Wholeheartedly agree. And to those who want to keep making excuses for GO3, here goes my rant.
A counterargument to the chiastic structure "catch all" of GO3
This is a response to this essay, which some of you may find soothing. I hope you do.
The essay is beautifully written, it exhudes hope and, very much like humanity and GO3, is fundamentally flawed. The essay may be less a critique of the finale than a grief-processing machine, turning disappointment into meaning because the alternative is too painful. And I'm okay with that. I truly am. But since the author invites intelligent criticism and exchange, here we go.
(TLDR: If Good Omens is about loving the world enough to save it, then ending by deleting the world and replacing Aziraphale and Crowley with gentler echoes is not the ultimate fulfilment of its humanism. It is the betrayal of it. The problem with the “their souls find each other again and again” reading is that it smuggles religion back into a universe supposedly liberated from religious control. Souls are not just a romantic metaphor here; they are the mechanism by which the essay avoids admitting that Crowley and Aziraphale have been erased. But if the new world has no God, no Heaven, no Hell, no Book of Life, and no divine machinery, then what exactly is a soul? What preserves it? What recognises it? What lets it pass from one reality into another? Remove the theological architecture and the reincarnation reading collapses. Asa and Anthony may echo Crowley and Aziraphale, but echoes are not survival. They are what remains after the original voice has stopped.)
The essay’s central move is: yes, the finale is rushed and structurally damaged, but the brokenness reveals a deeper thematic design. That’s emotionally generous, but also very vulnerable. The essay seems to mistake production damage for textual intention. It builds an elegant reading around absences, dropped threads, and emotional gaps, but those may simply be the scars of a six-episode story crushed into a feature-length compromise.
The essay claims Good Omens is “chained to a chiastic structure”, a literary palindrome in which events mirror each other in a divinely stacked deck. That is a beautiful argument, but it needs much more proof. In its current form, it's a catch-all: any repeated image, reversal, echo, or callback becomes evidence of structure. Mirroring is not the same as chiasmus. A show can contain callbacks, reversals, visual rhymes, the Eden imagery, and repeated moral dilemmas without being governed by a rigorous ABCCBA architecture. This essay asserts a totalising structure, then uses that structure to excuse or dignify almost every (bad) narrative choice.
The essay argues that, because the story is a macro-level creation myth, queer love could not have ended in a conventional happy ending “inside of this macro-level creation story.” A story about free will should not defend its ending by saying the characters had no narratively satisfying alternative. The finale could have given them free will as themselves. It could have broken the cosmic game without erasing the existing universe. It could have let them retain memory, identity, continuity, and a South Downs future. The essay says “creation would have always required a destruction”, but that is not demonstrated. It is imported from the essay’s own mythic framework. It's self-soothing, and that's valid, but it's not true. It could've ended in a conventional happy ending.
The essay frames the new universe as hope: their souls transcend reality, they meet again, the old structure breaks, and love survives. A beautiful sentiment. But Aziraphale and Crowley do not get freedom. They cease to exist, and two adjacent, softened variants inherit their aesthetic. That matters. The emotional investment of the series is not merely “some version of them will always find each other”. It is these beings: the angel who gave away the sword, the demon who made the stars, the two who survived Heaven, Hell, Armageddon, loneliness, denial, and the final fifteen. If the coda gives us Asa and Anthony, that may be romantic as reincarnation myth, but it is also a dodge: the actual characters are gone. If the thematic goal was freedom, why could they not choose freedom, memory, love, embodiment, and continuity?
GO3 wants the new universe to be secular enough to free Crowley and Aziraphale from God, Hell, Heaven, judgement, prophecy, and cosmic authorship, but religious enough to preserve the idea of immortal souls finding each other across time. That is a contradiction. If the new universe truly has no God, no Heaven, no Hell, no divine Book, and no supernatural architecture, then there is no obvious mechanism by which “souls” persist, reincarnate, remember, recognise, or return. Aziraphale and Crowley never meet again because they've ceased to exist.
There is also a central ethical issue here with the erasure of the universe: who consented? Aziraphale and Crowley. Nobody else. The original Good Omens is fiercely anti-apocalyptic because the world is precious in its messy specificity. Destroying that world to create a cleaner one arguably betrays the novel’s central humanist instinct.
The finale was, as The Guardian puts it, “abbreviated to the point of incoherence” and its central storylines become “non-starters”. It did not earn a cosmic reset of that magnitude. Absence can be meaningful, but not every absence is an artistic choice. Sometimes the cupboard is bare. And that's the case for this finale. We were short-changed, there's no two ways about it.
The finale does not actually dramatise what free will means in the new universe. It simply has divine or semi-divine beings declare that this version will be freer. That is a problem because Good Omens traditionally proves its ethics through human mess: Adam refusing his role, Agnes being inconveniently right, Anathema rejecting inherited prophecy, Shadwell and Madame Tracy bumbling into usefulness, people choosing badly and kindly and absurdly. A metaphysical reset is much more abstract.
A finale about free will, humanity, and the Second Coming cannot sideline Jesus and humanity and then claim thematic success.
If the ending removes the messy old world and replaces it with a universe allegedly free from narrative control, the viewer has to take that on trust. And we'd be very silly indeed to trust Good Omens now.
The reading of Aziraphale lying to Crowley for Crowley’s own good is emotionally potent, but also feeble. We have just spent two seasons watching secrecy, paternalism, miscommunication, institutional loyalty, and “I know best” logic hurt them. Having Aziraphale lie again and framing it as love risks repeating the problem rather than resolving it. Aziraphale’s growth should arguably involve trusting Crowley with the truth, not manipulating him into the “right” outcome. If Crowley’s deepest desire is real choice, then denying him full information undermines the moral claim of the ending.
Then we have Crowley’s arc flattened into sainthood. Crowley’s love of humanity has always been tangled with selfishness, irritation, pleasure, aesthetics, wine, music, plants, stars, the Bentley, and Aziraphale. Turning him into the one who simply wants “people to have a chance” over-sanitises him. Crowley is not just a fallen angel with a buried divine vocation. He's a demon who likes the world because it is ridiculous and alive. The essay’s reading is grand, but it turns him into a theological instrument of redemption, which is precisely the kind of symbolic imprisonment the essay claims the ending escapes.
And the absence of the kiss is unforgivable. It's queer withholding. After years of coded intimacy, denial, separation, and one traumatic kiss, refusing a final mutually joyful kiss reads less like restraint and more like another instance of queer desire being made metaphysical, tragic, deferred, or displaced. We have enough of that, thank you.
The ending does not resolve Aziraphale and Crowley’s relationship. It replaces it with an alternate-universe meet-cute. That is not inherently bad, but it changes the genre of the payoff. Instead of “they finally get to be together after 6,000 years”, it becomes “some echo of them gets a softer beginning.” For some viewers, that's not fulfilment. And that's valid.
The Guardian review makes a related point when it says the coda suggests Tennant and Sheen would be brilliant as a married couple in an ordinary romantic drama, “as different characters created by different writers”. But that is not Good Omens. It never was, and it never will be.
