Trying to look at Good Omens Season 2 as it’s apparently supposed to function as a ‘Bridge to Season 3’ and it’s… well, there’s a bunch of Problems there, I’d say mostly out of a mix of That Fucker (NG) wanting to prioritize making the GO3 ending as Tragic and Emotionally Devastating and Shocking as possible and obvious Vent Art about his own Divorce over building up any of the other themes that that sort of Ending would need, and the politics surrounding the current Streaming Industry, that basically demanded S2 to be mostly an Advertisement that will make audiences push for S3 to be green-lit in every possible way it could. But right now specifically I’m thinking about Nina and Maggie. If this was all building to This kind of Ending all along, then it suddenly becomes clear that the primary narrative function of these characters’ story is to build up to this moment.
Which is ‘needed’ because it basically acts as a counterpart or replacement to this cut exchange from the Book.
Like, that whole moment was an essential build up towards the book’s own (Almost) Ineffable Self-Sacrifice Climax. But both Adam’s Callout Scene and the way it culminates with the Husbands' decision to go into a hopeless battle against Satan were pretty much entirely gone from the original Good Omens Miniseries (what is now ‘GO1’). With TV Omens generally playing Crowley and Aziraphale as more ‘traditional’ protagonists, they now have much more positive implied relationship with Adam and there’s a lot less need for them to sacrifice themselves to ‘prove’ they really care about Humanity…
But, if you’re, let’s say, a hack writer suddenly tacking on a new Heroic Sacrifice Ending for this story to try to milk more Content out of it, suddenly you do need to find a new way to call-out how Humans tend to get screwed over in the GO universe, how Cosmic Forces try to control their lives and how Crowley and Aziraphale play a part in it - so that their sacrifice can build off it and ‘make up’ for it.
But, like, this is hardly a bad scene by many metrics, but in this specific supposed role of trying to build up thematically and character-wise to the Heroic Tragic This-Time-For-All-the-Marbles Sacrifice, it just can’t pull anything off that supports GO3. And comparing this to that similar cut moment with Adam just emphasizes all of these issues.
First and most obvious, Nina and Maggie only ever get a chance to have that talk with Crowley, compared to Adam talking in the company of both Husbands and us clearly seeing that his words have affected both of them.
Compared to a scene where the two humans talk to Crowley alone, and never get a chance to talk to Aziraphale (despite that being the Husband they had the most established relationship with previously and being the one responsible for the most egregious ‘Messing About’ that they experienced, but we’ll get to that soon…). It’s emblematic of one of the Big Thematic Issues that I have with the Decision even if I were to accept the basic idea of ending the Ineffable Husbands’ story with a ‘Heroic Sacrifice’ for Humanity - it’s not really a narrative about Crowley and Aziraphale’s relationship with Humanity, as much as it’s about Crowley’s relationship with Humanity, while Aziraphale’s part in the Decision is framed pretty much exclusively around his relationship with Crowley.
GO3 just puts so much emphasis on framing Aziraphale’s agreeing to the Decision as a sign of his love to Crowley, and ‘finally giving him something instead of being a Taker’… which, like, man, this is a whole can of worms just on its own, but trying to stay on-topic of this post, it’s such a massive downgrade to Aziraphale’s arc that he doesn’t get this opportunity to reflect and develop his relationship with Humans, compared to how much Adam’s call-out clearly affected him in the book… Now he’s just not allowed to have personal motivations for the Decision because that will diminish the “””poignancy””” of seeing him agree to it ‘for Crowley’.
And then what was always been the big sticking point for me about this scene as a ‘build-up’ to the sacrifice. Adam was criticizing Crowley and Aziraphale for ‘messing people around’ by doing their jobs, the jobs they’ve been already consistently doing for 6000 years at the start of the story, the jobs they were still very proud of and comfortable doing, their only objection has been the whole ‘Armageddon’ business.
