Rylan. Crowley Coded.

Your phone is your computer and your way to communicate. Your phone is symbolically your mind and your body. Your phone is you. And your phone is dead, This Version of Mr. Arnold, because you're a member of The Whickber Street Traders & Shopkeepers Association, which means that you run a business on a street that is owned by Aziraphale and, by extension, Crowley. So, symbolically?

Even though you are a character in your own right? You are standing in here for Aziraphale. You reflect what is happening with him, as all of Whickber Street and its characters, both present and gone, do... and all of the characters in S3-- including, I suspect, Crowley.

Aziraphale's phone is dead. And Mrs. Sandwich? Tell us, please, how does Aziraphale feel about this death that S3 is helping him to slowly come to accept?

"But I were going to go back to Bridlington."

Bridlington: etymologically means belonging to and settlement-- the place where you belong. Brid, root of bride. Crowley, and his Bride of Frankenstein hair in Heaven...

Aziraphale? He was going back to Bridlington when he got into that lift. He never meant for it to be permanent. Oh, Crowley, nothing lasts forever. This won't be for eternity. I'll fix it. I'll make it better. I'll make a world we can live in. I'll come back because I never want to be without you. So, what happened, exactly? Jesus, tell them...

Tell them by telling them why Mutt isn't here.

Everyone else's shop on Whickber Street was bought up and closed but that's not what happened to Mutt, is it? Tell them what happened to that lovely, vulnerable, Aziraphale-paralleling magician, because that is actually happened to Aziraphale...

"It was an accident. He mixed up the pill bottles."

Like Mutt, Aziraphale never really meant to die. He was overwhelmed and not thinking clearly. He was trying to metaphorically take his medicine. He had to take multiple kinds to get through the day and he did, always, to keep going for his beloved spouse. But one day, for Aziraphale, in the end of S2? When his beloved spouse was distracted by his own dying phone and didn't see what was going on? That one day, when Crowley was, not entirely of his own fault, not in a place that day to ever be able to find the lady and see the truth of what was happening?

Aziraphale mixed up the pill bottles. He didn't know what pill from which of the pills in his life he was taking. He thought he was going to Heaven. He actually basically went to Hell. Ultimately, though? He's just dead. He took the wrong amount of one of his pills and he accidentally overdosed. Do people ever ask for Death? No, they always ask for coffee. So predictable. Yet... people die.

Aziraphale accidentally left behind a beloved spouse who will now, Aziraphale fears, be like this version of Mutt's Spouse representing Crowley here, and always wonder if it truly was an accident or if Aziraphale had just been not able to take anymore.

Aziraphale got in the lift in the end of S2, and he never made it out again. Other than the flashback to The Great War? I think that the rest of S3 is Aziraphale's bardo-- a liminal state in Buddhism between death and rebirth, where he's hallucinating situations that help him to work through the life he's leaving behind and set up where he goes next.

A bardo is similar in some ways to the concept of Purgatory but, while Purgatory sorts you into Heaven or Hell? Those are not concepts in Buddhism. Bardo is meant to be a sort of karmic trip that prepares you to be reincarnated into your next life. Good Omens is basically splitting the difference, with S3 being functionally a bardo but Aziraphale being an angel meaning that what it's really setting up is what kind of eternity he'll have-- one that gets very Pratchett's Discworld, in terms of how it works when people die, as we'll look at.

It gets dark and scary and it's not all happy but Aziraphale did step into this circle a bit prepared/pre-paired and he winds up with a sad but also sort-of happy eternity. S1 & S2 is about his life and death, while S3 is about his afterlife-- his book of the dead, really, even as the plot gets delightfully bananas over many, many different books of life.

Every character in S3 is there to represent part of Aziraphale's life for the bardo-- or to represent a part with their lack of presence. They aren't real, and they aren't really them. Think of it like Aziraphale is tripping all of this because, essentially, he basically is. The concept of a bardo is that it's like your consciousness hallucinating. The people in Aziraphale's bardo aren't really them-- they're all just his characters, like ushers helping to take him from one place to the next.

This is also why S3 is (in a good way, imho) so tonally everywhere. If you felt a bit high watching it at times lol? You were supposed to. If the characters seemed to get a bit too cartoony in moments and the story suddenly became the world's weirdest murder mystery for a bit and you felt like you would have given your right arm for the Jim and the shop lesbians of S2? You were supposed to. 😂 It was cruel, but it did work.

Right, so, and when these characters each are no longer needed for their purpose in the narrative? They just disappear, thanks to Michael-- the character who threatened Aziraphale with the mythical Book of Life in the moments before he got into the lift in S2 and is, therefore, the one responsible for helping to birth the plot of the bardo narrative for Aziraphale. What is the purpose of her story here?

Michael represents Aziraphale's pain and rage at Heaven and at God and at The Metatron and at all these fucking horrible archangels who want to destroy everything. At all the abuse he and others have suffered because of Heaven. Via his proxy of Michael, Aziraphale serial kills his way through a smiting of the archangels, using the thing that represents having a damn life-- The Book of Life.

He obliterates The Metatron, he eye-for-an-eyes Sandalphon into a pillar of wall, he has Uriel choke to death on the panicked air she suddenly, like a human, cannot breathe in enough of. What's going to happen to you, Uriel? Nothing. All the nothing in the world. Uriel is Aziraphale's fear, his shock, his terror, over what has happened. It's part of the process of the realization for him that he is dead.

