Look, I would like to not get too cynical about this, but I really can’t help but notice that every time I go, like, “okay, let’s try to take the Finale in good faith, when it comes to fiction, there are very few Bad Ideas and a lot of Badly Executed Ideas. This story just totally fails to build up to this sort of ending… so what could’ve worked? What would’ve build up to this better?” And then I find some thread and I’m like “Hmmm, this could’ve at least softened the blow, why didn’t they do this?” the answer always seems to be “this would have involved making Crowley look even a little bit Wrong or Morally Culpable in some way.”
Oh- share your thoughts OP!
There does seem to have been a bit of Crowley as an NG self-insert characterisation drift huh?
I think TP would’ve prevented it because although there’s a TP = Aziraphale and NG = Crowley dynamic in personality, Crowley’s philosophical and moral core has I think always been pure TP. So the Crowley we have by season 3 is all personality, without the philosophy/moral core or with NG’s attempt to write that without actually understanding it really.
Hey! Sorry for the late response @theniceandaccurategoodomensblog, I just wanted to finish up some other posts on my To-Do list first… I went over some of this in my tags for this post, but elaborating and adding in more detail, in no particular order:
Crowley's shift from "screw the end of the world, Angel, let's just run away to Alpha Centauri!" to "we have to sacrifice ourselves for the greater good" happens way too suddenly, even for the condensed and rushed pacing of GO3. But having an actual arc where Crowley realizes how Selfish and hypocritical the fantasy of drinking up cocktails in space while the earth burns in order to build up to the point where he chooses the Greater Good instead, would require the narrative to actually admit and dwell on the fact that Crowley was wrong.
If you want to build up to any sort of Human Ending, you kinda have to lean into the idea that if being an Angel and a Demon is like a Job in an oppressive system, then the things that do make Crowley and Aziraphale's lives Objectively Better than Humans, Magic Powers and Immortality, are like the payment and perks they received from still being complicit in that system. Then it becomes thematically inevitable that if these two want to escape or dismantle the system that victimized them, they can't also expect to still get a fat pension check out of it. But to actually explore this thematic idea in length would be to implicate Crowley as the biggest champion of the dream of escaping the way the system victimizes you while enjoying all the perks of being complicit in it.
Also the angle of Miracles = the Privileges of the System synergies well with the more… charitable interpretation of the message of GO3, that change requires sacrifice. A hypothetical arc in an alternative GO2 about how Crowley and Aziraphale aren't ready to sacrifice their Miracle Accounts by cutting ties fully with Heaven and Hell will build up to this ending far better then spending all that time exploring trauma and indoctrination that the ending will only resolve via a very Magical solution. But that requires both Crowley and Aziraphale to be equally guilty in their hypocrisy.
Since the idea of 'Free Will' not actually existing in the original GO universe was not well-explored or well-argued at all, and is especially weak with the implication everything in the 'Real World' went pretty much identically to the previous Biblically Literalist Reality, it's easy for viewers to feel like Aziraphale and Crowley really just gave up their lives for nothing. The main argument you can make in favor of this new reality being better is not the lack of Heaven and Hell as supernatural forces meddling in Human affairs, but the lack of Heaven and Hell as an Afterlife, that judges Humanity via binary definitions of 'Good' and 'Evil' and can doom you to eternal torment based on pretty strict and inhuman ideas of morality (considering how few 'first-grade musicians' got into Heaven according to GO1/Book Omens). But it's hard for the audience to be emotionally invested in the idea of removing that unfair Afterlife system when outside of these aforementioned gags in the first season/original book, we very rarely dwell on how Heaven and Hell work as an Afterlife for Humans. The only people we actually see about to face Eternal Torment are a bunch of Nazis, which even the most restorative-justice-minded folks in the audience would find it hard to feel sorry for. But actually exploring how easy it would be for regular Human folks to end up in GO Hell and taking the subject seriously might means letting the audience think of the fact Crowley was working as a tempter to trick people into that eternal torment for 6000 years, and even with the amount of slacking off he does, it's hard to think he wasn't responsible for dooming at least some Human souls (not to mention the Arrangement means he also dragged Aziraphale into it).
This one addresses the point about Pratchett's influence in Crowley's initial characterization most directly, but it's very complex so I think I will also link to the post I made about it. It's going over about how unfortunate is that Modernized Sin-Spreading, which used to be such an important part of Book!Crowley's characterization, ended up being totally retconned out in TV Omens and how addressing it and treating it seriously could've helped build up to the GO3 Sacrifice the way it was part of Crowley's arc leading up to the Almost-Sacrifice at the end of the Book. One of the point I made is that I think Crowley's thoughts about Free Will and Humanity are meant to be poignant (and Pratchettian) themes in the book… but they were also Crowley's attempting to rationalize his job to himself. It can be both at the same time. And if you REALLY want to argue against Free Will in the GO Universe, you could try deconstructing these quotes in a 'Resurrectionists'-style fashion… but all of this would require making Crowley the kind of guy who is proud of himself for all the minor disasters and annoyances he causes and then addressing that part of him seriously.
So yeah, five ways the GO3 Ending could've been… maybe not good, but would've at least been built up to better, all of them would require acknowledging the fact that Crowley can be Wrong Sometimes.
