Good omens 3 as a sign of the times.
I don’t really know how to start this, or put this into words.Brevity has never been my forte, so expect this to be long, and rambly, and pretty personal. But it KILLS me (by which I mean really really depresses me) just how much the Good Omens finale feels like a sign of the times, and the bleak, bleak world we’ve found ourselves trying to survive in.
maybe I’m just looking back on the past through rose coloured glasses. Maybe 2019 only feels so hopeful now in retrospect because I was still a kid. But I grew up with this show. I was a child when I fell in love with it and its characters, and now I’m an adult, and the world feels so much heavier than it did back then. In one way or another, Good Omens has been a constant throughout the entire stretch of my adolescence. A familiar, perpetual, comforting thing that I’ve grown alongside.
it’s been there through highschool. Through friendships beginning and ending, through all the beautiful and painful and awkward parts of growing up. Through some shitty, shitty times, times I considered giving up and throwing the towel in. When I was suicidal, and scared, and lonely, when I was looking for something to believe in and somewhere to belong. As painful as it feels sometimes, some of my happiest moments will always be perpetually tied up with it. The friends I made, the sheer commitment of the artists and writers in this wonderful community that sparked in me the love for art that I still carry with me today, finding people who understood exactly why this strange little story meant so much to me.
Naturally then, at some point, it transcended the boundaries of just a television show to me. Perhaps the same could be said for the way that Aziraphale and Crowley transcended those same barriers within the fandom and became more than just the media they were confined to. For me, It became one of those landmarks you unconsciously use to measure your life against. A constant presence in the background, quietly accumulating memories and meanings over the years. Even during the periods when I wasn't actively thinking about it, it remained woven into the fabric of who I was. Later on, It wasn't something I carried with me every day anymore, but I took comfort in knowing it was still there, waiting for me whenever I wanted to return.
Even when it faded completely and was replaced by other fixations, as interests often do, I always knew it would be there. The promise of a third season was something I feverishly clung onto, a little reason to keep on going, a tiny point on the horizon, a future promise to look forward to. Something that would eventually arrive no matter what else happened in my life between now and then, something firm and real to hold steadfast between my teeth. Those 6000 years that Aziraphale and Crowley spent together, all the longing and devotion and love threaded through them, carried with them an implicit promise that even after all that time—after every separation, every missed opportunity, every roadblock—there would eventually be something better waiting on the other side. Six thousand years of choosing each other, finding each other again, stubbornly reaching across impossible divides. Even after the shitshow with that fucker NG and the condensing of the last season into 90 minutes, there was always, always the promise of that South Downs ending. with Crowley and Aziraphale as themselves (or, I suppose thats what we all rightly assumed, anyway.). it was never, never out of the question. to any of us. it was the only thing we were certain about. It existed in the future with the same solidity as a landmark on the horizon. Maybe it was far away, maybe the road would be difficult, but eventually, we would get there.
Through personal struggles, through growing up, through a world that increasingly seemed to lurch from one crisis to the next the older I grew, there was always this small certainty that one day I'd get to see the happy end of their story. A few years ago, if you’d had asked me whether I was certain about wether we’d get that happy ending, I’d have looked at you like you had asked me wether the sun was going to rise tomorrow. Of course they would. Of course love would win. Of course six thousand years of devotion meant something. Of course there would be a point to all that waiting.
Maybe then, in one way or another, it also became a bit of a mirror to the flicker of optimism I still held towards the real world and my own personal struggles.
It’s not lost on me how melodramatic it sounds, how absurd it is to place so much weight, even if unconsciously, on a TV show. but when you're young, stories help shape how you understand the world. Good Omens was one of the stories that taught me to believe that kindness mattered. That love mattered. That being human, with all the messiness and vulnerability that entails, was something worth celebrating rather than transcending.
And for all my adolescent cynicism, I always did think Good omens was a story about hope.
It believed in people, believed in kindness, believed in love. It believed that simple, achingly mundane human connection mattered more than institutions or dogma. It believed a boy and his dog and his friends were enough to save the world, could choose who they wanted to be instead of what was expected of them. That to imagine a future was to imagine them slouching hopefully towards Tadfield. Forever. It believed that stopping Armageddon could end with lunch at the ritz. It was warm, and silly, it looked my fears and hurt and cynicism the eye and answered it with a smile. It was a story that insisted humanity was worth believing in anyway. That love was worth believing in anyway. Just in case.
