free will (which the characters were proving to have, over and over, in previous instalments). With no supernatural elements, there is no Anathema Device who had unusual upbringing due to a book of prophecies and whose family made a decent sum of money thanks to investing in technologies their ancestress foresaw. There might be a Newt Pulsifer who works as a wages clerk on his computer that behaves like any other computer, who will never meet her. Plus there is no sentient Bentley. There isn’t even any classic Bentley that has had one owner since new.
And I know some people will tell me there were plans to have Adam more involved in S3 initially. But that, I feel, is missing the point. If everything was heading towards the ending we were given, it tears any meaning out of his involvement. If anything, it shows the futility of his optimistic, humanitarian approach in the S1 finale. And besides, I don’t much care for speculating what we might have got, had things turned out differently. There were supposedly plans for Terry Pratchett to co-create the continuation of Good Omens. That didn’t pan out either and we can only guess what we would have got then, based on, I can’t stress it enough, anecdotal third-party stories stored in memories that might be filtered through people’s perceptions, their own expectations and time. I’m sure things would also have been different had one of the authors relinquished the rights to the Good Omens story and sold it to Terry Pratchett instead of co-writing it, which supposedly was one of the options. But that’s simply not what happened.
As it is, S3 is what it is. And I don’t much like what it is. I find the stakes stacked too high, with the oh-so-original trend of making stakes higher for the sequel. I find the Book of Life as a plot device clunky and shoved in because we Needed a Universe Destroying MacGuffin. And I hesitate to use the words Deus ex Machina in regards to the Good Omens universe but there was a lot of shoving characters where the plot needed them to be, only for it all to receive a resolution that was heavy-handed and had no proper setup.
Like I said, I did not care for what we got. I did not share the optimism of many people who had whole lists of things they were hoping for in this season. Given my thoughts on S2, my expectations were rather low. And still in some aspects this season failed to clear that bar. I’m sure I will not be revisiting it. I have no intention of writing or reading any stories that incorporate it. My thoughts as a member of the fandom are mainly a mild concern that with what we were given it will be harder to curate one’s experience using tags. My thoughts as a fan of Good Omens, however, are mainly a deep regret that when the world is in such a bleak place right now, we couldn’t even be allowed to keep a world where the angels occasionally dine at the Ritz, nightingales sometimes sing in Berkeley Square and an angel and a demon are allowed to retire in the South Downs, loving humanity.
