bringing it up again for the millionth time but I'm still obsessed with the way that hannibal lecter is canonically aware of the narrative not because its ever explicitly stated but because the author who created him genuinely believes this to be true and stopped writing the book series because he's afraid of him
This is actually one of my favorite meta details about the novels because it’s just so uniquely compelling…. The show stays faithful to this by having Hannibal and Will each break the fourth wall twice, at least on my count, but there might be more instances of this that I’ve missed. With a show so fixated on even the smallest background details, the cardinal sin of camera work— audience eye contract— is intentional.
He does this during his dinner party in S1Ep7 (Sorbet) as he toasts the guests, content in the knowledge that his plans for Will and his machinations as the Ripper will soon come to fruition, and in S3Ep13 (Mizumono), when he embraces and comforts Abigail as everything falls apart— whereas his glance at us was smug before, a showman’s prideful acknowledgment, it’s raw here. Almost animalistic. Hannibal breaks the fourth wall as the harbinger of chaos and cruelty that occurs at his hand, as if relishing and taking solace in the fact that we can’t stop him. His descriptions of God as an uncaring, rather flippant entity who would rather be entertained by the tribulations of the world is a perfect description of the outside audience from a character’s point of view.
In the show, though, where Will is an original amalgam of the characters of Clarice and Will with hints of Hannibal from the novels, he actually demonstrates fourth wall awareness too. During S1Ep5 (Coquilles), when he closes and then opens his eyes on the hotel bed to empathize with the Angel Maker, Will makes direct eye contact with us, and in S3Ep2 (Primavera) he stares up at us, laying on the steps of the Norman Chapel in contemplation after conjuring a vision of Abigail to help process his feelings. Will breaks the fourth wall whenever he sinks into the liminal state of interconnection that his empathy provides. Will’s empathy seems to allow him to look past the limits of the fictional universe they exist in much like Hannibal can.
We mostly follow Will throughout the story, and the fact that all the violence we see with him has a pursuit motif or an overwhelming artistic element to it while following Hannibal killing Dr. Sutcliffe showed the raw reality of the act is….. very telling. Especially alongside the fact that we never see so many of the things he knew Hannibal did, the gory, brutal processes of his killing and butchering….. the narrative is bent around that to further a sense of meaning and romance, directing us away from the darker, simpler truths of their acceptance of each other like a child hiding stolen sweets behind their back.
It makes even more sense that they’d be the only two people in a world full of “sheep” who could understand and equal other— they share the same lucid, cosmic perception of their reality as a whole. So when you watch Hannibal and Will on the screen, in a meta sense, they are also aware of and watching you…… :)
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Pretty sure that would mean the fellas drink tree sap or something. Imagine running from a vampire thru the woods and passing her husband who’s biting a tree real hard
The wife has the classic Villain Of The Night aesthetic, all black, flowing cape, everything, and her husband is wearing red flannel, overalls, a beard, and is welding a log-splitting axe
Hey there :) I love your metas and would like to know why you think they decided to show satan as an actual being, but not god? Or do you think we will see god in the final episode?
Hi there! 💕Thank you & very interesting questions. *rubs hands together* This'll be fun. I know God is big on reminding people to not avoid salads but I also have chocolate cake so we can have a bit of both, yeah? *gets plates*
To answer your questions, I've got to share some ideas about The Voice of God that I've had lately that I think could come about in The Finale. If it winds up anything like this, it might not just change how we see God in the series but also completely upend our understanding of the novel at the same time...
So, throughout Good Omens the tv series so far, we've had what appears to be three beings who are the ones in charge of Heaven and Hell: The Metatron, Satan, and, kind of out here in her own world a bit, God. The Metatron claims to be the spokesperson for God but that is in doubt in a lot of people's minds, my own included. I think he's a fraud who cannot speak to God and whose power is dependent upon the angels believing that he can. I'm pretty sure that The Finale will see the main characters challenge him on this and expose his deception, leading them to be able to overthrow him and create a better system in Heaven.
Satan and The Metatron are dependent upon one another for power so if one of them goes down, they both do. Exposing The Metatron would cause the angels to realize that God didn't judge the demons-- The Metatron did. This would mean that the angels and demons would realize that they're all just angels and that they are on the same side against both The Metatron and Satan. I'm pretty sure that's why those two villains were working together to get rid of Aziraphale and Crowley in The Final 15 and want Gabriel dead-- they don't want the angels and demons to talk to one another long enough to figure it out and start a revolution.
So, let's say that all of that is close to (or is) accurate and we get to a point in The Finale when we find out that Heaven is a sham and The Metatron can't talk to God. This then brings up a big question that the characters in Good Omens aren't really seen asking a lot but that will suddenly be as big to these angels as it is to us humans:
Does God exist?
We might think we already know the answer to this, right? Of course she does! She's the ball of light that sounds like Frances McDormand! She's narrated S1 for us and she's talked to Crowley and Aziraphale and Job! When you ask if I think we'll see God in the finale, this is the being that you're probably asking about, right? The God we listened to who narrated S1 to us was crazy about humanity, yes? You'd think she'd want to participate since, as God, she'd know that would be what living really is. Does she, as you ask, have a body? Is she a living being? We might think she really does exist because we've heard what she sounds like but I think we might not quite yet have the full picture on that, as you'll see...
We can see what they're doing with The Metatron and Satan more clearly right now, I think. These two are two sides of an evil coin. Heaven and Hell are equally terrible. Neither has any sense of individuality, boundaries, or bodily autonomy. They are full of toxic, harmful ideas and are inflicting horrific abuse on the angels and demons. How they are presented to us as beings also reflects those horrors.
The Metatron is the only supernatural character in the story who does not have a full human corporation. He is just a floating head and that is the, well, pardon the pun, but the most meta thing in this story imaginable. He presents himself as above the other angels and nearer to God by virtue of the fact that he just needs a head to get around and doesn't deal with having a human body. His presentation is saying to the other angels that they couldn't ever possibly live up to his standards of holiness because they might all be magical but they have bodies, which are, by definition, unholy. They aren't supposed to feel or need anything that requires a body and what's extra fun for them is that everything does so the angels are made to feel like they cannot win from the get-go.
Fuck it up and wind up in Hell? Now, you are evil and belong to Satan for eternity. Violence, torture and assault from which there is no escape awaits you. I'd argue that while Satan is an actual being, as you put it, because he was an angel before, that we might not have actually seen that true form yet.
In 1.01, he attacks Crowley while being basically vapor and using the voice of Freddie Mercury. (That's definitely the most bizarre-sounding sentence I've written this week lol.) In 1.06, he is coming to claim Adam and Adam is told by Crowley and Aziraphale right before that this is what's about to happen so I think that Satan appeared as Adam would think The Devil would look like. He was eleven at the time, so, a giant, angry, horned, red devil cliche beast that sounded like Benedict Cumberbatch was probably about accurate. Satan has so far appeared not necessarily as himself but as whatever being might be most torturous to the person he's showing up to or whatever being might meet his end goals-- which is how he is appearing as The Metatron With A Body in 2.06. He's coming to tempt Aziraphale to Hell and Aziraphale would only ever think the offer genuine if he thought it was coming from The Metatron so that's who Satan made himself appear to be.
Both Heaven and Hell are, as Crowley puts it in 2.06, toxic.
But when you bring The Voice of God into this, things start to really interesting.
While it's not hard to see both Satan and The Metatron as evil, God is a little more difficult. This is some of the basis of the theory that The Metatron cannot communicate with God. One of the things that makes the theory have weight is that it's very difficult to see this God that is narrating the story to us in S1 as someone who would actually be behind the atrocities that Heaven claims are her will.
I think most of us like The Voice of God. She is very sharp, very dry-witted, and she's curious about people. She clearly loves all her beings. She really doesn't seem like a vengeful God that could be behind drowning people or casting all these demons to Hell or wanting to murder a laundry list of living beings around Job. The God we heard in S1? She wouldn't believe that Job's children belonged to Job in the first place, let alone want to kill any kids, let alone to do so only to win a bet with Satan.
There's a moment in S1 that I think solidifies that The Voice of God isn't a villain and that's when Crowley arrives at Tadfield Manor with baby Adam. God's narration introduces to us the baby swap plot about to go down by telling us (paraphrased) that it's helpful to understand that events in human history do not happen as a result of people being good or bad but just as a result of people being people. When she says this, Crowley is participating in the misunderstandings of the scene, alongside the humans in it, and God is counting him among the people of which she is speaking.
That's basically the moment that it becomes impossible to see The Voice of God as a villain because here she is, seeing Crowley as human. Here she is, narrating his and Aziraphale's story, and we the audience, for much of S1, really want to tell Crowley and Aziraphale that she is, right? If anything, this is the one thing we're angry with her about...
When Crowley is talking to God alone in his flat and not getting any response, we're angry at the God we also like because we know that she loves Crowley but he doesn't feel that and is suffering. We want her to tell him. We want her to be more clear with Aziraphale, too, after just appearing outside Eden. Even still, though, she's likable in her narration and seems separate from The Metatron and Satan.
There is the feeling that, if The Voice of God is God, that she believes that the universe is the dominion of her creations and that she cannot interfere because to do so would be to force them all to follow her will. She doesn't want to rob her creations of their free will. There is no plan from God but for them to all be free. This would make her a just god and go along with her narration so it allows us to be understanding about the fact that she cannot actually talk that much to her creations directly or stop any terrible things from happening-- because it's up to them to do so, not her.
That may all well be true but, as we will see, there might be some evidence that The Voice of God might have a more complicated identity than we might originally have thought.
If the main characters overthrow The Metatron and Satan in The Finale, it's going to be as a result of the characters talking and realizing that none of them-- including Gabriel and the archangels-- have ever spoken to God. As a result, they will all know that they don't know how to reach her.
They've only ever reported to The Metatron. God didn't even turn up for Gabriel's trial-- a big deal in Heaven, since he was The Supreme Archangel. All of this will lead them to the realization that The Metatron is a fraud but these characters are angels. They believe that they were made by the God they haven't ever actually interacted with entirely for the purpose of serving that God.
When they find out that The Metatron cannot contact God, they're all going to be wondering if God exists and it might be here that we'd think that Crowley and Aziraphale might share their experiences of hearing The Voice of God, yes?
Except...
...think about those known experiences for a moment...
The Voice of God has only appeared (key word: appeared) to speak to three characters: Aziraphale, Crowley and Job. In the first scene we see in which she speaks to a character, it's to Aziraphale, when he is alone outside the wall of Eden, right?
In this moment, Aziraphale has just rebelled more than he probably ever has before. He gave Adam and Eve his flaming sword and helped Crowley get out of Eden and now, here he is, standing outside the walls of Eden, having escaped himself and both thrilled and terrified to start a journey of exploring the Earth. He's been having an internal crisis as to whether or not he did the right thing. He knows that he did by his own moral compass but it's all very much against how Heaven works and he's unsure what it is that the God he believes made him and whom he serves actually wants him to do.
