The thing about Damian McCarthy movies is that the female characters getting killed doesn’t feel like fridgeing, simply because the male characters who respect and listen to women are usually left alive while the men who disregard and belittle the female characters usually get killed by the monster, who is the embodiment of female rage. Also each one so far is also a fun murder mystery. That’s not a bad template to make a film career off of.
It's been almost 48 hours. I have processed the finale. I'm past my grievances. I've ran out of the conventional stages of grief and I'm currently on the secret 6th one. It's time for memes
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I understand the Job’s Children argument about the nature of the finale. I don’t even fully disagree (and personally think it’s a very smart and succinct way of looking at it and communicating a specific feeling about it, actually). But. For me, it isn’t a perfect fit, because Job’s children in s2 weren’t dead and in s3 the universe essentially is.
For the purposes of answering the question of “do you want brand new children to replace your old children,” it doesn’t matter to Job and Sitis whether their children are dead or not, because it’s an awful question. Of course they want their own original children back. For that matter, Sitis would like very much to not have to birth any new ones. But for the purposes of the narrative, the good outcome to that question depends on the children not being dead and therefore able to be reunited with their parents (in the best hoodwinking Gabriel fashion, naturally). The children weren’t dead. The course of their lives wasn’t significantly altered except for living as lizards for an afternoon.
Michael burned the universe down. Everyone in it was Thanos Snapped into oblivion. The event already occurred. The universe is dead. You can stop here and go “this sucks actually, I reject this turn of events” and that’s perfectly fine and valid. But if you follow the question of “what if this did happen though,” even getting the universe back exactly as it was is a form of Job’s Children; it already died and Good Omens doesn’t raise the dead (editing reality to erase deaths, sure, but not raising them after they’ve died; there is no reality to edit anymore in this case). And more importantly, as Crowley knows and Aziraphale finally understands, Heaven and Hell are always going to be gunning for ending it all again, because that’s the Great Plan as they understand it, and they are incapable of letting it go. Perhaps, given enough time and patience and willingness, they could learn, but they would have to stop trying to end it all in the meantime and give Earth and humanity a chance. Which means unlearning thousands of years of seeing humanity as chips in the eternal game of poker at best, healing from trauma thousands of years old, learning to live with their hereditary enemies. I want to stop here and say that this option isn’t impossible or unviable and in our real world, this is actually the solution: careful, meaningful growth through discussion and helping each other and sometimes just putting up with each other in the name of greater community cooperation (disclaimer about not taking shit from raging bigots and people hellbent on doing harm, the conversation is obviously bigger and more nuanced than this, but stay with me here).
In fiction, with ten minutes to go in the run time, the universe is already dead. Crowley and Aziraphale lived through thousands of years of watching humanity be itself, be wonderful and horrible and innovative and backwards, and lived through not just the Antichrist debacle but Heaven and Hell’s attempts to get the apocalypse back on track. Humanity’s free will means nothing when there are entities bigger than them who are able to wisp away their world with a flick of a finger. Even Crowley and Aziraphale are a danger to humanity on some level; look at how often they can change a human’s circumstances with a snap of the fingers, how they can possess a human body, how they can bring down cataclysmic lightning and stop time and turn children into lizards and back. Humanity has enough hazards and dangers in their environment without that. They pose enough of an apocalyptic threat to each other without that.
Crowley’s choice to give them a chance by removing the supernatural from their world is the most in character thing he could do. He loves and despairs at humanity but he recognizes that it should be THEIR choice whether they burn the universe down, not a higher being’s. And with no apocalypse, no deadline other than the Heat Death of the Universe, they have more than a measly 6000 years to try and try and try and get it right and get it wrong. The universe is already dead. The children are already dead. Why not, with the last of their greater power, bring it back better?
Bringing all the angels and demons back as humans is frankly a stroke of kindness I didn’t think we were going to get, in the face of this new world that Crowley and Aziraphale chose to sacrifice themselves for. This doesn’t have to read like a happy ending to everyone. But it does to me, because it’s getting everyone back and getting them back in a situation that is ultimately better—messy and human and temporary and precious. These aren’t two random dudes played by the same actors, they’re Crowley and Aziraphale as humans after making the choice to bring about a new godless universe where humanity has no artificial time limit. The details are different, but it’s still them. Their hearts find each other even when everything is fundamentally different, and THAT is what is fundamentally the same, at least to me. They find each other in every universe. They love each other in every universe.
The ending is what makes me able to accept the death of the previous universe. That, and a healthy belief in multiverse theory as it applies to Good Omens by taking God at her word when she says “you want me to make A universe,” not “you want me to make THE universe.” I won’t lie about the amounts of copium at play the longer I get to think about it rather than just bask in the emotions of it all. The universe was dead and now it’s not. The children were dead and now they aren’t. That’s the ending in simplest terms and having very different feelings about that ending is completely natural and understandable. For me: I loved it. Heaven and Hell won and ended it all and yet humanity got a second chance because of Crowley and Aziraphale. That’s all.
I fully believe Asa Fell’s hair is what book!Aziraphale’s hair looks like. I can’t articulate why. I just believe it.
(Also I cannot believe they did my least favorite fanfic trope of renaming Aziraphale to something more human-sounding. That’s it, that’s my biggest complaint XD)
This is the closing remark to a longer post I’m about to make, but I ramble, so here it is as the tl;dr:
Heaven and Hell won and ended it all and yet humanity got a second chance because of Crowley and Aziraphale. That’s all. That’s why I love the ending so much.
Initial GO3 feelings: I love it. I love it so much. I stupidly gushily mushily love it. I don’t give two figs for continuity given the real world circumstances, I love this beautiful fanfic love letter of a ninety minute special and I’m crying.
The three Knives Out movies have the same vibe as Damian McCarthy’s three movies. The endings all have a pretty comparable energy. I’m freaking out. Obviously, spoilers for all six movies, but relatively light on details:
Caveat and Knives Out: the bad guy is vanquished, justice is served, and the leftover cast have a moment of understanding as they gaze at each other, one party in a house, the other outside of it.
Oddity and Glass Onion: after a colorful caper, the bad guy is undone by his own hubris as a jaunty tune plays and the audience smirks in satisfaction.
Hokum and Wake Up Dead Man: the protagonist, freshly healing from old guilt and trauma, faces life with a new zeal and optimism as the light of hope suffuses his face and the antagonist burns in hell.
(In an effort to reclaim some parts of myself I feel like I’ve been missing because work has been devouring me alive for weeks, I’ve caught up on the Helluva Boss shorts. Fun times!! Caused much cackling. Wish I had the time to sit and study them and ingest all the background details.)
Used my recipe from last year, but added chopped bell pepper and some dashes of garlic pepper just to be adventurous. I think next year I’ll try to cook the veggies first, just to see if they’ll actually get a little browned. Anyway, good luck Friend Jonathan!
Went and saw Hokum this morning, which is significant bc it’s the first conventional horror movie I’ve ever seen in a theater and the first modern conventional horror movie that I’ve seen at all (I don’t count FNAF or Iron Lung, both as video game adaptations and as mascot horror and cosmic horror respectively). I have discovered that I do not like that experience in a theater at all, spent the second half of it with my headphones in to try and deaden the noise a bit, and I watched most of it through my fingers, but I did really enjoy the story and the way the film told that story and want to watch it again, probably multiple times, to catch as much as I can. On a smaller screen. Where I have the power to pause or mute.
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