The harm Crowley was causing Humanity was a running gag throughout the whole book, and as silly and inconsequential as it might seem, the M25 debacle made it suddenly very serious, Aziraphale has been insistent that the interference that Heaven does in the affairs of Humanity is Ontologically Moral on some level, but Crowley was always there to poke fun at the hypocrisy, and now that the Angel realizes how eager his people were for Armageddon, he’s very disillusioned with it himself. This is something Crowley and Aziraphale have been doing and will have probably continued to do indefinitely if not for the events of the story (and by the end it’s not even clear what they’re going to do now, whatever their character development will win over their standard compliancy in the long term, how would they balance the still-looming requirements of their work with their new realizations…)
In GO2, we have a Crowley and Aziraphale that are already trying to retire, who already seemed to be on the path to not really bothering Humanity all that much, and the meddling that Nina and Maggie call them out on is something that was only brought upon by a whole sequence of very specific Wacky Circumstances that made it so they “”had”” to meddle for ultimately benevolent reasons (this was all a side-effect of agreeing to shelter Gabriel). That makes it feel a lot more like an isolated specific incident than something that is, like, a systematic issue about the whole universe.
I guess if you squint you can kinda see the idea that the Husbands were maybe looking for an excuse to shove their noses into humanity’s business and that something would’ve happened sooner or later even if Gabriel never got Jim’d and/or the idea that as long as Heaven and Hell can’t leave Aziracrow alone, it will always be Humans who get the short end of the stick in these conflicts. But… this is such a looser, less coherent and less textually reinforced thread compared to “Heaven and Hell try to promote/tempt their ideologies unto Humans and this is literally why Aziraphale and Crowley are on Earth and what they are doing on an everyday basis”.
And there’s a cynical part of me that can’t help but wonder, like, this might not be the only problem here… but one of the bigger problems hampering that point is how specific and contrived the sequence of events that led Crowley and Aziraphale to ‘have’ to meddle in Nina and Maggie’s business. I can’t help but wonder if this is another case of GO2-3 being held back by its inability to make Crowley Wrong or Morally Culpable for anything ever. While Nina and Maggie only get a chance to call out Crowley, the Wacky Circumstances that led to the whole ‘Aziracrow playing Matchmaker’ thing mostly downplay Crowley’s agency and responsibility for the whole thing. It was primarily forced by both outside circumstances and then also it was Aziraphale’s attempt to bullshit Heaven that got Nina and Maggie involved in this mess, and Aziraphale is the one who performed the most egregious ‘Messing About’ Miracles in that whole Story Arc.
Everything feels like it was built around making sure that Crowley’s ‘guilt’ of the whole affair is as small as it could possibly be. Which is a far cry from them being both equally called out by Adam at the end of the book, and each having an arc confronting them with the ‘problematic-ness’ of their jobs from different angles. A GO2 that, for example, actually centered about how Crowley and Aziraphale’s current hedonistic existence might still involve ‘Messing People About’ might’ve been more thematically appropriate, but if Crowley was called-out by someone whose once-in-a-lifetime dinner at the Ritz was miraculously thrown off-course so that the Husbands could sit at their favorite table, that would make both of them equally at fault.
Really, the best course of action for a GO2 if we really must build towards this Finale would be to introduce the concept of ‘Miracle Accounts’ earlier and have the thread of that season build up to the idea of Crowley and Aziraphale still being stuck under Heaven and Hell’s thumbs because they’re not ready to give up on the lifestyle their jobs and Miracles allowed them. Building up the idea that the perks of being an Angel or a Demon are more like the benefits and privileges they get from being complicit in Heaven and Hell’s bullshit, making some sort of ‘Turning Human’ feel like the most appropriate solution and emphasizing the theme of “Change Requires Sacrifice”, which is the… most charitable interpretation of what the hell this Finale was going for. But this is also another route that makes it hard to offload as much of Crowley’s guilt and agency as possible on outside factor and/or Aziraphale, I guess.
And then also the placement of this scene in relation to the Decision kinda diminishes it's implied impact on Crowley and his Decision. In the Book Climax, Crowley and Aziraphale’s attempt at a Heroic Sacrifice comes almost immediately after Adam’s debate versus the Metatron and Beelzebub, so it was pretty much unambiguously clear that they were affected and inspired by Adam’s words and this is what led them to make that stand against Satan.