This is the exact moment when The Voice of God appears and has a short little chat with him about it-- dryly dubbing him "The Angel of The Eastern Gate" and asking him what he did with the flaming sword. This scene is fun because we all figure that, if this is God, surely she knows what Aziraphale did with the sword, but we get to watch as he lies straight to her ball of light. We think that she approves because nothing ever happens to Aziraphale as a result of this.
However, there's no real proof in this scene that The Voice of God was ever actually talking to Aziraphale. Aziraphale is the only other character in the scene and one could theorize that he has imagined God talking to him more than God actually talking to him.
We tend to never question the fact that, while God doesn't seem to be talking to anyone else in the story in S1, that she does briefly talk to Aziraphale. This makes sense to us because Aziraphale's role in Eden was a big deal in the whole series of events on Earth and we already feel like God feels that Aziraphale and Crowley are important because she's narrating their story. Not only do they appear to have been chosen to be in Eden to help jumpstart human life on Earth but they're important enough in everything for God to be telling us their story as she chats with us. Because they're our main characters we don't see anything off about God seeing them as main characters, too.
We actually use Eden in our minds as some of the foremost proof that God exists in Good Omens. These angels act like she must and Aziraphale's spoken with her so it must be true, yes?
Except... what if it's not?
What if Aziraphale was having a crisis of faith in Eden and basically imagined speaking with God?
What if The Voice of God isn't The Voice of Actual God (if God even exists) but rather The Voice of God in Aziraphale's Head?
We've never seen any proof that any of the angels or eventual demons have ever actually spoken with God, including prior to the creation of Earth. We assume that God is real because they all talk like she is but we've never been shown any concrete proof that they aren't all just believing they work for someone they've never met.
But, wait, you might say, what about Crowley and Job hearing her in the Job minisode, right? Isn't that proof?
Well... that's a bit suspect, too, and I'll show you why. It's largely hinted at in the sound mixing and context of that scene.
Like Aziraphale was outside the wall in Eden, Job was a man of faith in the midst of a massive crisis when we saw him. He and Sitis had been weathering what they believed was the wrath of God. Job's whole world was under siege and his children were in danger and his wife was begging him to go ask God for answers. When Crowley and Aziraphale come up on Job appearing to speak with God, several things are contextually important that suggest that this isn't quite what it appears to be.
Diluting the visuals is that, in this scene, the post-storm, dawn sun is starting to come through the clouds a bit, much in the way it was after the storm clouds of Eden were clearing when God appeared to Aziraphale in Eden. Job was under the light, praying and appearing to be communicating with God. Crowley and Aziraphale stop far back from Job and, when we're near them, we cannot hear God clearly. The key is in the sound mixing in this scene. When we're near Crowley and Aziraphale, God sounds like she's speaking in a wind tunnel ten miles away. We can catch snippets of words on the breeze but there's nothing tangible there. It would have been literally impossible for Crowley and Aziraphale to hear a single, complete sentence of any of this... and, based on what Job tells Sitis afterwards, he doesn't hear it, either. To add to this, Crowley is unreliable where this scene is concerned because, when it happens, he's drunk enough that we're shown him having trouble walking.
These two were drunk on food and wine in the midst of having moral crisis and watched a man pray under stormy, dawning daylight a half-mile away and think that, maybe, he might have been talking to God. That's it.
Job was in a state of madness and thinks he heard his own Voice of God when asked what happened the next day by Sitis. Crowley and Aziraphale think, from what they can see, that God really is talking to Job-- but they're so far back that they cannot hear basically anything that she's saying. They are both different kinds of intoxicated and likely seeing light and sound from the dwindling storm/emerging daybreak highlighting a man experiencing a kind of religious ecstasy and taking that for possible truth.
We hear her accurately when the camera gets closer to Job... but this all influenced by Aziraphale remembering these events as he reads them in his Bible in the bookshop, so the real is overlapping in this moment with the Biblical account... and it's also clear that Job doesn't remember much of anything he thinks that she said. He returns the next morning and tells Sitis that it was all too wonderful for him to comprehend and something something whales and ostriches. Basically, Job went a bit bonkers and convinced himself that he heard God and she was going on about different animals.
So, look at what we're saying here...
...if Job cannot remember what God said and Crowley and Aziraphale didn't hear it because they heard sounds on the wind and Crowley was drunk and Aziraphale thinks God had spoken to him before but was, that night, only speaking to Job... then from where, in the Good Omens universe, did the Job passage that is supposedly what God said to Job and was recorded in The Bible actually originate?
Who wrote it?
Who is the real Voice of God, when it comes to the Job passage and, likely, in general?
Who wrote the line that prompted Aziraphale to think back on the Job minisode in the first place-- the one that was the only thing which Gabriel could remember at first?
You know why this is all Gabriel can remember and why he looks awfully distraught at the recollection of it? Because Gabriel doubts the existence of God. He's been The Supreme Archangel for thousands of years and she's never spoken to him and The Metatron's a total bastard and God didn't even show up when Gabriel was thrown out of Heaven. What has he been clinging to all these years regarding her existence and his own sense of what the right path to take is? He's been clinging to the bit in The Bible that detailed what it was that God apparently said to Job.
Gabriel not only clings to this as proof of God's existence but he clings to it as proof that he is right to think what he does. Gabriel's own moral compass is at odds with The Metatron and Heaven, just like Crowley and Aziraphale's is. He is The Supreme Archangel of Heaven but he doesn't believe that the demons are all evil and beneath the angels. He actively works to keep angels and demons alike from The Metatron and Satan finding out that they are talking to one another. He wants to believe that God is not a villain and that she approves of this mentality and, as proof that she does, Gabriel clings to the line from Job where God told Job wistfully that she was there "when the morning stars sang together and all the Angels of God shouted for joy." He sees this as God supporting his mindset that the angels and demons are all angels of God and to mistreat the demons is wrong.
But... if The Voice of God is The Voice of God in Aziraphale's Head, then when we hear Frances McDormand, we're hearing Aziraphale.
When it came time to write what it was that God said to Job, though, it was Crowley and/or Aziraphale who actually wrote the passage below, which is why it sounds so much like how they view things:
Job, you've got questions for me? I've got questions *for you.* Do you know how I created the Earth? Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth, Job? Were you there when all the morning stars sang together and all the Angels of God shouted for joy? Do you know the rules of the Heavens? Did you set the constellations in the sky? Can you send lightning bolts and get them to report back to you? Did you give wings to peacocks, Job, or teach the ostrich to run?
What is credited to God here are actually things that Crowley and Aziraphale did, as suggested by the Before the Beginning scene, when we see that Aziraphale was involved in the creation of Earth and Crowley designed the stars. The line to which Gabriel clings is one that God didn't say-- Crowley and/or Aziraphale wrote it, explaining Crowley's hesitation when he says to Aziraphale: "your, ah, boss... said that to Job" in response to Gabriel quoting it, as well as what it is that Aziraphale wants to talk about when he says "Crowley" upon finishing reading the bit of The Bible recounting the Job minisode-- most of which was actually written by he and Crowley.
Ok, so, if The Voice of God is really more like Aziraphale's Voice of God? This explains a few things...
It explains why we haven't heard Frances McDormand's voice speaking to any other beings besides Aziraphale and ones who are otherwise unreliable. The only being who reliably hears her is Aziraphale and that's because she is how he imagines The Voice of God. She is the one that lives is in his head and talks to him.
It also explains why her conversation with Aziraphale in Eden opens the 1.03 Cold Open and why the two instances where she shows up to Aziraphale are both very early on chronologically in Crowley and Aziraphale's relationship. It's showing that Aziraphale's Inner Voice of God is something that is always within him-- because she is him-- but that hearing The Voice of God in his head was something that was probably happening with more frequency in the earlier part of Aziraphale's story-- back when he was more on his own for long stretches of time and before he had Crowley more frequently in his life to talk with about how he felt about things.
Interestingly, the last scene of the Job minisode begins with Aziraphale sitting under the sun/light of God alone, afraid that he's about to fall, echoing some of the scene outside the wall at Eden... but ends with the shot of Crowley sitting with him, after supporting him and their mutual admittance that they're both lonely without the other. The Voice of God can be seen as something of a feature of Aziraphale's loneliness but maybe he has those conversations with her/himself less frequently from the Job minisode on because both his perspective on Heaven/Hell has changed and, just as importantly, he has Crowley to talk to.
After all, remember how we said that she showed up as Aziraphale was having a whole inner crisis in Eden? The same was true in the Job minisode. Not only was Aziraphale having a whole moral dilemma over what to do about Job's kids when he apparently hears The Voice of God speaking to Job but he's just recently seen Crowley again and they are basically on a little date.
Aziraphale, in the hours prior to hearing God in the Job minisode, has just tried food for the first time-- a lot of food lol-- and is flirting his way closer to sex. He's literally taking a romantic walk with his demon love when Frances McDormand cameos so the possibility that, while he's having a very nice night, he's also internally having a bit of an ox ribs and lust guilt delusional freakout seems kind of high.
So, now, think about what else happens if Frances McDormand's Voice of God is Aziraphale's inner Voice of God... Gabriel has some scenes in S2 that could be seen as playing around with this a bit.
The first is Aziraphale bringing up the concept of an author when talking with Gabriel about the book organization project. While there is humor in the fact that Gabriel can't remember what an author is-- how could he when he can't fully remember who he is?--- there's also something else at play here, too.
Gabriel's idea for how to organize the books sounds balmy but it's secretly kind of brilliant-- especially when taken as a metaphor for how to view people. Gabriel can't be bothered with categories, genres, types, labels, or titles. All he's interested in is the first letter of the first sentence on the first page of every book. While we're laughing at this because we know that he's going to end up with most of the books just clumped together under a few sections like the one we see him spending time in-- the "I" section, full of "it's" and "I" beginnings of books-- that's also the point.
We have more in common than meets the eye and Gabriel is insightful enough to bypass the labels we put on others and ourselves and just get to the common origin stories and experiences. Aziraphale asks if his plan is to sort the books alphabetically by author and Gabriel says he is by the first letter of the first sentence-- ironically, Gabriel is sorting by author, really, but he's matching up authors based on what they've written, not by their similar names.
Why this matters is because we now have this scene between Gabriel and Aziraphale where the concept of an author is in play. Gabriel can't remember what the word means but his project is based around what is actually a really deep understanding of one. At the same time, Aziraphale knows what the humans refer to as an author but is struggling to claim authorship of his own life. The word author was also at the core of this struggle for him in S1 when he prayed for help in stopping Armageddon. What was it that Aziraphale said he was looking to reach when he prayed?
"A higher authority."
Aziraphale was looking to reach God or anyone with the power to stop Armageddon and his efforts to find someone else to be that higher authority were unsuccessful and that is because we are all the authors of our own lives.
We are God.
Aziraphale is his own higher authority. He is the author of his own plan-- his own life.
And, if The Voice of God in the series that we hear is really Aziraphale?
