More GO Metaverse/AU Musings
Many people have written eloquently about how, since the book/radio drama/S1 all end happily with character arcs wrapped up, there is plenty of justification for taking them as one's personal canon. This is probably going to be my approach.
However, I do think there is justification in the structure of the show to consider each season as its own AU. I'm not saying you have to interpret it this way, just offering the possibility.
Season 1 begins with the OG wall meet-cute, which establishes A&C as a pair of slightly befuddled agents from opposing sides who have more in common with each other than head office. Of the three seasons, this one retains the most of the Cold War spy setting from the book, with them meeting in public places and expressing fear about getting into trouble with their head offices. Also, this is the only season that mentions the Arrangement, which is a concept that only makes sense if they both know that angels and demons are the same.
Season 2 introduces a new meet-cute that, to me, can be read as resetting the story into an AU about religious institutional trauma. The two angels are more like church friends, with one about to be ex-churched, and while the fear of their institutions persists, the conflicts between them throughout S2 seem more philosophical than S1's more practical and obvious emergency. In addition, among a number of moments that I find contradictory to S1, there is no hint of the Arrangement and generally A&C seem to lack the common knowledge and experience that I read them as having in S1.
Season 3 doesn't have breathing room for much of this kind of analysis, but the third meet-cute seems to launch us into a war AU with A&C as soldiers on opposite sides of an unbridgeable divide, who will never find more than a moment's peace together, which leads into their final decision. This is a huge reversal from S1, which showed characters successfully building relationships across their differences.
Chronologically, the only way I can make all three meet-cute scenes make sense in order is by assuming external manipulation. Their memories and/or their Book of Life pages must have been altered, or we must be watching them in different timelines or universes.
This is not the only issue I have when trying to consider the story chronologically. To me, the S1 flashbacks show a slowly developing relationship, allies to friends to lovers, over the centuries. The S2 minisodes disrupt that flow, with the Job flashback getting very intimate, then whipping back to a more distanced tone at the Crucifixion. And how do we get from Bastille Aziraphale, who is experiencing in real time what a hungry and oppressed populace will do, to the Aziraphale of Edinburgh 1827?
I do think S2 and S3 have more connective tissue to each other than to S1, so again, a S1-only canon makes a ton of sense. But I think, if it helps, that you can also apply an AU lens to each season.
Edited to add: I don't mean to claim that all these contradictions I perceive were intentionally plotted. There are some hints to that effect, but they're too haphazard for certainty. But I do think that, whether intentional or not, as a viewer, it is possible to interpret each season as a different flavor of A&C even while the current-day plot seems to be marching forward chronologically.
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