Oh, God, what happens to me now? Nothing. Nothing. I'm dead. Nothing. I didn't dance on the head of this pin and now I'm fucking dead. I will disappear, am disappearing, a world ending, an universe destroyed. I will be gone. I will never see Crowley again. I fucked it all up. I shouldn't be down here, in this Space Between...

Michael is the embodiment of Aziraphale's madness-- the maniacal panic in Aziraphale's eyes in the lift in the end of S2 when the dawning realization of the mistake that had just cost him his life was sinking in. She loses her mind from thousands of years of being overlooked, finally left despairingly tossing entire continents into The Eternal Flame, like an adult Adam on crack. (Sorry, Canada and Australia, I still love you lol.) She's yelling about the rats that are invading everywhere (and are all over the bardo) in a way that is far too Aziraphale, as is how she keeps telling Crowley and Aziraphale how she remembers. She remembers. It's all in there. She remembers everything she did-- everyone she killed and everything, from all of time. Every person. And it's too much, like how it sometimes is for Aziraphale, which led to his demise.

The whole of the entire universe's Book of Life is now in her head and it goes round and round and she can't take anymore until she hurls herself and what's left of the book into the fire and kills herself. It's representing Aziraphale's thousands of years of watching humans be born and live and die, and the memories he has of all the horrors of The Great War. It's super-cheery lol...

And this is all without even mentioning the massively sexual abuse survivor-coded moment with Michael when she started losing it about The Metatron "fiddling with" the book that, at that point, had become Michael herself, and that he was always there, haunting her memories, showing up to taunt her creepily while she just screamed, unable to make him go away.

(Slight aside: There is a very subtle moment in S2 that suggested that this is part of Michael's real story. It was in the group scene in the end, as it was Michael's reaction to Dagon talking about the elephant in the room of Lucifer's obsession with Crowley. Aziraphale saw Michael's response and, based on this bit in the bardo? Likely read it correctly. How you interpret its inclusion in Michael's madness when Michael is so representing Aziraphale here is interpretable. Is it there because Aziraphale is aware of it as part of Michael's story? Is it there because of Crowley? Is it there because it's something Aziraphale and Michael have in common? It's left up to us.)

On a similar topic, Aziraphale died without ever knowing what Saraqael did to Crowley in S2 and tried to do to Gabriel, which is how she's bad here but mostly escapes his wrath. That, and that she needs to be there to help Muriel steer the plot of the bardo. Saraqael is the exposition character while Muriel?

Muriel is the useful idiot, as even they noticed, who kept the plot of the bardo humming and shifted Aziraphale through his consciousness' stages towards accepting his death and creating what comes next for him because it's the Discworld. We go where it is that we believe in our hearts we deserve to be. But Aziraphale died unsure that he deserved the only thing he had ever truly wanted. This bardo was a way to work through that, and all that had led to him getting into that lift, and set up what for him would come next.

Sandalphon reinforces this idea of bardo, as he exists here basically just to show us a place called The Space Between-- a corridor where Heaven crosses into Hell and it's all just one world of Death. Sandalphon is also one of the many characters who all work together to reinforce the idea that Aziraphale's consciousness is writing this narrative, as he talks to Jesus about how the speech-- the things Jesus was to say-- was all written by Aziraphale, and that only Aziraphale had control over it. So, what's Jesus' role here?

Jesus represents Aziraphale's isolation, his hunger, his loneliness, his need to be good, his love of magic and Crowley and food and human life. His sadness over no longer being incarnate and all "the joy unbounded" that it brought him, that he has Jesus teach. Aziraphale's attempts to reconcile his life are worked out further in the story of his proxy Jesus learning three card monte-- learning a life of card tricks, food, and all that good fish. Jesus learning how to live like Aziraphale knew how to live. Jesus' entire goal was learning how to find the lady-- a whole post on its own-- but, for Aziraphale, there's only ever truly been one. It's always been the Lilith on the wall, Aziraphale's Queen of Hearts.

Jesus, from the start, echoes Aziraphale back to himself, and to us. He's now awoken, disoriented, in a new place, his last memory having been of being murdered, and not entirely sure how he got to this weird spot or what these strange people want with him. He is on his own and he doesn't really truly know these people around him. They're all telling him he's there to bring about the end of the world, which he doesn't want to do. He wants and needs to talk to someone he knows. He needs to tell his fellow ducks about his frozen peas but, the thing is? It's a bit late for that.

Jesus is all... I had some friends, can I talk to them? A whole bunch, like, 12 of them, all great people. Jesus wants to talk to the apostles. Aziraphale? Misses his Whickber Street people. And what do Aziraphale and the angels tell Jesus? They tell him that they can't give him his friends. It's fucking Heaven, so, this seems a little odd lol... but it's also not odd, if you accept that this place where Muriel volleys between silly Inspector Constable and terrific Undercover Demon and where crazy crossword trips and Crowley's having a drunken meta-conversation with himself about his role in all the seasons' of story lol ("before, I bring the baby") isn't exactly playing by the rules of reality, right? 😂

The apostles should all be accessible, in theory, right? Even with not wanting to do that because of it being 90 minutes lol, you would think there'd be a different reason why not from Heaven other than 'sorry, mate, you left them awhile back now'... but there isn't, because that's mah point... They tell Jesus that everyone he knows is dead and there's no way that they can go get any of them for him to talk to-- really, though, it's that Jesus is representing Aziraphale, who is dead.