Then look at that moment when Gabriel pulled a book off the shelf of the bookshop-- one without a title or an author, though someone has written it-- and it turned out to be one with which we're very familiar:
As Gabriel works on his book organization project, we get this trippy moment when he opens up and reads from the first page of a copy of a book that we all know as Good Omens. There is evidence that this is different from just the "lol Aziraphale is a Doctor Who fan" joke elsewhere in the season. This Clue comes in the shot showing us the book itself from multiple angles in Gabriel's hands-- and the fact that the cover is not the same as our copies of the book. It is a red clothbound hardcover with no dust jacket and no visible title or author printed anywhere on it.
The show has already established that Terry Pratchett and that other guy exist in the Good Omens universe because their solo books are visible at different points in the series. When it establishes that the novel Good Omens exists within the Good Omens universe, though, it does so only by establishing that the text of book we know does. The title of it is not visible and neither are any evidence of its authors in our world, despite their existence in this fictional one.
Moreover, by showing us the first page of what we know to be the Good Omens novel, they're showing us a part of the book that we've already heard before, near its beginning. This bit highlighted on the screen to us-- the opening sentence and first, full paragraph of the novel-- were God's narration over the end of the Eden scene in the first episode. Most of the narration of The Voice of God in S1, as we know, is taken from passages of the Good Omens novel and the show establishes in S2 with this Gabriel scene that the text of Good Omens exists in an unmarked book in Aziraphale's bookshop.
I think it's all saying pretty emphatically that Good Omens, in the Good Omens universe, was written by Aziraphale.
The only way that works then is if the voice we've been hearing both read this book to us and seeming to speak to Aziraphale is of Aziraphale's own creation, which would then mean that Frances McDormand is also, essentially, playing Aziraphale. She is just what God sounds like in Aziraphale's head. She is what Aziraphale imagines God to be. She is, effectively, Aziraphale.
This then suddenly makes everything about God's narration make a lot more sense, right? God's love of humanity and her interest in behavioral science and her cheeky, dry-as-a-bone humor is all very Aziraphale. God's love of Crowley and the way that she approves of him and Aziraphale's relationship and sees them as people like her other beings is what Aziraphale believes would be true of the loving God that he believes in and is fundamentally true of how he views their relationship and Crowley himself. God's ability to speak Crowley and Aziraphale's language and the novel being written in it becomes less that God can do so because she's God and more because she's really just Aziraphale.
The whole novel itself takes on quite a different perspective if you look at it as the book above that Gabriel found when he was organizing the books. The one that, as of S2, it was too dangerous to have labeled at all but that we can theorize was written by Aziraphale and is wrapped up and bound in Crowley's signature color and that color of love-- red.
The book we know as Good Omens is, in the Good Omens universe, a book that Aziraphale wrote for Crowley in which they are two of the characters.
This is, more than anything else we've seen so far, the real book of life.
I think that it's saying that if you were to finish the series and find this to be true, you could then go pick up the novel again and read it as if Aziraphale wrote it, with the narrative passages maybe in his Voice of God Frances McDormand voice but with the knowledge that The Voice of God is really Aziraphale himself.
I love this idea because it means that the tv series that keeps giving us more information that reframes our prior understanding of things might wind up ending with a twist where the nature of The Voice of God in the series is such that it won't even just make rewatching the show a extra fun (although it will) but it'll make it so that you'll be able to go all the way back and read the novel in a different way as well, now with the perspective that Aziraphale is meant to be its author.
This also would be fun because it'd then be viewing the tv series as the canon and the book as what Aziraphale wrote happened and any discrepancies and changes as Aziraphale's writing choices. It means you get to read the passages in the book that are descriptive of Crowley or of he and Aziraphale together from the viewpoint that Aziraphale wrote them, which honestly makes them even funnier.
This would mean that God, as she's been presented to us so far in the series, is an actual being because she's Aziraphale and that we will see her in the finale because she's been a part of our main character all along.
So... there's then just one question left... and it's the same one we had earlier on in the meta:
Does God exist?
If The Voice of God is Aziraphale's inner Voice of God then is the story going to suggest that a real God does exist or is it going to suggest that she doesn't or is that going to be left as an open question?
There are a couple of paths that they could take-- two that I can see and likely some I haven't.
One is Agnes Nutter. I know a lot of people have theories that she's actually God. They could suggest or imply that a bit. In some ways, they might already have done so, as others have suggested.
The other path is the one that I think they might take, though, regardless of what they do or don't suggest with Agnes, which is to leave it so that Aziraphale is The Voice of Frances McDormand God and it's an open question as to whether or not an actual God exists.
The reason why I think it's that path that they're going to take is that Good Omens has a lot of themes around recognizing and claiming personal power and living to your own moral code. It's also very much aligning these supernatural beings in its story with the humans in it and it might just be the writer in me but I think it would be a stronger ending to have the angels and demons wondering just as much as the humans if God exists than it would be to definitively give an answer.
They're all going to know that The Ineffable/Great/Divine Plan in the sense that Heaven was saying existed for eons doesn't exist but the angels and demons will be left wondering along with the humans if they have a creator and if that creator made them for any particular reasons... just like how we wonder those things, too.
As much as the story is a religious satire, it's also a romance, and I can't see an ending of this story doing much to say that Crowley is wrong for his romantic notions that he and Aziraphale were made for each other. It's probably going to just leave the existence of God as an open question.
The story is already going to provide the characters with some much-needed peace from the fact that they'll know that what they endured was a judgement of The Metatron and not God. That and the resulting more peaceful system in Heaven will allow Crowley and Aziraphale to go live their life together without as much fear and they will do that. They might be able to put a name and a title on that book and own the authorship of their story. Even if some might label it as fiction, Gabriel, at least, sees it as belonging alongside the other, human-penned books on the I shelf in the bookshop, and he won't be the only one by the end of the story.
Not knowing then if God exists at all will yield just as many questions... but, if they had all the answers, where would be the sense of wonder in that? It will certainly give them some things to talk about for eternity together. 😊
One of the most enduring realizations I'm left with from Season 2 is how depressed Crowley is in the present day. And S2 gives us ample contrast: Crowley is mischievous and rabble-rousing in every historical scene. Making trouble, pushing buttons, mixing it up. Provoking his angel, gently. Challenging his pink-lensed worldview. Even when he's calm, though, he's mild, given to smiling that he tries very hard to conceal from Aziraphale. But in the present day, when he's not fighting with Aziraphale or screaming lightning down from the sky, he looks tired. Exhausted, even. Someone for whom hope is an effort.
In the present, the two times he doesn't seem absolutely run down are when he's rushing to his angel's rescue because Aziraphale called him with his "something's wrong" voice and when he's following his angel around like a puppy, tugging at his pant legs with "Can I watch???" Both of these are times when his angel has either explicitly expressed the desire to have him near or is actively doing something particularly Aziraphalean that Crowley just cannot resist.
Through most of the scenes in the present, he's melancholy. He's lost his flat, he's living out of his car, and his relationship with Aziraphale remains largely unaltered from its state at the end of S1. Hell is breathing down his neck a bit, and while he's up to the task of fending off their regular harassment, dealing with the risk of Gabriel and the consequences of helping him provoke considerably more stress for our demon. In the present, Crowley seems very unhappy. Miserable, even.
And yes, he's a demon, and they are experts in doling out and putting up with misery, but... Crowley's tired.
He even asks what’s the point at the beginning of S2 present day. I think he’s unhappy because of the bentley and the flat and that his relationship with aziraphale hasn’t really changed, but I also think retirement is hard (for both him and aziraphale actually). Imagine spending 6000 years doing something, and then suddenly you’re…not. I think they both seemed happier when they were each trying to get maggie and nina together, and it makes sense, they had a job to do again.
This gets closest to where I think Crowley is in s2, yes.
Crowley is a doer and a maker. He likes to make things (that make other things). He likes to do things, even if sometimes those things are pretty ridiculous -- c'mon, Odegra, really?
In s1, Crowley hits the end of his rope on this when he can't see anything else he can do about Armageddon. The Warlock gambit was a bust. He doesn't know where the actual Antichrist is, so not only can he not manipulate Aziraphale into killing him, he can't go kill him himself. (Whether he would is... a question.) He's left with the very Monty Pythonic "run awaaaaaaay!" and I think we all know that's hardly his best moment.
In s2, Crowley's at the end of his rope again, but in a different way: ennui. Without his job, without any obvious looming cosmic threats, without his ersatz conservatory, he's "transcendentally bored" and unable to shake how everything feels "pointless."
I don't know how s3 will resolve this. Lovely though it is, a retirement cottage in the South Downs doesn't fix Crowley's ennui problem. I do think a satisfying resolution would leave Crowley with an actual job to do, though.
And yes, I don't know why people don't discuss this more. Crowley seems so down at the beginning of S2 and we see Aziraphale try to cheer him up, call him with basically any old reason to hang out which helps but is not everything. And I expect this is how they spent the past few years...mainly.
They are clearly closer but by far not as close as we all expected*.
Why didn't Crowley tell Aziraphale about Shax, about his flat.
We see how quickly Aziraphale offers Jim a place to stay. Crowley must have known Azi would do that in a heartbeat for him.
Was it too much? All at once?
He says in FF that they spent a lot more time together in the last few years, and it definitely looks like that. They are closer, physically, emotionally; comfortable around each other, there's no formal distance or the whole left-right positioning etc. The way Azi barges into him to talk about the half miracle, how he shoves him out of the shop with 'wait and see', how Crowley simply sits on the arm of Azi's chair when talking to Muriel. How they bicker about everything all the time.
I don't think either of them really miss their jobs. But they both know I think they are not really free. And they feel a bit lost without the structure they had for 6000 years.
They also probably aren't sure how far they can go before they cross some line they aren't supposed to.
And I think they both worried about this incessantly (for each other) and probably didn't talk about it.
Just been very careful to be as close as possible but not as close as they like cos something might happen.
My hope for S3 is that their cottage will be a retirement haven but only part time. Cos part-time the husbands will be organising and teaching the now free angels and demons about Earth, about how they can help, how they can organise themselves and reduce their own and Earth suffering and unhappiness.
It will take time but they have time.
*Yes, of course I've seen the takes that say that Crowley was waiting for Aziraphale to ask him to date properly, to have a full on relationship etc etc and Aziraphale is clearly still stupid/hopes Heaven will take him back/stuck in his morality problem etc which is such BS.
I agree; they’re both adrift in S2. Crowley is openly depressed, Aziraphale is basically gnawing his own leg off for something to do all season and, when something to do presents itself, he’s off like a steam engine while Crowley is rather peculiarly passive.
I keep having this thought that, traditionally, angels and demons are functionaries. They don’t have free will; they’re there to serve a purpose, even if it’s just circling God’s throne and eternally chanting “holy, holy, holy” which sounds like one of the worst jobs ever, to be frank.
While our two have developed quite a lot of free will and individual interests, they need something to do, they need a job. Aziraphale is poised in a slightly better position because he has the bookshop and local standing, but he’s just as desperate for meaning as Crowley.
My secret thought about S3 (haven’t mentioned it aloud before, might as well now) is that they may end up budding off into a world of their own to manage, that that little planet that pops up between them in the intro might turn out to be the cottage.
