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.
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