Aziraphale can't talk to anyone because his phone is dead, and he was going to go back to Bridlington, but he mixed up his pill bottles, and now he's on The Other Side, and that's when Jesus is like...

Gabriel? Could I talk to Gabriel? This place is super-spooky without Jim and I don't like it. Is he around? He talked about himself a lot but he wasn't so bad and he came to comfort me before I died. [He did Aziraphale, too, even if they didn't know that was happening.] Can I talk to him? I don't really know any of you all that well, sorry. I'd feel a lot better if you had someone that I knew that I could talk to. I know who Gabriel is. I know he cared enough about me to try to talk to me. I'd like to see him again. Is he here, in this place?

It's really Aziraphale, wanting to talk to Gabriel. He didn't go to him for help in the end of S2 because he was trying to protect Gabriel and Beelzebub but now that he's on the other side of this, all alone? He wishes he had. He at least wishes that Gabriel was here. He doesn't know the rest of the archangels like he knows Gabriel and Aziraphale died before they could all to the pub and become even better friends. And now? He's in this bardo realizing he's never going to talk to Gabriel ever again. But, besides that Jon Hamm was "out of the picture" (loved that pun lol) for this one? Why isn't Gabriel, or anyone else missing, in this place?

Because Aziraphale is fucking torturing himself, that's why lol, and Gabriel and Beelzebub, like Maggie and Nina, are characters whose role in that are actually sharper in their absence than their presence. Even Furfur, at this point, falls into that category, as he was supportive of Aziraphale in the end of S2. None of them have present roles in helping Aziraphale process his death because they all represent his fight to keep living. They're all there in absentia-- no flies, no Jim, no Give Me Coffee because there's nothing left to wish for. It's already been taken. There's no Nina, just the horrible Coffee Cafe. No Maggie-- no family. No music. It's all closing to him now. It's all been bought up.

Aziraphale's consciousness isn't going to get through the bardo to accepting his death with Maggie being all oh, you're an angel, Mr. Fell, it's going to get through the bardo with her closing record shop. (Which was the first time I cried in S3. There were many lol.) Jim isn't in the bardo because Gabriel is the exact opposite of this place-- and that's a good thing because I don't like this place. This place is spooky. But that's how it is supposed to be because this world of Hell and Death is one where Aziraphale is never really going to see his Whickber Street again. But, right, so, back to Jesus 😂...

But then Jesus makes the big request: there was another one like all of you. Red hair, yellow eyes, really funny. He was so nice. Is he here, in this place? Can Jesus-Aziraphale talk directly to him? He's getting there, but not until he fully allows himself to.

Not until Beloved Spouse gives Jesus-Aziraphale a cheese sarnie (exactly the type of thing Crowley would do for Aziraphale and, as we know from S1 and living life ourselves? the cure for personal Armageddon is any form of a cheese sandwich) and says go over there, he's over there. This moment is really sad, actually, when you look at Jesus as a proxy for Aziraphale because Jesus represents Aziraphale's regret. The story gives Jesus back a body-- it makes him incarnate again. It allows him to live, which is part of Aziraphale processing that he no longer can.

Aziraphale literally died hungry-- he barely ate in the last few days of his life in S2, when The Four Horsepeople were riding for him. He needed a cheese sandwich and he needs to see Crowley again. Paralleling Crowley-- Beloved Spouse-- gives him food in the bardo, in a reverse of the life Aziraphale was building with The Ball, and he tells Jesus-Aziraphale where to find Crowley. It smells so good, and I haven't eaten in so long. Beloved Spouse, a Crowley, leads Jesus-Aziraphale to Crowley.

Jesus-Aziraphale talks to Crowley first in the bardo, Aziraphale easing himself in to it. He gazes at Crowley adoringly the way that Aziraphale does, even. This Crowley is of Aziraphale's own consciousness and while Aziraphale lets himself process the horror this Crowley represents when he talks as himself to Crowley? He is first there as his Jesus proxy to interact with him, just to see him, basically. Just to picture him again, and that's Jesus' unbounded joy at seeing what would, in other situations, be Five Alarm Fire Crowley lol. He's sauced and grumpy and sleeping in an alley and Jesus-Aziraphale is just like hiiiiii you, drunkenly ramble to me some more. I'm so lost. What is it that I'm meant to do here?

But Aziraphale himself talking to Crowley? He cannot do it at first, not until his consciousness actually creates a plot in his bardo where he would need to-- and it's losing the Jesus that is, well, him. It's the whole plot-- we've lost Jesus, but Jesus is basically Aziraphale, so, really, we've lost Aziraphale. It's a story that allows Muriel to then say to him why don't you ask your friend-friend for help?

This is also why Jesus takes the lift down and just pops instantly onto Weird Whickber Street, finding Crowley in twelve seconds flat-- something that isn't just the 90 minute runtime lol but is a feature of how this place works. Stuff just happens. Plot just becomes what it needs to become to process Aziraphale through his bardo.

Characters do or say things that don't make a ton of sense for reality-- like Dagon tossing Crowley back when he refuses to find help her find Jesus, or Beloved Spouse knowing that Crowley has yellow eyes, or the way the entire "it's murder!" plot with the archangels keeps shifting as it needs to for the purpose of the overall narrative. Every place here intentionally feels like a set, rather than a whole world, because that's exactly what it is-- it's a construct designed with a singular purpose, taking Aziraphale's consciousness through this journey.