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Michael bringing David up unprompted over and over again
Michael turning into a sunshine once he found a way to talk about David
Michael’s licks and smirks and sparkly eyes at every mention of Doctor Who
Why be The Doctor when you can be The Master in an intense relationship with The Doctor - they’d need to bring David back as the Doctor for that, though, of course.
Michael would like David to pay homage to him by playing both Crowley and Aziraphale, spoke about them going for the same roles before, David being his favourite costar, and chose David to do his eulogy. I’ve always quite liked him.
Michael also later noted that his friends had their loved ones do their eulogies. There is no way around it now that I’m saddled with him.
Michael talked about struggles of being queer in Port Talbot in the 80s, and his first crush on a man and how he processed it.
After the podcast was released, he reposted Pride Event at Port Talbot.
Since I've figure a few things out, I need to re-do my Murder Board. New answers, new questions.
What I think I know:
NEIL GAIMAN IS A LYING LIAR WHO LIES. Except when he's dropping hints or answering straight out. All of his answers to anything anyone asks about GO are suspect at best. (I cannot blame him or anyone else on the cast or crew -- they spent A LOT of time and energy building this very meticulous puzzle game for us -- why would ANY of them give ANY of it away? That would ruin all the fun!)
Most of the discontinuity of Season 2 can be explained by POV switches between characters. See here and here for more. I think the title/location cards are also probably POV Clues, that needs a closer look.
Crowley gave something to Aziraphale in his mouth when they kissed. It's the fly. Now, what else was in the fly besides Gabriel's memory?
Saraqael and Crowley and by proxy, Aziraphale are all working together. That explains A. the tiny miracle blowing up into a 25 Lazarii miracle. It didn't. They had to cover for something else that did. B. Saraqael showing the archangels the book shop in 2019 in the spy hole. C. Crowley's spy turtle neck and where he went during Aziraphale's Job flashback. D. Why Saraqael helps him see the trial in Heaven. (Oh! Muriel's now in on it, too!)
Crowley's memory is fine, it's a red herring. He is dissing Furfur, he is denying knowing Saraqael even after she gives him a reason to recognize her to hide that they are working together. He tells Jim he doesn't remember why they invented gravity, but that whole scene if from Aziraphale's perspective, so the conversation likely didn't actually go just like that.
Shax is on a mission besides Gabriel -- she's looking for whatever Aziraphale and Crowley are hiding. Gabriel is a side-mission.
The hand-washing comment from Crowley in the Resurrectionists minisode -- he tells DaVinci about helicopters in Good Omens the novel. It's just a thing he can do.
What is up with Maggie? Maggie's freaking Jesus 2.0. She's what Shax is looking for, and who Crowley, Aziraphale, and Saraqael are hiding. Also, where is God? God is busy being Maggie, that's where.
SECRET SONGS??? Why are the songs secret?? I'm losing my mind, what is happening?? I think this is a message that A. Aziraphale and Crowley are okay, and B. We will absolutely be getting part 3 of 1941.
I still think the scenes might be out of order. Is it as simple as watching them in chronological order? Could be.
What still needs answering:
The clocks jumping time still don't make any sense.
The weird hand in the 1941 photo still doesn't make sense.
Aziraphale's chair position being moved still doesn't make sense.
The extras behaving strangely still doesn't make sense.
Crowley's car being in the wrong spot on the road after Shax threatens him still doesn't make any sense.
I'm not sure that the POV switches explains all the weird sounds.
I'm not sure that POV switches explain Crowley's sunglasses going from silver to black.
What did Gabriel need to bring to Aziraphale? I think he put whatever it was in the fly along with his memory.
I still don't know why Aziraphale went to Edinburgh, or why he stopped at the graveyard where Gabriel's statue is.
Why does Michael do the "nothing's in the box" thing with the matchbox? It's a petty specific action. Someone pointed out that Michael's nails look chewed and terrible, are we meant to stare at the matchbox while something else goes unnoticed? Well, duh. But what?
We most certainly did not get the whole scene where the Metatron is talking to Aziraphale. What else was said?
What did Crowley do during his ALL-NIGHT JAUNT in Heaven? Did he sneak around and steal something? Did he uncover something? Did they hurt him?
What did Aziraphale do with his briefcase that he took to Edinburgh? We see it in the book shop from his POV, and Edinburgh is seen from Crowley's POV, so they both know it exists. And then it's gone.
Why does Gabriel prophecy with God's voice? IS it God's voice? It's a woman, is it Francis McDormand? It's hard to hear.
Why the heck did Maggie and Nina go talk to Crowley while the Metatron was talking to Aziraphale? What they had to say wasn't important enough to leave Nina's shop during a rush, and I definitely don't think they derailed Crowley from what he needed to say to Aziraphale, though it might look at first as if they did. So what was that about?
When Shax stops Aziraphale for a ride, he says, "Oh, I really need to get to --" and then is cut off. He really needs to get to where? It's an easy assumption to think he means the book shop, or London. But is that all he means? Or was he on his way somewhere else? And if it was just the book shop, what does he mean he's late? Late for what?
Crowley can tell "something's wrong," and he doesn't just mean the demons. What?
Why would the Metatron allow Beelzebub and Gabriel to leave, after trying to stop Armageddon 2.0, but come after Crowley and Aziraphale like that? Because of the big miracle? Just because they're higher-ups? Something stinks.
Why does Crowley say "Oh, God," right before his confession in the final fifteen? To let Aziraphale know that he understands what Aziraphale is saying? That God (or the Voice) is there? Seems possible.
When Crowley leaves Heaven, he tells Saraqael and Muriel to come, too. But in the elevator, Michael and Uriel are there! When the fuck did they show up??
Why does Beelzebub tell Shax to attack the bookstore? Aren't they worried about Gabriel being harmed? And they know Hell is understaffed. Maybe that's why they command it? Because they know Shax won't be able to get the demons?
What about the Masons? It's such a specific thing for the pub owner to bring up, what is the meaning of it? And Maggie has a Mason symbol on her necklace. Did the Masons carve the statue of Gabriel? When did they see him?
The only narration we hear in the entire season is Aziraphale in the Resurrectionist flashback. I believe this is to throw us off the POV character switches all season. But still, why do we only hear him narrate 1 flashback? I think he's reading the diary to himself in the present day. That would explain the end, "And that was the last I was to see of Crowley for some time." He JUST heard the story of the jukebox from Maggie. And Gabriel appearing -- same city that statue is in. Of course he thought of something important from that diary entry! Now, what did he notice?
Is the Book of Life a real threat? We hear two stories about it, that it's real and that its ability to erase beings was something to scare the cherubs with, this is inconclusive. Crowley gets nervous after Beelzebub talks to him, but I think he's pissed that Heaven and Hell have taken an interest in them again, especially since they're trying to hide Maggie!Jesus.
So many promo posters show Aziraphale, Crowley, and Jimbriel together, or symbols of them. Three feathers: two white, one black. Tea cup, cocoa mug, wine glass. The three of them. Not with Beelzebub, not with Muriel, the three of them. And all three of them have been Jesus-coded in some small way. No one else. Those three. What. Why. Are they the sacrifice required to bring about the new world? Why not Beez, then?
Wait. Two Crowleys?? WTF. There are two Crowley puppets in the magic shop, and Crowley doesn't remember Saraqael or Furfur. Is he dissing them, or is that the second Crowley that never did meet either of them? Am I insane? I have no theory here, just some wild speculation that needs a lot more time to simmer. Two actual Crowleys, or two ideas of Crowley? Or something to hurt my head?
Why are they in a cave in the opening sequence? The guy who made the opening sequence says they are in the fly that Gabriel stores his memory in. Okay, why? And Crowley lights a match to see. Hm. What else was in that fly that Gabriel didn't take when he got his memory out?
An album on the wall in Maggie's shop says "Rat Keith." This seems to me to be an allusion to The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, by Terry Pratchett. In the book, some men have tied several rats' tails together to create a rat king that keeps the wild rats under control -- except that the rat king has too much power and is doing way more than just that. People die. So who's been given too much power and is now running the show instead of being a puppet? The Metatron, perhaps? Hm . . . Also, Keith is the young boy who plays the part of the Pied Piper for Maurice's scam. He leads all the rats out of town, never mind that the rats can talk and are in on the scam.
Repeating themes:
Beverages of all kinds -- tea for Aziraphale, wine or whiskey for Crowley, cocoa for Jim.
Time -- lots of clocks/mentions of time
Love/partnership/togetherness being stronger than separateness
Memories/forgetting/remembering
Payment -- money comes up in both the Resurrectionists minisode and the Flesh Eating Nazi Zombies minisode, but no one pays for anything in present. There is bartering, but no money.
Rising from the dead -- Job's kids (even though they weren't actually dead), bodies used for science, Nazi zombies, the Second Coming.
Unreliable narrators
Death in general -- but 9a., I'm a dirty pagan, why didn't I make this connection sooner, death always leads to REBIRTH, change, something totally new and 9b. there are tarot cards in the magic shop, and even if you're not a dirty pagan, the Death tarot card means transition, something must die before a new thing can be born. Hmmmm.
Morality and what is "good" and what is right
Recognition and identity
Repeating words and phrases:
Technically
Properly
Isn't it just?
Too late
Funny old world
Not as such
Made for each other
EVERYWHERE
Obviously
Two shakes of a lamb's tail
Hints:
Powell and Pressburg films
The Crow Road
Catch 22
The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents, Terry Pratchett in general
Jane Austin
Book Good Omens
The titles of episodes, minisodes, places, etc. 7a. The Arrival: a book and a movie, though the book seems far more relevant. And lovely. The Clue: a movie. Companion to Owls: a line from a Bible story. I Know Where I'm Going: a movie. The Resurrectionists: two novels, each called The Resurrectionist, singular. Both look unhinged. The Hitchhiker: a Twilight Zone episode. Nazi Zombie Flesheaters: Literally no other reference. ?? Nazi Zombies do appear in a LOT of movies, comics, and video games, usually as a dark joke. The Ball: a video game. Irrelevant? It's a puzzle-based game, so maybe not. Every Day: a song AND a movie. Some themes repeat here: Puzzle games, being re-directed from one's path to find true love, death and being brought back to life in a gruesome and unpleasant way.
I don't have any specific addresses to any points in this post, I think it's a great overview of Things That Don't Add Up. And oh, they are Legion. I just have two things to add to the general pile.
One, just an opinion. We've seen allusions to the Three Shell Trick in both seasons now. There are three shells. There will be three seasons. I really don't think we have been given enough to put together any complete hypothesis with what we have. I'm loving all the fascinating places people are going with what we've got, though.
Two. At some point Neil Gaiman referenced The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare by GK Chesterton. He says it's a book he and Terry had in mind when they were writing Good Omens, in answer to an ask about what else someone could read to understand GO better. But not many people seem to have dug into it here. I read it yonks and yonks ago, and I'm currently chewing through it again. It's a quick read, very much a book of its time which might put people off, but it starts with two poets in conversation. A red-haired anarchist and a law abiding blond. Then it proceeds to go completely nuts, in a rather Edwardian kind of way. It's also full of quiet sarcasm. Is it a thriller or a fantasy or a satire? Yes.