Maybe then, though I am still trying to comb through the tangled mess of my feelings about this show in general, that is why the finale, despite the wall I had built up between myself and the fandom sometime in the last year, smashed through and hit my right in the chest.
The thing is, I went in with 0 expectations. I hadn't heard anything about it since the 90 minute finale was announced. I didn't even know it was coming out until my mutuals started posting about it. I watched it on a whim. thats what fucking kills me. My younger self would've been staked out in the main tag anxiously awaiting the release date down to the second. She would've had a calendar marked down to the day, would've combed through every fan theory and meta post about what was going to happen that she could get her hands on. I should be grateful in retrospect, I suppose. That I didn't stake so much of my joy on something that ended so tumultuously. Had I fully committed to the fandom again, I genuinely think it would have been soul crushing. There were years when this story occupied such a central place in my life that an ending like this would have been catastrophic. I have so much empathy for the fans who do feel like that right now- the ones who put so much time and effort into the fandom, the ones who staked so much hope on this project, the ones who poured so much love into this show, and, at the very least, expected a little of that love returned.
But I wasn’t even really expecting the world, going in. I was just expecting, perhaps naively, to feel something of what I used to feel. Some fleeting recognition of the person I used to be, the world she used to inhabit. The hope she held for the future beneath her mask of cynicism. Because, underneath it all, she, like Crowley, was an optimist.
When I finished the episode and watched the credits roll, I wanted to feel angry. I wanted to feel bitter, like the rug had been pulled out from under me. I wanted that feeling of unfairness, the heartbreak and passion I’ve seen so many others express since its release.
But all I felt was a hollow, resonant, cloying acceptance.
Oh. of course that’s how it ends. That’s just the way things are now.
The ending felt bleak and disappointing, but so much of the world already feels bleak and disappointing. It felt uncertain, but uncertainty has become the background noise of my, and many others, everyday life. Crowley and Aziraphale look the systems that want to define them in the eye and give up. Gone is the stubborn, warm, humanist core that used to beat at the heart of this series. Whether intentionally or not, this finale, to me, feels so deeply reflective of the moment we're living through. A moment defined by political unrest, instability, fear, disillusionment, and a growing sense that the systems governing our lives are too large, too entrenched, and too indifferent to challenge. And the show that has always fought back against that notion, poked fun at ideologies like Christianity that people weaponise for their own gain, that ended with stubborn humanity and small acts of love saving the day, complies with that idea. Aziraphale is used as a punching bag by everybody around him throughout the episode. Crowley, who had spent the entire runtime as hopeless and damn near suicidal obliterated himself and the rest of the universe with no say from the humans that the series used to revolve around. God, what a bleak message, especially for an overwhelmingly queer audience.
And the worst part is, I finished the finale and found myself agreeing with its hopelessness and disillusionment instead of resisting it. The show that had sown the seeds of hope and optimism in me for a brighter future in the past had contorted before my eyes into a mirror of the very real fears and loss of hope and hollowness that my world has transformed into. And it frightened me more than the ending itself ever could.
Because it also arrived at the same time as another realization: I can't go back.
Not to being a kid in 2019 and watching the show for the first time. Not to the friendships I built around it that I’ve since lost. Not the person I was before the last 7 years happened. Not to the version of the future I thought I was growing into. Not the hope I used to hold near to my heart.
and it hurts, man. It really, really sucks to see the disillusionment I feel right now reflected by something that used to represent the opposite. And maybe I'm mourning my own lost optimism and childhood more than anything happening in the narrative itself. But im still mourning.
For the unbearable fact that one day you look up and realise the future you've been imagining for years has quietly become the past.
And there is no South Downs ending for that.
There is no cottage waiting at the end of the road where all the lost versions of yourself are gathered around a table, unchanged and untouched by time. There is only the strange experience of meeting something that once meant everything to you and realising that both of you have changed beyond recognition.
Seven years collapsed into ninety minutes. That fixed point in the future, that milestone that seemed mythical at a distance, especially to a suicidal kid who didn’t know wether she’d make it through the next few months, let alone years, sailed past with horrible, ordinary placidity. Exhaustion, maybe. The same indistinguishable exhaustion that seems to permeate everything nowadays.
And I so wanted it to go differently.
All I wanted to see, even for a brief, brief moment, was the outline of the person who once loved this show and the world with her whole heart.
Instead, I am brought to the realisation of just how far away she is now.