Then, there's Mrs. Sandwich, who represents Aziraphale's guilt and self-loathing, his fear that he is selfish and short-sighted. It's her standing in while he's away in the Heaven of the bardo, trying to help Crowley win himself-- their car, that is-- back from Brian Cameron, one of the guises of Lucifer in S3, and a whole meta and a half himself.

It's Mrs. Sandwich with whom Crowley is leaving the plant he sleeps with at night, "freshly watered" (I'm still laughing over that line lol), with a whispered "I'll be back" in their ear and a little pat on the bottom, the way that Crowley definitely sometimes used to leave Aziraphale. In the bardo, the resources that Crowley needs to reclaim himself-- to literally own himself, as that is what the car is-- are coming from Mrs. Sandwich, who now loathes Aziraphale for leaving. Without him there, everyone's rent was too much, and the street Aziraphale built began to fall like he has been.

Many of Aziraphale's other friends from the real world have no presence in the bardo but Mrs. Sandwich is different. Like Aziraphale, she loves Crowley, and has been a good friend to both of them. She knows them and their story in a way that most others do not and that allows her to be how Aziraphale can judge himself for the mistake here that has cost him his life and left Crowley and the people of Whickber Street without the protection he used to be able to offer that kept the gangsters from taking over the street.

Mrs. Sandwich is doing the It's A Wonderful Life's aspect of this-- the Pottersville. The horror of it, though, is that Aziraphale can't go back. This version of Whickber Street isn't real but it exists to help Aziraphale acknowledge that he did own this street, he did help these people, he did help everyone to make it a good hamlet for them all to live in. He kept the gangsters-- Lucifer, the demons-- at bay-- from the street that is him and Crowley. Kept them from gaining a foothold. But, now he's dead, and Maggie's business has gone under. Now, he's dead, and the street is being bought up and rebranded into a world of Beyond Soho, as owned by the local gangsters as The Bentley... his and Crowley's car.

Whickber Street is dying because Aziraphale is dead, and he is this street. It's died with him. All but the bookshop, that is, but that will die by the end, too. The bookshop still stands because the bookshop is needed for the narrative, because it is Aziraphale, and Crowley and Aziraphale. It's their world, and what will remain until the bardo is complete.

Time has already stopped for Aziraphale in reality but, in the bardo, the story is that Aziraphale has been gone years, trying to redeem himself for The Great War and make a world that he and Crowley could live in by changing Heaven but, well... find the lady. So much of this all feels surreal that it's very unlikely to have really happened. Some characters even seem to become nearly aware of the fact that they are characters in this narrative.

Muriel figured out that they were the useful idiot for Michael (which is to say, the useful idiot for Aziraphale, too). Muriel, in a way, basically bursts into the Chengs' restaurant to tell Aziraphale that they're close to knowing that they're something Aziraphale mentions near the end-- a character in the book. Not real-- part of this narrative. Their discovery is really an increasing sense of self-awareness that echoes the rising awareness of Aziraphale regarding what is happening.

Near the end, Lucifer asked why, if he was just a character in God's book, he hadn't yet disappeared, like everyone else? It was Aziraphale who could answer that because this Lucifer and this God and even, I suspect, this Crowley, in S3, are all just there to help Aziraphale process the fact that he's dead and figure out what his eternity will be.

Things happen that make sense for the purpose of the bardo but not a kind of sense that would work in reality. Where are Crowley and Aziraphale's pages in The Book of Life, for instance-- why didn't Michael rip those out, too? Why didn't she try to kill them before she killed herself? Because she can't. Because she's not real. Because she's part of Aziraphale's narrative and that wasn't needed for the story. The villain was right in 2.06-- Michael doesn't actually have that kind of authority. No one truly does over another.

Notice how this Crowley in S3 knows where The Book of Life was supposed to be and where it always was, despite having a memory in S2 recalling that he and Beelzebub made the whole thing up and initially not thinking it real? This bit of S3 doesn't make sense with what we saw in S2-- intentionally. It helps to reinforce that this isn't Crowley, this is Aziraphale's consciousness making up a Crowley to help him through this.

Even though Crowley had come to believe in S2 that maybe his memory was wrong and Beelzebub was correct about The Book of Life being real, as opposed to something the two of them made up back in the day? Crowley not believing it was real in S2 proved that Crowley didn't know any of the details about it that Crowley seems to have in S3. But that's because this Crowley is not S2's Crowley. Aziraphale doesn't know what Crowley knows about The Book of Life-- he wasn't there for that Beelzebub conversation. We were but he was not. It's so that we can tell the difference.

It's to help us see that, sadly, S3 Crowley isn't a real Crowley but one Aziraphale's consciousness created to help him with the bardo. Just as sad as this entire death narrative for Aziraphale is? Is that, just like how it is for the now-dead Aziraphale? 2.06 was actually the last time we ever saw the real Crowley. In S3, David Tennant plays Crowley in Aziraphale's bardo and, then, Professor Anthony Crowley, who is also not, truly, the Anthony Crowley we know.

We last see Crowley in the story when we last see the real world, in the end of S2. We saw him last driving south of Whickber in The Bentley with The Plants in the backseat-- and something that he doesn't yet know Aziraphale left in the trunk when he came back from Edinburgh but which is there in the lyrics of "Time After Time" in the end: a suitcase of their memories.