(I'm just going to stick in here the last lines of the poem that prefaces my edition, dedicated to Edmund Clerihew Bentley. Because they say a lot, I think
Between us, by the peace of God, such truth can now be told,
Yea, there is strength in striking root, and good in growing old.
We have found common things at last, and marriage and a creed,
And I may safely write it now, and you may safely read. )
Thank you for the additional read to add to my list!
I do agree that while there is a certain amount we're meant to find, more is going to be left unanswered, even in season 3, because digging up the answers is part of the fun.
I still don't know why Aziraphale went to Edinburgh, or why he stopped at the graveyard where Gabriel's statue is.
This doesn't have a straight forward answer. It's not meant to. Its the same reason they go to the pub to talk about Nina and Maggie. The show isn't structured in a simple linear way, its structured in pairs and parallels. It's multilayered. It jumps back and forth, just like the structure of Catch-22 does. You can't understand some of the early stuff until you see the later scenes. What you see as the linear story on the surface is a thin veneer. The true guts of the story and its meaning is underneath that.
The statue of Gabriel is something I'm writing up at the moment for Part 4 in my Aziraphale's Edinburgh Journey series, and it is a larger parallel to some scenes in S1. I should have it out in a few days. I had help spotting that, as I will credit, but it goes wider than originally thought, and I'll be writing a couple of other posts to go with it in explanation about structure. There is nothing hidden under the statue, that is not its function.
Why does Gabriel prophecy with God's voice? IS it God's voice? It's a woman, is it Francis McDormand? It's hard to hear.
I think this may be Anathema's voice. This is only after a lot of thought and some other ops also think that. Why? Still not sure, but Anathema is tied into the future, like Aziraphale is. Will have to wait for S3, I think.
Why the heck did Maggie and Nina go talk to Crowley while the Metatron was talking to Aziraphale?
Because Maggie is a parallel character to Aziraphale/Beelzebub and they are all tied to the future. Most people have noted that some of what they say is foreshadowing, such as the waiting comment. That whole conversation is foreshadowing for something in S3, imho.
Crowley can tell "something's wrong," and he doesn't just mean the demons. What?
That's the "malignant and creeping sense of unease" Furfur offers Shax when she's trying to requisition demons. Everyone seems to forget about that.
What about the Masons? It's such a specific thing for the pub owner to bring up, what is the meaning of it? And Maggie has a Mason symbol on her necklace. Did the Masons carve the statue of Gabriel? When did they see him?
No, the Freemasons didn't carve the statue. They are there because of their beliefs, as a contrast to Christian beliefs. They are similar, but different. Did you know the Freemasons appear in S1 as well? It's just we weren't tuned to look for their symbology then. But once you know what it is, its everywhere. Its part of the Memento mori theme that's there throughout both seasons, that something has to come to an end and change. We're still getting there - the change is to come in S3.
So many promo posters show Aziraphale, Crowley, and Jimbriel together, or symbols of them. ... And all three of them have been Jesus-coded in some small way.
I did a series showing how Crowley and Gabriel, who are parallels and foils to each other in S2, trace out the Passion during S2. I've seen some ops reckon Aziraphale has Jesus-like traits as well, and there is some argument as to who might be Judas. There is something there. I think we might need S3 to work it out definitively, so stick a bookmark on that one and sit tight.
Why are they in a cave in the opening sequence?
This one bothers me from time to time, then I have to sit and think, and remember that Jesus was entombed in a cave for three days before his resurrection, and this is probably just a clue for this, and the Second Coming.
An album on the wall in Maggie's shop says "Rat Keith."
They couldn't use any real albums or band names on the walls of the record shop for copyright reasons, so just about everything in there is made up. For that reason, I don't put much weight on anything seen in there, except a few things, like the movie poster.
Beverages of all kinds -- tea for Aziraphale, wine or whiskey for Crowley, cocoa for Jim.
Both myself and @vidavalor have talked extensively about the metaphorical meanings of food and drink in the series. For myself you start with The Cupperty Ceremony, The Altar of Eccles Cakes, Wickedly Witchy Food Bribes , thoughts on the coffee in Liberty and the Tree of Life, and I'll just reference this recent thread with general drinks from the other day.
Vidavalor has their foundational Crepes meta, Bread, Fish, Canapes, Peas, and here we discuss the ice creams in S1 together (and one has to note that the red ice is actually an easter egg from an old 1960's film called Bedazzled, which is also a retelling of Faust.)
It all recalls the old words "give us this day our daily bread", the loaves and fishes, and turning water in wine stories.
And an object can have more than one metaphorical meaning laid upon it. That is what we are finding. Three or four, or even five meanings are not unusual in Good Omens, far and above most books, shows and films. Neil really has done his best to pack in as much as he can with this show!
Repeating words and phrases:
Technically
Yep. I did a whole meta on the words of authority here. I plan to explore the theme of Authority a bit further, too. Just need a bit more time at the moment.
And to all the book title and movie title references and show title references - yes, you need to read/watch them if you haven't and you aren't familiar with them. I watched "I Know Where I'm Going" the other day (its a lovely film!) and there were lots of relevant references to S2 and Ep 3, which I will be writing up soon. But there is so much to do!
And unfortunately, some of it we just have to wait for S3 to happen, as well. We can see that there should be a parallel in places, but for certain scenes don't have them - they are the ones to flag for foreshadowing (and I'm starting to think some of them were meant to connect into the missing minisodes, and I'm starting to do some work on them, too). And some scenes we expect a third parallel as well. That's where you need to start making your bingo card list.
Hello, thanks for the replies! Here are my thoughts on a bit of what you pointed out:
I still don't know why Aziraphale went to Edinburgh, or why he stopped at the graveyard where Gabriel's statue is.
"This doesn't have a straight forward answer. It's not meant to. Its the same reason they go to the pub to talk about Nina and Maggie. The show isn't structured in a simple linear way, its structured in pairs and parallels. It's multilayered. It jumps back and forth, just like the structure of Catch-22 does. You can't understand some of the early stuff until you see the later scenes. What you see as the linear story on the surface is a thin veneer. The true guts of the story and its meaning is underneath that."
I disagree that there isn't a straightforward answer to this question. If there is no reason or no straightforward answer, that breaks a lot of narrative rules. The reason can be hidden, as I think it is, but it can't be non-existent. In every scene, a character must accomplish something, whether that is going to an important place, learning important information, leaving an important place, meeting an important person, etc. Something has to get done. I saw one meta that said the reason Aziraphale goes to Edinburgh is to move the narrative forward, but it only does that if he accomplishes something. I think he did, we just have to tease out what he accomplished. I do believe we've been given all the information we need, it's just been laid out in subtext to make us work for it.
You also mention that it's the same reason they go to the pub to discuss Maggie and Nina -- I think you're on to something there, but I know why they go to the pub to discuss Maggie and Nina. That thread needs tugging on. It's the key to a lot of what we see that seems odd.
And I don't think there's something under or inside Gabriel's statue. It's important, but I'm not sure why yet.
Why does Gabriel prophecy with God's voice? IS it God's voice? It's a woman, is it Francis McDormand? It's hard to hear.
"I think this may be Anathema's voice. This is only after a lot of thought and some other ops also think that. Why? Still not sure, but Anathema is tied into the future, like Aziraphale is. Will have to wait for S3, I think."
I wonder if it is Anathema. Someone pointed out that the prophecies Gabriel says sound kind of biblical, but they aren't actually from any book in the Bible. It would make sense if they are from another book of prophecy -- perhaps a book we are all familiar with? Or its sequel, perhaps? I'm not sure on this one, because I also don't think Gabriel has Agnes Nutter's book -- either of them. This thread needs pulling on, too.
Why the heck did Maggie and Nina go talk to Crowley while the Metatron was talking to Aziraphale?
"Because Maggie is a parallel character to Aziraphale/Beelzebub and they are all tied to the future. Most people have noted that some of what they say is foreshadowing, such as the waiting comment. That whole conversation is foreshadowing for something in S3, imho."
I feel like that answer is a little too meta -- ? Is that the word I'm searching for? Too inconcrete, perhaps. Maggie and Nina talking to Crowley has to have a narrative reason, this is a TV adaptation of a speculative novel that was never written; it must follow certain rules of narration, and the characters having reasons that they at least believe are important for doing things is one of those rules. They can't just flit around being mirrors of other characters, they have to have agency of their own. There are a lot of layers of meaning to the book and to the show, but at its base it is still a piece of commercial fiction and must behave like one. This scene may very well be foreshadowing and parallel-drawing, but it also has to give the characters agency.
Crowley can tell "something's wrong," and he doesn't just mean the demons. What?
"That's the "malignant and creeping sense of unease" Furfur offers Shax when she's trying to requisition demons. Everyone seems to forget about that."
I have not forgotten that, and I don't think that's what he's talking about. It's too clear a line for it to just be a throw-away reference back to Shax requisitioning demons. Crowley can tell things about the future (hand washing, helicopters), and sense things (when the hell hound finds Adam). He's got a whiff of something, and I want to know what it is. Now, Mrs. Cheng entering the ball, I think, is picking up that malignant and creeping sense of unease. I've seen some people hypothesize that because of her weird pause, she must be a demon or something similar; I believe that's where the MACSOU is coming into play.
What about the Masons? It's such a specific thing for the pub owner to bring up, what is the meaning of it? And Maggie has a Mason symbol on her necklace. Did the Masons carve the statue of Gabriel? When did they see him?
"No, the Freemasons didn't carve the statue. They are there because of their beliefs, as a contrast to Christian beliefs. They are similar, but different. Did you know the Freemasons appear in S1 as well? It's just we weren't tuned to look for their symbology then. But once you know what it is, its everywhere. Its part of the Memento mori theme that's there throughout both seasons, that something has to come to an end and change. We're still getting there - the change is to come in S3."
I'm not currently prepared to say the Freemasons did or didn't carve the statue of Gabriel, though my money is on did.
I did not notice the Masonic symbolism in season 1! Thank you! I'll have to go have a look!
I don't believe they are there only as a contrast to Christian beliefs or mythology. The reference is way to specific -- and why refer to a group whose literal start was carving stone when Jewish faith, or Muslim, or Hindu, or Norse, could have been used instead? Including Masons was a choice, and not one that was made off-handedly. They are there for a reason. And as everything else in commercial fiction, their presence has to do double-duty -- it can represent all sorts of things, but it has to have a solid narrative purpose as well. The Masons are in this up to their stone-carving necks.
So many promo posters show Aziraphale, Crowley, and Jimbriel together, or symbols of them. ... And all three of them have been Jesus-coded in some small way.
"I did a series showing how Crowley and Gabriel, who are parallels and foils to each other in S2, trace out the Passion during S2. I've seen some ops reckon Aziraphale has Jesus-like traits as well, and there is some argument as to who might be Judas. There is something there. I think we might need S3 to work it out definitively, so stick a bookmark on that one and sit tight."