Meanwhile, like, I dunno, this is still one of the few scattered moments in GO2 that seem to act as something like a thematic buildup to the Finale, so I would like to acknowledge and analyze it as such, but sometimes it’s just so disconnected narratively that I start second-guessing that idea. Maybe this wasn’t a flawed half-assed attempt to make a counterpart to the Adam Call-Out that will connect to the Decision, maybe this is just yet another GO2 Plot Cul-De-Sac that wasn’t going to lead anywhere in Season 3…
Because between Crowley's chat with Nina & Maggie and the Decision, there are like 3 in-universe years and 90 minutes of Television (originally planned to be more like 6 hours), and when it comes to Crowley’s relationship with Humanity, we don’t actually get to see much effect or change in behavior that was inspired, even implicitly, by Nina and Maggie’s words. Like, its not like we get to see another opportunity where he might think he can totally make a human do what he wants, but instead he backs down and realizes that humans and are more complex than that or… anything else that implies he’s more respectful of human agency and less inclined to ‘mess people about’ than he was before that one conversation.
We see very obviously how their words affect his thoughts and decisions when it comes to Aziraphale, but not when it comes to Humanity. Nina and Maggie didn’t make him hate Heaven or Hell any more then he already did, they didn’t make him more inclined to try and fuck off to Alpha Centauri than he already was, they didn’t make him more protective of the Bookshop or more convinced that nothing could be changed or more inclined to spend years drunk in an alleyway. And then the main indication we have that their words did have an effect over the Decision is this very pointed choice of the word ‘Real’ in both occasions.
But even here, the use of ‘Real’ feels…. Not very thematically consistent. Nina and Maggie were saying that they were already Real People and that Crowley needs to respect that, but wouldn’t that also imply that the world they were living in was also “Real”? And yet Crowley claims that the original GO Universe was not Real, and that’s why they shouldn’t restore it and instead replace it with a new version that is “Real”. I mean… I guess you could say that the intention here is probably that the individual Humans were ‘Real’, but their universe wasn’t due to the whole ‘God’s existence is fucking with the possibility of Free Will’ thing. And Crowley’s conversation with Nina and Maggie made him realize how unfair it was for all of these Real People to exist in a world that wasn’t as Real as they were.
But you know… Crowley didn’t give Nina and Maggie the ‘Real’ Universe he apparently thought they deserved, nor did he give it to the 8 Billion other ‘Real’ Humans that were alive at the time these three had that little chat. The main reason why Crowley’s behavior seems discordant with Maggie and Nina’s words, the main reason why his Decision seems to be implying that both the Universe and the People were not Real, is the way he just seems to totally disregard the value of these people’s lives. And sure, he didn’t personally destroy the previous universe, he was trying to stop it until it was too late, but…. Once it was all gone, God has given him the option to ‘put everything back the way it was”.
Did She basically offer them to resurrect every soul who died when Michael destroyed the Book of Life? Well, that’s certainly what it sounded like, both on a basic 'what these words usually mean in most contexts' level and with how this line clearly alludes to the ending of GO1, where resurrecting everyone who died during Armageddon is exactly what happened.
And like, is it possible that in this specific case ‘putting everything back the way it was’ wouldn’t have brought anyone back as much as it would’ve replaced them with identical clones? Or that God meant that She was going to do another ‘let there be light’ and redo the Biblically Literalist Universe from scratch? Was there really no option to modify the current Universe to ensure more Free Will, and if so, could you make the argument that life in the original Good Omens Universe was really such an existential nightmare that all of these 8 billion humans are better off dead so that future people could live free of God’s meddling? Maybe. But whatever you want to infer or interpret, the fact is that we can’t know either way, because Crowley never asks any of these questions, never discusses any of these options.
Sure, there is a limit as to how much can and should be explained. This is still a story, and shouldn’t be reduced to just a bunch of characters standing around rattling off a bunch of rules and ‘what if’ scenarios to ward off the Nitpickers, rather then focusing on the narrative and the themes. But the vagueness of God’s suggestion here is actively detrimental to the narrative and themes of the story. Because the story that has been created here is that Crowley and Aziraphale have received an offer that sounded very much like it could bring back all of these people we saw die miserable and terrified and unfulfilled and they decided to give up on it without any real consideration or further explanation or justification.