And the suit shop in the bardo? It's a travel agency-- Beyond Soho. But, yeah, for now, at least, back in reality? Crowley is still alive. Someone killed his best friend and he's driving the speed limit to somewhere. He might not last much longer himself without Aziraphale.

The best ending for him would be if he drove himself to Edinburgh and go met Gabriel and Beelzebub at pub, which is Crowley Nightingales-coded their version of Alpha Centauri to mean between the four of them in 2.06. In reality, in the end of S2, after Crowley told them they should go and he and Aziraphale would meet them on Alpha Centauri, Gabriel and Beelzebub went to The Resurrectionist, where they've been waiting for Crowley and Aziraphale. A couple of decent planets-- a couple of couples, with the know nightlife to speak of.

They were supposed to be a group, a group of the four of them, but there's now only three of them left. Now, Gabriel is with Crowley like how Jesus is with Beloved Spouse in the bardo, is how Aziraphale fears it, saying: It was an accident, Crowley. He never would have meant to leave you. He loved you.

In the bardo, an empty Bleak House is a book of life if Crowley says it is. What he says is real. What he writes in it is life. It's a conspiracy theory birthed into reality for this-- Adam's haunting "what I say is true." Make it happen, make it real, only nothing is real here because this is death. And, in the very end, Aziraphale authors them a version of a life together-- one where Crowley is an author and, for the first time, signs his real name when he writes an inscription in a book to Aziraphale.

Their end is the ability to make a book of life openly with one another, but it isn't truly with one another. It's an eternity for Aziraphale where he always has a version of Crowley with him, as he did in the bardo, but it's never the original. It's a Heaven, and it's a Hell. It's all they both every wanted, but it's also what they never got to truly openly have together.

The penultimate act of S3-- God and Lucifer in the dark, wordless bookshop-- is the bardo's end and Aziraphale birthing into being the creation of his afterlife eternity.

In the end of the bardo? Everyone else is gone, but for Aziraphale and the three, other, key beings in Aziraphale's darkened bookshop. He is ready for the last stages. He turns the sign on the door to 'open'. Somebody might want to buy a book... to let in the only one left: The Devil who took him in the end of S2 once again in through the front door. He haunted Aziraphale's entire life and he took it in S2, as it ends, his presence in Aziraphale's consciousness is needed to complete it. The bardo put Brian Cameron-- its first Lucifer-- into intensive care but The Devil wears many faces. Lucifer and the guise. Toby Jones! Lucifer will soon arrive.

Before that, though, the whole rest of the world has disappeared, more and more, as Aziraphale's awareness of what has been happening has begun to increase. The narrative of the bardo arcs towards death-- towards Aziraphale's imminent death in the plot, as the universe shuts down, and the death of him and Crowley together-- all of which exists in this space because it's the "tidy finish" to Aziraphale's bardo, as Aziraphale tells Lucifer. Everything narrows to the world of the bookshop, which was Aziraphale's whole world. To he and Crowley, who was Aziraphale's whole world. Nothing else in the world mattered more.

Aziraphale is nearly through the bardo so the world now becomes just him. There, in his bookshop, where the pages all go blank, because there is no more access to the world. There are no more people. There is all the nothing in the world, as Michael put it, because Aziraphale is now fully conscious of the fact that he is dead. That the world has ended. That time is over. It becomes just him and his vision of Crowley and their shop, their world together. Aziraphale is as Crowley declares him-- the entirety of creation-- because every person is a world themselves. Aziraphale's whole world was Crowley and their bookshop. His hallucinations of Crowley and the bookshop is what allows him to make the new world. The books are empty now, back to paper. Ashes to ashes. Space for new life... the pens still write, and there are many.

The rest of S3 sets up the eternity Aziraphale creates for himself-- the book of life he writes to be his book of the dead. In this space are just the three characters Aziraphale needs to finish this: Crowley, who is always his whole world, and the pair of beings who have long threatened that world to Aziraphale: Lucifer and God. Only...

...this place isn't really real, remember? It's basically a hallucination. All of the people in it exist to help Aziraphale through this and aren't really there in their own rights. Aziraphale essentially has a conversation with himself by having a conversation with these ideas of Crowley, God, and Lucifer, but the point of all of it is to reconcile his death and begin his eternal afterlife.

Aziraphale is now here for final judgement but it is, essentially, his own final judgment of himself, his own self reconciling his death, using his own visions of Crowley, God, and Lucifer, as proxies, because we judge ourselves. We go where it is in our hearts we believe we deserve to be and Aziraphale, by this point, knows he needs to decide where that is.

When he thinks about his life, he thinks about how he tried. He did want to do the right thing, most of the time. In a line that had me literally pause the movie for a minute after because I couldn't hear the dialogue that followed over my own teary sniffling 😂, Aziraphale says: I just wish it'd been easier. He had a very difficult life. He wonders why it had to be so hard, like all of us wonder about our own, because he's no different from us, as has been the whole point of the story.

It is Aziraphale's own judgments of himself that are voiced by God and Lucifer alike: You wanted to be left alone to read. You wanted to eat all that yummy human food. And human music. You were lazy. You were gluttonous. You were prideful...

Essentially, we're hearing the same things Aziraphale would beat himself up over sometimes when he was alive, the things over which he struggled sometimes not to feel guilty, which are just the things of having a life. He's imperfect. He's a person. And, in the end, he owns all of it, even if he's not exactly made peace with it, because these voices were never the loudest to Aziraphale. Crowley could always drown them out for him. Crowley could always say eat the dim sum, angel. Take me to bed, angel. Isn't this song gorgeous, angel, have a listen. That's the word of God there, isn't it? and it would cut through the noise. Always.