Yep, I read and enjoyed your theories. I think these promo posters are, in fact, some sort of foreshadowing, and we may very well need to wait for season 3 for answers there.
Why are they in a cave in the opening sequence?
"This one bothers me from time to time, then I have to sit and think, and remember that Jesus was entombed in a cave for three days before his resurrection, and this is probably just a clue for this, and the Second Coming."
It's not a cave. In an interview about the Easter Eggs in the opening sequence, Peter Anderson says they are in the fly. And I think I know why.
An album on the wall in Maggie's shop says "Rat Keith."
"They couldn't use any real albums or band names on the walls of the record shop for copyright reasons, so just about everything in there is made up. For that reason, I don't put much weight on anything seen in there, except a few things, like the movie poster."
I totally put weight in everything we see. It's all there, either as an Easter Egg or deeper symbolism or as a Clue. This may just be an Easter Egg for Terry Pratchett fans, but it makes me think of the Metatron, something that was created for a particular purpose and got too big to control. I might be reaching, and I'm willing to concede that I am. I'll take Easter Egg. Another post talked about all the various albums in Maggie's shop and some of the Easter Eggs to be found in them, I don't know that I think they are a whole lot more than Easter Eggs, but they're fun to look at.
Beverages of all kinds -- tea for Aziraphale, wine or whiskey for Crowley, cocoa for Jim.
"Both myself and @vidavalor have talked extensively about the metaphorical meanings of food and drink in the series. For myself you start with The Cupperty Ceremony, The Altar of Eccles Cakes, Wickedly Witchy Food Bribes , thoughts on the coffee in Liberty and the Tree of Life, and I'll just reference this recent thread with general drinks from the other day.
Vidavalor has their foundational Crepes meta, Bread, Fish, Canapes, Peas, and here we discuss the ice creams in S1 together (and one has to note that the red ice is actually an easter egg from an old 1960's film called Bedazzled, which is also a retelling of Faust.)
It all recalls the old words "give us this day our daily bread", the loaves and fishes, and turning water in wine stories.
And an object can have more than one metaphorical meaning laid upon it. That is what we are finding. Three or four, or even five meanings are not unusual in Good Omens, far and above most books, shows and films. Neil really has done his best to pack in as much as he can with this show!"
Yep, I've read your and vidavalor's food metas, that's part of what made me notice the beverages. I absolutely agree that the objects shown throughout the show can have multiple meanings, that's part of why I wanted to make a note of the beverages and have a go at them myself at some point.
"And unfortunately, some of it we just have to wait for S3 to happen, as well. We can see that there should be a parallel in places, but for certain scenes don't have them - they are the ones to flag for foreshadowing (and I'm starting to think some of them were meant to connect into the missing minisodes, and I'm starting to do some work on them, too). And some scenes we expect a third parallel as well. That's where you need to start making your bingo card list."
I started working on a chiastic structure breakdown, and noticed some really odd stuff going on with it. The parallels are there, just not where you expect them to be. I'll keep working on that and post it once I have it done.
Thanks for the Good Omens discussion!! I'm having so much fun with this.
@melbatron5000 I can answer a couple of the things on your board, I think, especially the word-related questions, and I've some alternate opinions to some of the things you listed but I'm flattered to be about about 2 weeks behind on Asks & requested topics atm so I'm going to add a few topics you mentioned to my list & will tag you when I get to them & we can chat about them then, if that's good? I love hearing what you all think about things. Thanks for recapping what we've already written on some of the topics, my good @drconstellation.
Hannibal/ Addams Family crossover where Hannibal is distantly related to Morticia and has tea with the family often
Morticia: Hannibal are you alright? You seem....conflicted
Hannibal: Will sent someone to kill me
Morticia: Oh that's wonderful!
Gomez: Stupendous!
Morticia: What's there to feel conflicted about?
Hannibal: I wish Will would attempt to kill me himself. And he practically seduced the man! Why won't he seduce me into killing someone for him?
Morticia: Because you framed and imprisoned him, dear-
Gomez: Remember when you framed me for that double homicide?
Morticia: -As if I could ever forget how you looked during your questioning. You mustn't be upset with the man for using the tools at his disposal. If he is trying to kill you, then he is thinking of you. Who cares what methods are used as long as it comes from the heart.
Buckle up, my fellow Good Omens Ineffable Mystery Puzzlers, Crackpotters, and Assorted Brainrotters, because I learned something HUGE yesterday.
This will be a bit of a long post, because I want to show you exactly how I got where I am. I want you to understand. I want to put all the naysayers to bed (ha! But I'm still gonna try), and settle this once and for all.
I know (almost) exactly what Crowley gave to Aziraphale during the kiss.
DO NOT TAKE ANY OF MY THEORIES TO NEIL! PLEASE!
Okay? Okay. Thanks. Shall we begin?
Ahem.
Firstly, whether you believe me or not, I am 100% certain that Crowley did, indeed, give something to Aziraphale in his mouth during The Kiss. I've covered that in the link previous. Okay? Okay.
I did not know what it was. I've now heard theories that it was a bullet (nope), a ball bearing (nope), hellfire (nope), and no one, NO ONE has suggested what I see. (If you have, hello! Talk to me!)
Here's our first foreshadowing Clue:
And here's our next foreshadowing Clue:
And the next:
And our last Clue:
With me so far? Well, that first GIF is a bit off, I couldn't find one of Crowley actually spitting out the flies. But he does. When Beelzebub first drags him to Hell, he actually goes "Pleaugh!" and spits out four or five flies.
Moving right along, we come to Crowley in Heaven with Muriel, looking at the trial. We learn two important things here:
One, Gabriel doesn't have a desk.
Two, Muriel does. Where they keep the records. And it's a bit lonely. Every few hundred years, someone comes and asks for something. Muriel can't access the sensitive ones, you have to be pretty high up. A throne, dominion, or higher. Like, maybe Supreme Archangel?
So if Gabriel doesn't have a desk, whose desk is he at when he's getting ready to leave Heaven? Of course I can't find a damn picture of Gabriel at the desk, but it's Muriel's. Where they keep the RECORDS.
Gabriel puts his memory into the fly, then gets on the elevator to go to Earth.
Now, when Gabriel opens the fly with his memories inside, we find out that it's a container. Bigger on the inside. You can put thing(S) in it. The bit we see of him remembering is shot in two parts, one where he's flying down a red tunnel, one where he's flying down a blue. If you slow this scene down and watch, you can see that he is NOT looking at just his own memories. There is more going on here, more that he was not present for. @embracing-the-ineffable put up a great meta about that here. Go look!
Now I figured Gabriel must have taken something else. Something important. Something useful. Something he meant to give to Aziraphale, except he forgot.
I also figured he must have left whatever it was in the fly when he took his memories out. Crowley must have realized while watching the trial footage that Gabriel also grabbed something else. I don't know when Crowley grabs the fly, but he does. And that is what he gives to Aziraphale in the kiss. Why? Well.
I had no idea what Gabriel took until I started working on the chiastic structure of season 2. I'm not done with that analysis yet, but let me show you one thing that I have found so far:
(The numbers are just to try and help me navigate the story and its events without time stamps)
My note #357 of what happens isn't quite right, but when I saw the only two times Aziraphale says "I forgive you" are towards the beginning of Season 2 and towards the end, I realized I had something.
Rephrase line 357: Crowley's kiss is forgiven IN EXCHANGE FOR RECORDS.
(Not that I think Crowley's kiss needs to be forgiven. It's just what Aziraphale says, and had to say at that moment, because the Metatron was listening in.)
What does Heaven in Good Omens remind us of most of all?
A big corporate entity. And what do powerful people do when they get fired from a big corporate entity? They download all their emails while they're cleaning out their desks. Damning emails. Emails that can be used to black mail or even destroy big corporate entities. Or, ya know, maybe they swipe some sensitive RECORDS?
Oh yes.
Here's Aziraphale reading the records:
Here's Aziraphale being horrified and outraged by what he's reading:
And here's Aziraphale realizing he has got some GOOD DIRT on Heaven. Maybe enough to bring them down:
That's it folks. I have no idea what the records actually say, and maybe we're not meant to know until season 3, but whatever it is, it's GOOD.
That's my story, and by God Herself, I'm sticking to it.
I’ve been meaning to address this for a while now, but @camdenleisurepirates gave me the final push after reading my piece on Gabriel’s cross. Huge thanks for that morsel of motivation, my ADHD brain loves you.
This is going to be yet another long read, although not as extensive as my bookshop statues meta. Still, better get yourself some hot chocolate or another drink of your choice and make sure you’re comfortable!
Now, remember the X-Ray interview with Peter Anderson on Easter Eggs in the opening animation he created for the second season? Forget red herrings, apparently our fandom has a literal red phone box! I’m convinced that this whole scene is a one big — the biggest, actually — Easter Egg, and I’ll explain why step-by-step.
The red phone box Crowley used to warn Aziraphale about the Antichrist and the following Armageddon in S1, the exact one where he left change for an emergency call, seems important enough in terms of the future S3 plot, but there’s so much more going on in this frame. Not only the lift.
The angels
At the very start of this sequence we can see a fragment of an elaborate bridge guarded by cherubs sitting on two columns, maybe globes, leading to a distant structure built over a literal mountain of trash — all elements of the S1 and S2 openings which were consciously picked out by the animators and put together in a very ominous pile.
Ready for some scavenging?
In the Gabriel’s cross meta, I already mentioned the importance of Ponte Sant’Angelo in relation to the ex-Archangel’s statue. Now it’s time to widen our perspective and focus on the full picture — quite literally. Apparently the bridge from the opening sequence has ten statues of angels, exactly as the Italian historical monument.
First things first though: the two big cherubs guarding the entry to the bridge might seem familiar to some of you. While they’re obviously not copies of the same statue, a very similar pair of brass cherubs is placed in Aziraphale’s bookshop to symbolize Aziraphale and Crowley. And looking at the screenshot above and the way they sleep or sulk with their backs turned on each other, they are most certainly not talking. The addition of more than one set of eyes is a lovely reference to biblically accurate angel memes though.
If we assume the traditional left-right positioning of the characters, Aziraphale is on the left and Crowley is on the right. Directly behind Aziraphale we can see a ship named “Good Traits”, but in reverse — kinda sorta confirmed by the animator Peter Anderson to be connected to the concept of the seven deadly sins on Twitter. Same that was mentioned recently by Neil in one of his asks.
The presence of Gabriel — a renegade Archangel wielding a broken cross — on the right, Crowley’s side, seems to match this theory. It could also support one of the possible interpretations of the very last bookshop shot in the S2 finale.
Out of all ten statues, Angel Carrying the Cross by Ercole Ferrata is considered inferior to the others on the bridge in that it appears to be a two-dimensional relief sculpture rather than an unbounded three-dimensional artwork, which seems to match Gabriel’s first impression as a character.
The inscription on the statue reads, “Dominion rests on his shoulders" — that is the weight of the cross that Christ was forced to carry through Jerusalem before being crucified. Even though Gabriel’s burden partially disappeared, the whole bridge and its environment is covered with crosses. It’s clear that we’re looking at a direct parallel of Via Crucis, the Way of Sorrows.
