I’m more ambivalent than fully positive about season 3, but I have spent a lot of time thinking about this. I’m going to try to explain what I think the story was trying to say about free will and why it went wrong, but this is going to be long and a little rambling. I am still putting all my thoughts together, so I’m going to do my best to stay on this one aspect of Good Omens, and not bring in any of the other Season 3 issues.
To start with, the humans absolutely had free will in the original universe, and all the evidence you list does indicate this. However, there is an aspect of “lacking free will” brought up in the book and reiterated in seasons 1 and 2, which is that angels and demons in general (and Aziraphale and Crowley in particular) have been “messing around” with human lives, screwing things up just by their presence. It’s a limitation, not a removal or negation, but it means humans are not completely free to control their own lives.
Biggest example is Wee Morag, who would have been fine and alive if Aziraphale hadn’t decided it was his duty to interfere with the body snatching, and then to “help” with the next attempt. Next biggest would be all the little ways their shenanigans in season 2 affected the people of Berwick Street, from Crowley accidentally locking Nina and Maggie in the coffee shop for hours because he had a mini tantrum to Aziraphale mind-whammying everyone into acting out his Jane Austen Ball fantasy.
None of this is meant as an attack on Aziraphale or Crowley. These are largely unintended consequences, but they show how much influence they have even without trying. Meanwhile the other season 2 mini-stories show the effects of Heaven or Hell taking a direct interest in particular humans; Job loses everything including (nearly) his children, and that shit is TRAUMATIC even if it’s all restored; and Furfur rather carelessly unleashes a trio of Nazi zombies on London, and no one seems to the death and chaos this might cause. It’s not the “Ineffable Plan” of God, but it is the result of humanity running into the ineffable.
Now, does any of this negate free will? No, it does not. But it does DEVALUE it somewhat if your choices or actions can be overridden by any angel or demon, or if all your plans and life work can be destroyed by a supernatural entity that wants to make a point. Part of the Good Omens message is that humans can’t properly BE humans if higher (or lower) powers keep sticking their fingers in and shifting things to suit them.
You are free to pick any of the three cards before you, but whether or not you find the lady is up to the dealer, not you.
Does season 3 address this well? It really doesn’t. This needed to be a central focus of the season if it was going to be essential to the conclusion. We get a few hints that Aziraphale leaving led to the death of his neighborhood, but nothing concrete. We get the three-card-Monte metaphor but it doesn’t quite tie back to anything. We see Jesus finally start to connect with his new community and maybe have an effect, only to have everything destroyed in an instant by Michael—this could have been a poignant reminder of the powerlessness of humanity but instead just feels like a weird anticlimax.
There was maybe a chance to pull it all together in the conversation with God, but by introducing the authorial mandate explanation (that people only ultimately do what God wants them to), the whole conversation shifts. We’re back to talking about the Ineffable Plan, and not the effect of the ineffable.
To use the three-card-Monte explanation again, we were talking about the dealer manipulating the cards so that your choice didn’t matter; but now instead we’re talking about the dealer manipulating you into picking the card they want, or just planting your decision directly into your head, inception-style.
Add to that Crowley bringing up the problem of evil, the threat of punishment or reward after death, the ways God harms humanity through the way the world is designed, or through inaction that allows the world to evolve in harmful ways—all this broadly ties back to “supernatural interference fucks with humanity’s ability to make the most of free will” but now it’s just completely muddled.
Maybe if they’d had a full hour long episode to pick through it they could have addressed all of these points in a way that makes sense. Instead, we get an extended Crowley rant where every sentence is making an entirely different point, and while that’s very ADHD of him, it does nothing to shape a coherent problem that needs solving.
All the nuance is lost. More importantly, the focus is lost. We aren’t looking anymore at a specific and demonstrable way angels and demons have messed with humanity and limited their freedom, we’ve stepped back to the broad and undefined topic of “free will.”
So when God asks if Crowley wants everything back the way it was… Sure? Seems fine? We as an audience have just been subjected to a fire hose of philosophical and theological questions with no answer and very little bearing on the previous 60 minutes of television. It’s pretty easy to read this as “Yes, put everything back to how it was before Michael started fucking around, we can figure out the rest as we go.”
When what we should be thinking is “No, we need a version of the world where humans can use their free will and not worry about some angel coming along and kicking apart their sandcastle.”
[I have slightly lost the thread of my metaphors here, but I hope you’re still following.]
While this doesn’t HAVE to be solved by destroying the universe and creating a new one, it DOES at least give us a problem where the solution “God, the Devil, Heaven, and Hell are no longer allowed to interfere with humanity” makes sense. Had the story kept this focus, I think we’d all be at least somewhat on the same page about the ending.
As it stands, with no firm groundwork laid, our interpretation of the ending is going to depend on our individual understanding of free will as a broad concept and how well the many points Crowley says map onto both this understanding and our preferred interpretation of Good Omens and its themes.
No, I am not going to argue humans didn’t have free will. They did, that’s the whole point of eating the fruit in the Garden of Eden, and Season 1 is all about humans exercising that free will.
The point of Season 3 should have been that that free will is devalued or harmed when the supernatural can keep butting in and overriding decisions or knocking things off course.
Season 2, I feel, is setting us up for this. We see a lot more of Aziraphale and Crowley, Heaven and Hell, interacting directly with humans and making a mess. Nina and Maggie give Crowley the “you need to step back and let us figure out ourselves” speech.
And then Season 3 doesn’t so much drop the ball as launch it into the sun, leaving us all to make sense of the ending based on our pre-existing theology/philosophy, our personal understanding of the show, and vibes.
If anyone who really loved the ending wants to contradict this or build off my explanation, please do so. I’ve been working away at this ending like a Rubicks Cube for weeks and I still don’t think I’m anywhere near making full sense of it.
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