Except in the very end, when Aziraphale was too far gone, and it was too late, and he couldn't hear the birds.

And it's because of Crowley that Aziraphale can fight back against these inner voices here now, in this final judgment, and he owns his life, with: Yes, but I was the second-best angel you ever had. He turns the conversation away from God and Lucifer to the best angel there ever was, in Aziraphale's mind, who is the person he loves. He talks to this version of Crowley to reconcile in his own mind how they parted before Aziraphale died.

They've been secretly together forever, as the finale makes pretty clear enough-- they've had this "bookshop" for centuries going back long before 1800. And how it ended in reality in S2 was terribly tragic. On the other side now? Knowing he'll never see Crowley again, Aziraphale says the things wishes he could have said instead.

They are all things that he had undoubtedly told Crowley a million times in life already but that he wishes could have been more how things ended for them instead of how they did. He's been doing this with Crowley all along since they crossed paths in the bardo, trying to reconcile what happened. I need you to forgive me. You taught me to be brave.

Having a conversation that asks the question of how they could have ever really been happy, if they had run off together? They'd have been leaving all these people to goodness knows what awfulness. They'd have never forgiven themselves. It would have broken them.

You don't have a door. Aziraphale confronting the fact that his death leaves Crowley unprotected, because he is Crowley's door. The wild ride that is liberating our Bentley by besting Brian!Lucifer with Nightingaling crosswords really being Aziraphale processing that he no longer can.

You were the best of us, he tells Crowley in the end, when he says the things he wished he could have said in the end before they parted, instead of what he did. You cared so much about everything. You were an artist, and you wanted to understand, to make better art. You were the one who always thought it all had a sensible purpose. There's humor in that last bit, too, as sensible is related to sensual.

You made me complete.

Aziraphale's bardo has a version of God for them to talk to, even though Good Omens did just end as I had hoped it would, without any true proof that such a God actually truly exists. Frances McDormand, after all, read bits from the book that Aziraphale wrote-- the one we know of as Good Omens-- that Jim found as an unpublished book in S2. It's a book implied to be written by Aziraphale-- one of his books of life.

He wrote this one, too. At one point, literally, taking the blank copy of Bleak House after Crowley began it and writing down the first words of this bardo story... the first sentences of The World to Come for Aziraphale, as all of this is just a path to writing this new book of life-- one that is really a book of the dead. All of this is to make Aziraphale's eternal life. You could see the creation starting in Aziraphale's mind after he locked the door. There would be cocoa, books to read, and one another. Somewhere, a place for us-- a West Side Story reference, a playbill for which caught fire in the bookshop in S1. The West End, The West End...

And this story of Aziraphale's new world starts, as his old one ended. It is a summary of the truth of what he just lived, really, which he will use as the basis of creating a world beyond it: There were four of them in that bookshop, which was the whole world.

An angel, a former demon, The Devil himself, and one other who was there because They were omnipresent. They had always been there. They would always be there... And as Aziraphale wrote it? It began to happen around him. This God turned up as he wrote her into being because she is of him, like how Frances McDormand's Voice of God was. He is the creator of this world. He is the Almighty. Together, he and his vision of Crowley birth this new universe that is really entirely Aziraphale's eternal life. His heaven, his hell. His self-written damnation, and his plan for some peace, all at once.

Moments later, Lucifer wanted to know why he was still there, as Aziraphale had said that all but Crowley were like nothing more than characters in "God's book" but Crowley? He was always real to Aziraphale. He was life. If that were true, Lucifer wanted to know, why hadn't he disappeared yet, like all the other characters in this bardo? What was his purpose in this book of "God's", to be here this far along in the end? And Aziraphale knew the answer.

He knew what the word of God would be on that-- because he is God. Because we're all God. Because he made up this God and this is his narrative, his bardo. You're still here because it's a tidy finish, is what he told Lucifer. The deity and the adversary. The dark counterbalance to him and Crowley. The two who should be there when Aziraphale's end came because they had been who he had always fought. They were the reasons why Aziraphale was now dead.

Aziraphale's bardo gives his version of Crowley the chance to ask questions of God-- but it's really Aziraphale asking as Crowley, and it's Aziraphale answering. It's an echo of a thousand conversations like this that he and Crowley have had together, including what was a recurring theme of one, from how Crowley references it-- one that influenced what Aziraphale wrote in the book we know of as Good Omens and the bit referenced in 1.01-- about how the ideas of God and free will are like three card monte. You'll never find the lady unless she wants you to.

Free will vs. determinism and The Problem of Evil are for sure their own discussion here but this is long enough right now lol so, for the purposes of this discussion here? It's basically Crowley voicing Aziraphale's fears-- that no one ever finds the lady without the dealer, God, letting them... that there is no true free will-- but there's also that this God is Aziraphale, and you're talking to the angel who fooled Nefertiti with a lone caraway seed and three cowrie shells.

Aziraphale is no stranger to the art of prestidigitation, in any way you take that lol. He knows how to find the lady, and he's about to make an eternal world where he finds her, over and over and over and over and over again... but, first, he does have a question of this God his consciousness has made him to talk to here, before all of this is over.