Towering over the Italian bridge, at the very top of Castel Sant’Angelo, is a statue of Archangel Michael, seen as the golden angel on the top left part of the trash pile. Aziraphale’s side, perhaps as his assistant, perhaps a rival? Legends of the Jews mention Michael as the chief of a band of angels who questioned God's decision to create man on Earth. The entire band of angels, except for Michael, was condemned to Fall — which could explain why they have such a good access to the Grapevine That Obviously Doesn’t Exist. And whatever’s going on between Michael and Dagon, perhaps.
In Roman Catholic teachings, Michael has four main roles or offices. Their first role is the leader of the Army of God and the leader of Heaven's forces in the final triumph over the powers of Hell. Viewed as the angelic model for the virtues of the spiritual warrior, their conflict with evil taken as the battle within. The second and third roles of Michael deal with death. Their second role is that of an angel of death, carrying the souls of Christians to Heaven. Michael descends at the hour of death and gives each soul the chance to redeem itself before passing; thus throwing the devil and his minions into consternation. In their third role, Michael weights souls on perfectly balanced scales they are often depicted with as their attribute. In their fourth role, Michael appears as the guardian of the Church. Might be the reason why they’re the closest to the building on top of the mountain.
It looks like Michael lost their sword though, just like Gabriel lost a part of the cross he was supposed to carry. The sword in question was supposed to be used to slay the dragon — Satan, the Adversary — according to John of Patmos and his Book of Revelations.
Speak of the devil: interestingly, there are two copies of an anonymous variation of the Angel of Light statue appearing twice on both sides of the bridge. Both the title as well as the statue itself seem like obvious references to one (former) angel literally called the Lightbringer, Lucifer. Perhaps one of them is representing his son, the Antichrist, instead, with the both of them helping out the Ineffables on two opposing — or perhaps only parallel — sides of the bridge?
The light carried by Lucifer appears to be green, a color used in the series as a visual representation of Hell, but on the intertextual level might also serve as a reference to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel The Great Gatsby and the green light at the end of the Daisy’s dock symbolizing the undying love, desperation, and longing for an unattainable dream. In the story, the color represents the limitations of power and money. Not surprisingly, the novel appears on Jim’s bookshelf and is part of the Good Omens book club — a list of personal recommendations from Neil Gaiman and Douglas Mackinnon for the fans to catch up on before the next series.
Last but not least, the possible connection to Libertas as the inspiration for the Statue of Liberty, shown multiple times in S2 as a foreshadowing of our character’s trip to America in S3. The related quote of Patrick Henry “Give me liberty or give me death” becomes even more relevant if we consider how the motto of the French Revolution was sometimes written as Liberté, égalité, fraternité ou la mort (“Liberty, equality, fraternity or death”). A lesson surely learnt by a certain angel back in 1793, when he was held prisoner for the last time before being forcefully taken Upstairs in the Final Fifteen.
The bridge and the castle
Okay, these are the basic observations. Now a brief historical overview and we will reach the fun bit in a jiffy.
Have you ever wondered about the meaning of this whole complex? It wasn’t always angelic, but named after a Roman noble dynasty. The Aelian bridge was built by the Emperor Hadrian in 134 AD to span River Tiber from the city center to his mausoleum. With time, the remains of more emperors were put to rest in there, until it was plundered and destroyed in a war. Then the remaining structure was transformed into a military fortress and a castle serving as the papal residence in times of war.
The Papal State also used Sant'Angelo as a prison; the Renaissance philosopher Giordano Bruno was imprisoned there for six years. Executions of the inmates were performed in the small inner courtyard, but they weren’t the only deaths in the area. On the other side of the bridge, in the adjoining Piazza del Ponte, under the watchful eyes of the stone likenesses of two saints, the public executions were held, and the heads of the criminals were brought onto the bridge and exposed to public view there.
As a prison, the former mausoleum is also the setting for the third act of Giacomo Puccini's 1900 opera Tosca. Long story short, the eponymous heroine convinces her lover to feign death so that they can flee together. Unfortunately, they are betrayed and the firing squad shoots at him with real bullets instead of blanks. Tosca believes in the quality of his acting performance rather than the truth, and when the realization hits her, she leaps to her death from the Castel’s ramparts.
After Nero’s bridge was destroyed, the travelers were forced to cross this bridge as the only direct route to the Vatican and St Peter’s Basilica, earning it the nickname “the bridge of Saint Peter”. That’s why in the 16th century Pope Clement VII erected statues of Saints Peter and Paul at the ends of the bridge, guarding it as they are supposed to protect the entry to Heaven.
In 1688 the bridge was embellished with ten angel statues, five on each side of the bridge, carrying Arma Christi, the Instruments of the Passion. The Good Omens characters represented by those statues in the opening sequence might be other instruments of Christ’s suffering as parts of the system that needs to be overthrown or replaced.
One angel appears particularly important in the context of both the bridge and the Second Coming — Saint Michael the Archangel.
Legend holds that the Archangel Michael appeared atop Hadrian’s mausoleum, sheathing their sword as a sign of the end of the plague of 590, thus lending the castle its present name. A less charitable yet more apt elaboration of the legend, given the militant disposition of this particular Archangel, was heard by the 15th-century traveler who saw an angel statue on the castle roof. He recounts that during a prolonged season of the plague, Pope Gregory I heard that the populace, even Christians, had begun revering a pagan idol at the church of Santa Agata in Suburra. A vision urged the Pope to lead a procession to the church. Upon arriving, the idol miraculously fell apart with a clap of thunder. Returning to St Peter's by the Aelian Bridge, the Pope had another vision of an angel atop the castle, wiping the blood from his sword on his mantle, and then sheathing it. While the Pope interpreted this as a sign that God was appeased, this did not prevent Gregory from destroying more sites of pagan worship in Rome. In honor of the vision and Michael, the bridge was renamed in their name.
What if the procession from the opening sequence was meant to imitate the procession led by the Pope from the legend? What if Aziraphale, now officially a Supreme Archangel, Commander of the Heavenly Host, is the one actually leading it, with Crowley finally at his side as his partner and second in command, just like it was proposed by him in the Final Fifteen?*
What if by some reason, maybe personal ambition, maybe just a tragic coincidence or situational necessity, there really was an impostor in Heaven, and Metatron — the so called Voice of God who seemingly doesn’t speak up for Herself since Job’s test — has been playing a winged version of the Wizard of Oz all along?
It would make just the perfect sense if not for one tiny detail. The procession we see on the bridge is actually led by Crowley, which doesn’t fit the parallel at all — unless it’s actually a proof of an ongoing body swap, as the mismatched names of the actors could also suggest?
The mountain of trash and the bookshop
The symbolic mountain of trash we can see Aziraphale and Crowley climb is a reference in itself. To an actual mount called Zion, believed to be the place where Yahweh, the God of Israel, dwells (Isaiah 8:18; Psalm 74:2), the place where God is king (Isaiah 24:23) and where God has installed king David on his throne (Psalm 2:6).
In a literal sense, it’s a hill in Jerusalem, although the sources refer to three different locations in different contexts — although for the purpose of this meta the Upper Eastern Hill (Temple Mount) makes the most sense. Its highest part became the site of Solomon's Temple. The same King Solomon the rituals in Freemasonry refer to. Masonic buildings, where lodges and their members meet, are sometimes called "temples" specifically as an allegoric reference to King Solomon's Temple, not actual places of worship. And Aziraphale’s bookshop is built around Solomon’s Magic Circle.
In a metaphysical sense, and especially in the context of the Christian New Testament, it is also believed to be a part of Heaven — the heavenly Jerusalem, God's Holy, eternal city. Christians are said to have “(…) come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, to an innumerable company of angels, to the general assembly and church of the firstborn who are registered in heaven” (Hebrews 12:22-23 cf. Revelation 14:1). Just like the procession were following in the opening sequence.
There’s been some speculation whether the lift on top of the mountain could symbolize Aziraphale’s bookshop, or, more specifically, the oculus in its centre. If you look closely at the enhanced screenshot, you can see that the dome isn’t made of glass and that it looks like a tower (a church’s bell tower, perhaps) more than a whole building.
And there is an actual doorway in there — not like the modern lift doors — opening up towards the source of that white, heavenly light. And what kind of enlightenment can you usually find up in the skies or heavens?
We’re welcomed to crack open the doors to the Heavenly Sanctuary — the Most Holy place, Sanctum Sanctorum, the Holy of Holies — to undraw the final curtain and finally stand eye to eye with God. Who knows, maybe even ask some questions or listen to some answers.
Or, at the very least, to meet one of Her forms known as Jesus Christ. Because that’s precisely where he serves as our (humanity’s) Mediator and the Holy Priest after his Ascension to Heaven. The structure at the top reminds of some temple architecture seen in Antiquity and Christianity.
The Catholic Church considers the Church tabernacle or its location (traditionally at the rear of the sanctuary) as the symbolic equivalent of the Holy of Holies, due to the storage of consecrated hosts in that vessel and their meaning as the Body of Christ. Tabernacle is commonly marked with a red light turned on and off depending on His presence or lack if it.
Looks like He’s already in the area, one way or another, keeping eye on some things.
Are we following a procession of believers happy to embrace their one and true Savior? Or are they actually protesters on their way to dethrone the authority and the system?
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Did you all know that "tip top" is MLE slang for a blowjob?
Now that I have your attention lol, some etymological meta on The Ineffables' rather tip top use of slang and wordplay and just what it means to offer to say "thank you" in Ineffable Husbands Speak under the cut. It's absolutely ticketyboo...
When we humans who speak English refer to oral sex performed on a penis, the most common slang we use for this today is to call it "giving a blowjob." Linguistically-speaking, this term is actually relatively new and how it came to be is a truly muddled bit of etymological history. As recently as the early 1950s, the American military was innocently referring to their war planes in different publications as "blow jobs"-- meaning that the planes were well-equipped to carry out destruction. This-- and other instances like this at the time-- shows that the meaning of "blowjob" as slang for oral sex performed on someone with a penis either had not yet really evolved at all or had not yet penetrated the mainstream enough for any of the people involved in these articles (journalists, editors, four-star generals lol...) to suggest that, perhaps, a different term be used to describe these planes.
Whether or not the slang term "blowjob" is actually derived from the military... as soldiers appropriating the language of war to turn it into the language of sex has been happening since the beginning of time... or whether it arose in a different way, is still unknown. The earliest documentation of something like "blowjob" comes from sex workers in the 1930s who referred to what we call giving a blowjob as "blowing someone off." This is obviously funny now from a language evolution perspective, considering that when we use that phrase today, what we mean is that we dodged an interaction with someone, as in "I was supposed to grab coffee with my friend yesterday but I was tired so I blew him off." If you said that sentence to a Mrs. Sandwich in 1935, she'd have several follow up questions...
