I talked before about how GO3, despite being clearly a condensed version of a nearly six hours script also still feels strangely stretched-thin due to the amount of material recycled from GO2, GO1 and the still-unused bits from the original book. Including the whole ‘oh no the Mafia wants to burn the Bookshop!’ bit being clearly an outgrowth of this passage from the book…
But this whole thing is particularly frustrating because of the original function of this passage. This whole bit in the book had, well, it had two main purposes. First of all, it’s to further characterize Aziraphale, and it’s just so very ironic that a plot point that was originally introduced to establish that ‘an Angel doesn’t have to be a fool’ has been transplanted into a story that’s so determined to make our Angel look so foolish (the Mafia Subplot did have one of Aziraphale’s few bright spots in GO3, but this whole ‘movie’ still feels like such a far cry from how this passage originally established that Aziraphale being an Angel does not mean he’s weak or overly-naive or incapable of taking care of himself).
But the other important function of this passage is as foreshadowing, its setting up the idea that Aziraphale’s bookshop is very vulnerable to fire and generally the possibility of it burning down via a less serious scene…. That builds up to the very very dramatic moment when the bookshop actually burns down near the climax of the story.
So coming back to it now, at the second sequel to the story where the bookshop burned down makes the whole thing feel… repetitive, repetitive and unimaginative and regressive. It’s the exact same type of Danger the characters already faced but lesser. Instead of the dramatic escalation of going from ‘the Mafia threatens to burn the bookshop down but Aziraphale isn’t worried about it’ -> ‘the bookshop accidentally ends up actually burning down’, we go from ‘the bookshop burns down’ -> ‘the Mafia threatens to burn the bookshop’, which is just weird when so much of this episode is trying to be Bigger and More Dramatic than GO1. It’s putting the already-fired Chekov’s Gun back on the mantle and then trying to make a big deal about it again.
I mean, part of the problem is one that might come with any attempt to continue the ‘Good Omens’ story past the actual last pages of its book. The Bookshop and the Bentley have been very well-established as Aziraphale and Crowley’s most important Worldly Possessions… and that’s exactly why these two things end up spectacularly destroyed during Armageddon to emphasize the stakes, and also why they end up being flawlessly restored by the Happy Ending of the story. But that also makes it hard for a new story to find a new way to establish the newer, bigger and badder danger, cause using the Bentley and the Bookshop is still the most obvious way to increase the emotional stakes for the Ineffables, but you have to do something that feels novel compared to what already happened, and hopefully is just as dramatic if not more.
Like… I do feel like the Demon Invasion of the Bookshop in GO2 kinda worked as a New and Novel Bad Thing that can happen to the Bookshop. It’s a different visual of the Bookshop getting fucked-up, and puts the characters in a new conflict of having to stop the destruction while it’s ongoing while not harming the bookshop too much themselves….
And Crowley losing the Bentley in a Monopoly game is also, at least, a different way of losing the Bentley than the M25 Debacle. You could say S2 ‘raised the stakes’ on that conflict by making Crowley so much more dependent on the car by having him lose his flat first, so that losing the Bentley again in S3 is actually a much more serious crisis… although if that was the plan all along, then I think it was also a Bad Idea for S2 to lean so hard on the Fandom Interpretation that the Bentley is sapient and/or an extension of Crowley’s body, because that just made it feel really implausible that it would even let a random human take it…
I guess you could say that another thing that S2 does is to build up the whole of Whickber Street, and not just the Bookshop, as being emotionally important to Aziraphale, and thus to the Audience. So watching it deteriorate and act as the ‘Face’ of the Book-of-Life-pocalyse was a pretty good emotional device…. In theory at least. I really don’t like the whole ‘Aziraphale gets shamed for abandoning Whickber Street’ scene for… a whole bunch of thematic and character reasons, and its destruction basically stopped mattering as soon as the narrative started seeing the Book-of-Life-pocalyse as more of a Blank Slate for Crowley to pour out his Amazing Free Will Vision for Humanity into...
(Also it seems that between all the things that might’ve been changed due to the shortened timeframe and the smaller budget, one change that seems pretty certain is the story primarily happening around Whickber Street, instead of the original focus of the USA and New York City. So I don’t even know if it was a planned writing choice or just a lucky accident.)
But while I have lukewarm feelings about some of these, there is at least some attempt to make Crowley and Aziraphale ‘lose’ (or be in danger of losing) something important to them in a way that feels different while also being of equal/bigger emotional stakes compared to the original Good Omens’ burning Bentley and burning Bookshop. Some of them are halfassed, I think, but there are still attempts. And between all of them, threatening to burn down the Bookshop again feels especially derivative and unoriginal and lame. If this was really a six episode episode script condensed into 90 minutes, was there not one other idea that gives us original (or at least semi-original) stakes for Crowley and Aziraphale? Something that will actually make it feel like an original sequel with new ideas?
I know this is such a small detail in the face of everything else wrong with the Finale, but it’s been really frustrating me lately, and it feels kinda emblematic of a lot of it's other Plot Problems. Why are we, in a condensed story that apparently couldn't find the time to actually resolve it's major plot and character arcs or build up to it's ending, wasting so much precious screentime on something so pointless and derivative? Why are still, for so much of the Finale, still just returning to the early pages of the book and not even building anything new or interesting out of them?