It's the only one he'd ever have for God: Why did you give me Crowley?

Why did you make me complete and then take it away?

Which is really...

Why did you let me die? Why did you let me know such love and then take it away from us? Why did you let this ending happen? What did I do that kept you from giving us-- from giving *him*-- a happy ending? Why did you let us know what it was to love one another, and for so long, but then never let us know what it was to live openly together? Why couldn't we have just lived happily ever after together?

And that is when Aziraphale's Crowley steps in and tells him what he already knows: You know you'll never get an answer to that.

You know she's not God. You know you're talking to yourself. She's a different version of the Frances McDormand you used to hear in your head-- one like what I told you I thought God was like. You know that you're dead, and none of this is real, and even if it were? She'd never tell you.

You'll never know why and, back in reality? Neither will I.

Just like every damn human who has ever tragically, accidentally lost someone, angel. We're just like them.

And Aziraphale, as God, answers with what he suspects might be the case. Why he thinks that this God that he believes exists gave him Crowley and let him know love and then put into motion events that took it away from him.

Because your love for him was the messiest, silliest, most predictable thing in the universe. And it always put a smile on my face. Like The Voice of God-- Aziraphale-- said and wrote in his book of life? It's like playing poker for infinite stakes in a pitch-dark room with a dealer who doesn't tell you the rules and who smiles all the time. Her response here is simply what Aziraphale, who believes in God, long ago decided was why God made them for one another, and let them find and love each other.

Aziraphale's version of God here is not surprised by Aziraphale loving Crowley. She calls it the most predictable thing there was-- because that is how Aziraphale feels. How could anyone not fall in love with Crowley? Aziraphale's God-- so, Aziraphale-- says you two were messy and silly... you were human.

Silly... a word that means funny and light and foolish and adorable and also was used between Crowley and Aziraphale to talk about trauma. A gentle shorthand for this is your anxiety, your PTSD talking, Crowley. A word that summed up how they loved and took care of one another, making a space where they were allowed to be people. A place where there was no punishment for that, no judgment for it. A world where they each had free will and autonomy and choices and could make a precious and peaceful, if fragile, existence together, even if they could never find their way fully to a more open life.

Humans are gonna human, as The Voice of Crowley told Aziraphale's Concept of God. No two people were ever more human together than the angel and the demon, and that's God's-- Aziraphale's-- point to himself.

It's Aziraphale admitting to himself the truth he has always, deep down, believed, but sometimes struggled with allowing himself to believe was true: God gave me Crowley because God wanted me to know what it is to be human, in all its beautiful messy, silly, predictableness, and we were human together. The thing I was always afraid to accept that I was, that I longed secretly to fully be? I already was. I performed on the West End Stage all my life. That really did make me a professional conjurer, didn't it?

By the time we're here, the world is very over for Aziraphale. He's here, trapped in his bookshop, which is the only thing left in the world of this bardo because it represents Aziraphale, and Crowley and Aziraphale's life together. It will die, too, moments from now, because it's already too late. That's what the bardo exists to help Aziraphale realize. It's already over. He's dead. And ahead of him lies eternity. It's time for him to choose a path out of the bardo and be reborn into a kind of second coming, even it's basically his eternal afterlife and not quite real.

At this stage, his concepts of Lucifer and, even, God? They no longer matter. There is only one voice who does matter to Aziraphale-- only one he needs to hear to finish bringing him through the bardo to where he goes next and that is, of course, Crowley.

In the end, Aziraphale's final judgement on himself comes not from God but from this vision of the person he loves, and who loves him. The one with whom he made a space, from The Garden of Eden through the bookshop, to have privacy from God and Lucifer, to talk and be together and love one another. God and Lucifer disappear to the background, as it was when he and Crowley were together, and the center of the bookshop becomes The Tree of Life, under which this vision of Crowley will help Aziraphale decide how he wants to spend his eternity.

Aziraphale's bardo narrative sets it up so that he can ask this version of God that he has invented for what comes next-- but she is Aziraphale himself. It's the Discworld-- Aziraphale will decide where he goes. Aziraphale will create the world for himself that is to come, as we see plenty of evidence of in the world of Asa & Professor Anthony at the end, like their names, and the other characters there. Things like what just took me out entirely (goddamn this show lol) like Asa's dead mother always having said things like "scrumptious" and "tickety-boo."

Aziraphale is very harsh on himself, as this bardo showed, but he listens to what he knows Crowley would say here. As we've always seen, it's only Crowley whose voice can drown out his own and God's and everyone else's because Crowley matters more to him than anything else. Crowley is his god, and how Aziraphale voices his plan to himself for the eternity he has decided that he deserves.

Aziraphale asks this version of Crowley what it is that Crowley wants-- because even Aziraphale's own, singular, eternal life would always be for Crowley. But also because he knows the truth. There was only one thing Aziraphale himself ever wanted, and it's too late for that now. He mixed up the pill bottles, and now he's never going back to Bridlington.

He and the Crowley he has known and loved for over six thousand years have had all the time together that they will have, and they will have died before having found a way to fully live openly together. And doing that? Having that open life together?

That was all Aziraphale ever wanted in life.

He asks this Crowley, essentially, to tell him what it is that he already knows himself that the real Crowley wants, because that is the world that this god-- Aziraphale-- will make next. He will make the world for his goddess, in her image. And this Crowley says what we all know Crowley would say...