Which, like, I think ‘when given an offer that sounds very much like an offer to resurrect them after a cruel and untimely death, one should at least seriously consider the option and at the very least ask for more details /clarification before writing the possibility off’ to be, like, the bare possible minimum of what it would mean to treat someone like a ‘Real Person’.
Because at the end of all of my rambling and comparisons, the real issue here isn’t at all with the Nina and Maggie scene. It’s just that this scene couldn’t shoulder the burden of justifying something as… extreme (world-shattering? Dramatic? Cosmic? Epic? Badly written?) as the Decision all on its own. And quite frankly, Adam wouldn’t have been able to handle such a monumental task either.
Yeah, Adam calls out Crowley and Aziraphale for ‘messing people about’, but there is a huge leap between the statement he actually makes, that their meddling is annoying and makes life harder for Humans (which is also more or less what Nina and Maggie say in their little conversation as well) and claiming that this prove that them existing as an Angel and a Demon is inherently antithetical to Humanity’s Free Will. Heaven and Hell’s (And Aziraphale and Crowley’s as individuals) attempts to meddle in Human Affairs has been generally portrayed as not-very-effective and not really causing any life/history altering changes, but there is still a very strong argument to make that it still causes troubles and minor annoyances and major frustrations to Humanity…
It’s just that the Decision suddenly decided to pull Free WillTM into this and made the whole thing feel contradictory to both the storyline 'building up to it' (where Crowley and Aziraphale’s attempt to matchmake Nina and Maggie caused them a fair bit of troubles and headaches, but they also pretty thoroughly failed to ‘make them fall in love’) and to, like, the entire series as a whole.
And Crowley and Aziraphale’s attempted sacrifice in the book was against a very present and self-evident danger of Satan coming up to throw a big deadly infernal temper tantrum. And, like, this wasn’t the Husbands’ fault by any means, but it was a situation that emerged from the ‘Heaven and Hell constantly preparing for Armageddon’ status quo that Crowley and Aziraphale were complicit in and benefited from all these years. Not to mention that three out of the eight Humans currently at the Airfield and in danger of getting Satan’d were there because Crowley and Aziraphale dragged them into this mess. It’s, you know, at the end of the day a situation of there being an immediate emergency and Crowley and Aziraphale taking some responsibility for it. It is a far cry from Crowley and Aziraphale having every single possibility offered by Actual Literal God (and also a Reality-Rewriting Book) and choosing to say that Humanity would be better off if they did not exist.
And, well, Adam didn’t need them to do a Heroic Sacrifice, since he obviously just took care of it on his own. Did he want them to sacrifice themselves to save Humanity? I honestly don’t know. I kinda feel like he might’ve found that gesture well-intentioned but also condescending, since, again, he took care of all of these problems on his own. But obviously the basic goal of stopping Satan and making sure none of the Humans (including all of Adam’s closest friends) don’t get hurt is something Adam would strongly agree with.
But would he have wanted these two to undo their own existence just to make sure Heaven and Hell would leave Humanity alone like he wanted to? That I am a lot less sure. And if he was told that this ‘sacrifice’ also means giving up on the possibility of restoring his life, the lives of his friends and the specific world that he knew and the Tadfield he knew… I don’t think he’d be on board with that, even with how much he disapproved of Heaven and Hell. At the very least he’d push for finding some sort of third option. A way to reduce Heaven and Hell's influence as much as possible so he could keep his home and his friends.
And this is just the same with Nina and Maggie. If the Decision was supposed to be inspired by their conversation with Crowley, why is it basically nothing that they actually wanted? Did they believe that the only way to make sure supernatural entities don’t meddle in their lives is to make sure they live in a universe without any? Would they have thought it would be worth it even if it means giving up on the chance to restore their own lives and their own future? Do you think Nina would have wanted her process of healing from Lesley cut short like that without anyone asking for her input (or that of any other Human, for that matter)? Do you think Maggie, the woman who struggled for years to keep a failing Record Shop afloat just because this is her family business would have advocated for throwing away this entire Universe and replacing it with a ‘Better’ one?
All Nina and Maggie were really asking from Crowley was just ‘please respect our personhood and talk with your boyfriend’ and then the entirety of GO3 is Crowley not doing either of those.
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