A real universe. A world where people have a chance. A world of no God and no Lucifer, no angels and no demons. For all the people, all of the humans. It's a world of a catch-22, though, and this is the part where Aziraphale uses this vision of Crowley to damn himself a bit. Aziraphale can't make a world with his Crowley anymore because that time is over. He's dead, and he doesn't have the power to change that, and if he made a world with a version of his Crowley in it? Well, he would always know that the stain was there underneath, wouldn't he?

He has this vision of Crowley help him get to a place where he can move into his afterlife by trying to miracle away the life they made together. This Crowley voices Aziraphale's own intentions for the world that comes, a plan he made out of his love for Crowley and what he knows that the real Crowley would want for him. He's about to try his best to make a world that reflects not his own struggles to love himself but the true free will and peace that he knows the person who loves him would want him to have for all of eternity. Instead of judging himself, he listens to what he knows in his deepest heart is Crowley's judgement of him, and lets that Voice of Crowley be the only one he hears. And that voice says to him:

Make us a world, angel, where Heaven and Hell don't exist. Make us a place where you and I spend eternity meet-cute-ing different versions of one another and grow old together and lose one another and find one another again and there's free will so there are stakes and choices and the stuff of life but you and I always find one another and the endings are always the funny ones I prefer. Make a place where we metaphorically and euphemistically climb every mountain together, over and over and over and over again.

That's the eternity you should make. That's the one you know that I would say that you deserve-- to at least be with some version of me. You do deserve that, angel. It might be too late for us now, as we are, but you could make yourself a world where there are other versions of me and then you'd never be lonely, and you deserve peace, angel.

Because you're not good and you're not evil, and you're not an angel and you're not a demon-- you're perfectly imperfect human incarnate, like the rest of us. You're a professional conjurer. Our life together is over. But you should make a world where there's always some me that always finds you, and we live happily ever after. We go to Alpha Centauri-- our little cottage, like we've always wanted to. It's not us, but it's of us, because you'll have made it. It will carry bits of us with it. A record of us is in its DNA, and there will be lots and lots of records.

All those nights where we'd make up little scenarios of what our life would be like, if we were human? How we'd meet under different circumstances? How we always made all those scenarios cleverly things that we always actually really, on some level, truly were? That's your eternity. Versions of our story, over and over. I'm a lonely professor of astrophysics, angel, with "boxes of my unsold books in my garage"-- please, for the love of Somebody? Come along and amaze me.

You need to let the me you loved go, angel, to go forward now. Promise me you will. You know I would want for you nothing but peace and if you, as the Creator, hold onto me into this next world? If you remember us? If you allow yourself to know that you control the parameters of the universe, instead of miracling that knowledge and the memory of me away? Then, you're actually damning yourself, and that's not what I want, angel, please, listen to me on this.

Please make this a world where you don't recognize me, every time you see me for the first time. Please don't make this a world where you remember me and all of these other versions of me? You love them dearly but you know that they're not me. The real me wouldn't want that for you... but you would... so, please, don't do that. Make a world where you let me go to find me again, in other lives, for all of time, and we never know that the world that is so real to us is the eternal afterlife of The Angel of The Eastern Gate, made just so that he can always find somewhere a version of his goddess Ashtoreth.

I know you'll listen to me enough to make that world where we have free will and find one another but please, angel, say that you won't always know the shooting star is not a real shooting star in more ways than one. Tell me you'll memory-wipe yourself here, too, and forget me to find me again.

Don't tell me that you will damn yourself to falling in love with versions of me, always remembering the original. Tell me you will truly let yourself find peace, and not that you know the truth but you are allowing yourself to live in a world where, here, you can bring a version of me hot cocoa and hold my hand and watch the stars with me. Here, you can marry me, and we can sit under the apple tree together, literally and euphemistically, openly and in peace. Tell me you will make sure that you won't remember, and you'll allow us to find one another and fall in love all over again, every time, as if it's the first and only time.

Is it Heaven? Yes. Is it also Hell? Yes. But, more importantly, is it like a free, open life on Earth? Like the ones we always imagined? I think it might be. You know I want nothing but peace for you, angel. You know I love you. You know I think you deserve it. Tell the God that's you what "she'll" be making. She won't refuse and Lucifer can't object because this is all in your consciousness and ultimately up to you. Your book to write. More chapters of our story to make.

I'll go with you as you go. I won't leave you on your own. Hold my hand, and kiss me goodbye, knowing I'll see you in the next life because I'm coming back-- some form of me is. Wherever you are? I'll come to you.

Technically, it's meteorite debris from Hailey's comet. Technically, it's all space litter, angel, not a shooting star. I'm never again the me that fired The Bullet Catch, am I? I wouldn't know a nightingale if it perched on the end of my nose-- though all versions of you and I will always word. But I need you to tell me, Aziraphale, that you will let both of us go, knowing versions of us will always find a way to one another.

I need you to promise me, angel, that we find new lives and new happiness and write the book together. Because the real Crowley on Earth that you loved would want you to not remember him, if it allowed you to make lovely, peaceful, happy lives together with other versions of him somewhere. He'd want for you anything that brought you comfort and happiness.

Please promise me that when you make this new world for us? That it's not that, sometimes, when you're sitting out with a version of me, older and grayer and content with you under the stars? That when you see a shooting star and make a wish? That it's not to pray again that, though you love and adore the person sitting beside you, that you'll never forget the Crowley with the yellow eyes who used to call you 'angel.'