Further complicating the history of the term is that since the origin of "blowjob" as a term is murky, no one has ever really been very clear on which kind of "blow" is being addressed in it or if it refers to multiple kinds at once. Is it a "blowjob" because of aspects of the act of it or is it a "blowjob" because the end result is, as the military influence might suggest, that the recipient "blows", meaning comes apart/ejaculates? Either way, it's the most common way you refer to this type of oral sex in English but, as we know, different groups of people have additional slang to refer to it as well. Crowley and Aziraphale are shown in S1 to have picked up the MLE slang term for it of tip top.
MLE stands for Multicultural London English and it is what is known as a sociolect. A sociolect is a dialect that's built more out of being a part of a certain social class or group. MLE is also a multiethnolect, which means that it is a dialect derived from the influence of people of different ethnicities and backgrounds. It is the language spoken by a diverse group of working-class people, most of them younger, who live and/or work in London, and has mostly emerged since the 1980s. One of its slang words is the use of tip top to mean a blowjob. It is sometimes shortened just to top, if context in the sentence allows for the meaning to be understood as a blowjob and to not be confused with other sexual meanings around the word "top."
Tip top is an example of different dialects crossing and interweaving. MLE uses "side ting", for example, to describe sleeping with someone other than one's partner which, just like its American counterpart of "side piece", is derived from the British English phrase "bit on the side", which we also hear Nina and Crowley use in S2. In S1, Aziraphale used ticketyboo, which is Victorian-era slang that is also thought to be an example of different dialects crossing. Theories on its etymology involve a Hindi saying, a British one, and a bit of French intermixing. It is an example of Crowley and Aziraphale's interest in the ongoing evolution of language and how they weave that into their wordplay. We'll come back to ticketyboo later on. Tip top and saying thank you are up first...
Tip top is originally a British English-rooted expression meaning someone is feeling excellent or that something is in excellent shape. It refers to the tip of the top-- the highest of peaks. There is then a fun sense of humor to it being adopted from its endearing but potentially kind of stuffy British use ("How are you, my good man?"/"I am tip top, old chap! Right as rain!" lol) to becoming slang for oral sex in a dialect used by predominantly non-white, younger Londoners, many of whom emigrated to England or who come from immigrant families, particularly from countries that either still are part of or were formerly part of The British Empire. There's a top shelf, droll trolling of the colonizing British Empire happening there in the language evolution and it's also a good example of how when different cultures overlap, so too do their languages.
Crowley and Aziraphale always have to choose words that are able to remain hidden beneath the surface layer of their conversation. One of their wordplay kinks that we've observed are words that have multiple different meanings, as we looked at in other metas. Their favorites are ones with hilariously contradictory meanings that they can use to create sentences that have one meaning on the surface with one interpretation of the definitions used of the words and another entirely if the other meanings of those same words are used. They get off a bit on using common words in Ineffable Husbands Speak when speaking to others-- particularly angels and demons-- who have no idea what they're talking about because they only understand one level of meaning of the words being used and assume the context implying that one level of meaning is correct. Examples of these types of scenes: the Aziraphale one in Heaven that I'll mention again below, Aziraphale in Hell in 1.06 and then telling Crowley "I asked them for a rubber duck" to make him laugh afterwards, Crowley's "can I get a wahoo?" and what he says to Gabriel before getting into the fire in 1.06 having a different meaning in Ineffable Husbands Speak, as well as almost everything Crowley said to Muriel in the second half of S2 (the handcuff innuendo; "extremely alcoholic breakfast at The Ritz", etc..)
We've seen that some of their favorite words like this are wily (meaning sly, tricky, crafty on one level but also alluring, magically attractive, sexy on another), smitten (to be attacked by an angel with the righteous fury of God but also to be struck down with love and infatuation), and thwart (to oppose and stop but also to cross from one side to the other.)
Aziraphale called Crowley a "wily adversary" to the angels in Heaven and could barely keep a straight face because when he and Crowley say "wily" to one another, they mean it as "sexy." (As in, "he was a wily old serpent and I was technically on apple tree duty.") Crowley used "thwart" multiple times in the same scene in 1.01 as an euphemism for "fucking", as in:
(I also love that, out of all the different names the thing has, Crowley and Aziraphale call it "The Divine Plan" while flirting in this scene, since divine means "of God" or "like God" but it also is used just to mean "delightful" or "delicious," as in "the wedding was lovely-- we had a divine time!" or "mmm, gah, this cake is divine..."
Additionally, another meaning of thwart is that it's the term for the seat in a rowboat that someone would sit on to row a boat and, like we looked at in the Fish meta, Crowley and Aziraphale have their whole we-got-oysters-the-first-night-we-slept-together-so-now-everything-related-to-fish-and-the-sea-is-a-sexual-euphemism-or-metaphor thing happening. Wahoo to that sushi but anyway we're talking about blowjobs, so... *redirects self*...)
As we were talking about at the start of this meta, calling oral sex on a penis a "blowjob" is a relatively new thing but different euphemisms for it have existed forever. By the above measure for words used in Ineffable Husbands Speak, though, tip top is a tip top choice for a blowjob euphemism, old chaps, as there is just a lot of word nerdy wordplay potential there. One of the reasons why Crowley and Aziraphale use it is also one of the reasons why it has likely evolved to mean a blowjob in MLE in the first place and that is because of the innuendo inherent in a phrase involving "tip", as in the sensitive tip of the penis, which is especially humorous when added into the fact that "tip top" means "excellent." You're just hitting the tippity top when you get a tip top, no? Just reaching the highest of those climatic peaks...
The first time we hear Aziraphale use tip top is in the paintball scene at Tadfield Manor in S1. Crowley and Aziraphale are hit with the paint, Crowley shapeshifts into a roaring snake and causes a guy to pass out and his already high levels of horniness increases until he's doing the lip bite and the cute nose scrunch that screams 'do me':
Meanwhile, Aziraphale sounds all innocent (it's faux-innocent, as it often is lol) and is going on about the paint on his coat and he says that he's "kept this coat in tip top condition for over 200 years" and starts to pout.
Crowley and Aziraphale are supernatural humanoid beings with feathers and Crowley is also a snake. They have a seemingly never-ending list of comparisons to other creatures of Earth happening and some of it trips over into their innuendo. A coat, on one level, is the coat that Aziraphale is wearing in the scene that was splattered in blue paint but... it's also a word used to describe the fur or hair of an animal.
Aziraphale has kept his coat-- the beige outer layer of his clothes-- in tip top condition-- so, in well-maintained, excellent condition-- for more than the last 200 years. Euphemistically-speaking, though... Aziraphale is referring to the apparently historically well-groomed state of his hair-- specifically, his pubic hair-- which he's always got lookin' fine and zhushed for visitors. Aziraphale keeps his coat in tip top condition because loves him the highest peaks of the tippity tops does the angel...
(Sidenote but Aziraphale has massive pubic hair thing happening, as this is not the only scene he's referred to it euphemistically. In S2, as we looked at in the meta about his dirty French, he used "plume" in its "feathered" sense to euphemistically refer to missing quality time with Lady Crowley's natural garden box.)
Is now a good time to mention Mr. Fell and the blowjob's formal name of fellatio? Fellation and fellatio are rooted in the Latin verb fellare, which means "to suck", though "to fellate" and "fellatio" became words relating to oral sex only as relatively recently as during the 1800s. The Latin verb, though, has existed basically for forever and considering Aziraphale's kind of cheeky use of Fell as his surname in reference to how while he might not have fallen to Hell in the angel/demon sense of it, he's "fallen" into "sin" of the Adam-and-Eve, food-and-sex sense of the term, one of the reasons behind choosing Fell as his surname then could be tied to the verb fellare and his penchant for giving and receiving oral sex. (And how do we know that it wasn't, say, Crowley in the 1800s who got the ball rolling on using that Latin verb to refer to a blowjob? lol) At minimum, it's too funny for Crowley and Aziraphale to have never made a joke about it at some point. Back to the paintball scene...
Crowley knows what tip top means in this scene and it's clearly already existed in Ineffable Husbands Speak for some time. His mending of Aziraphale's coat is then in an exaggerated manner involving some (magically unnecessary) blowing, visually referencing the tip top/blowjob wordplay that Aziraphale was doing to suggest that they get up to that activity soon:
But tip top is far from the only blowjob-related term in this scene...
While this scene takes place in the 2019 present of S1, recall that I mentioned above that MLE is not that old as sociolects go. It's definitely old enough and close enough to Crowley and Aziraphale for them to know it-- and the above illustrates them using it-- but what about before MLE emerged to give them the tip top slang option? What did Crowley and Aziraphale call a blowjob in their language before the 1980s/1990s?
The paintball scene then sees them show us another euphemism for it that other scenes in the series show us that they've been using for at least a few hundred years. Let's talk about the etymology of 'thank' and what they mean when they offer to say 'thank you.'
The word thank is etymologically tied to the same root words as both thought and think... which are, of course, things you do with your head. They are all rooted in the Latin tongere. The word tongue is rooted to both tongere and the Latin lingua, for languages. As a result, the words tongue, think, and thank are all linked together in their histories and, as an added bonus, are also tied to words related to languages and wordplay, which makes it all a little extra funny from hidden language/innuendo standpoint.
The other common euphemism for giving a blowjob is to refer to it as "giving head." You think with your head and use your tongue to speak but... you also use your tongue when you've got your head in your partner's lap... You bow your head to pray, which is referred to as to 'give thanks' to God... and you bow your head to make your partner feel tip top...
Oh, hello, Blasphemy Kink, Our Old Friend... 😇
In the paintball scene, Aziraphale smiles dirtily and says "oh, thank you" after Crowley mends his coat, and gives Crowley that look that says that he wants to give him a proper thank you for his help. Mrs. Sandwich in S2 picks up on the seamstress/clothing innuendo theme when she's going on suggestively about her girls' ability and willingness to mend a gentlemen's shirt, nodding back to Crowley's hollowed-cheeked bit of magical seamstressing in S1.
If you look at Crowley in the above Aziraphale-saying-thank-you gif, you'll notice from the movement of his head, that Crowley replied-- with a humorous tone-- the standard response to someone verbally saying "thank you" which is, of course: "You're welcome."
"You're welcome" is every bit as funny and dirty as "thank you" in this context...
First, there's that "welcome" is homophonic for both "will come" and "we'll come." Aziraphale says he wants to give thanks and Crowley replies with the assured, well, outcomes of that outpouring of gratitude. 😂 But there's also the amazing history of "welcome"...
"Welcome" is derived from combining two words in Old English: the prefix wil-, which means "desire, pleasure" and the word cuman, which means "come." Together, they also formed the word in Old English that is the origin of "welcome"-- 'wilcuma'-- which meant (I kid you not) "a person whose coming is pleasing."
Aziraphale is always very welcome, as far as Crowley is concerned lol.
The spelling evolved into "welcome" over time, thought to be influenced by the Old Norse velkominn (which is from where the modern German "welcome" of "willkommen" is derived.) Mixed in the evolution of "welcome" is also the Old French "bien venu" (which has evolved into its modern form of "bienvenue"). "Bien" in French means "good" and "venu" is of the French verb venir, which means "to come."
Obviously, the original meaning of wilcuma/welcome is in reference to hospitality of a less sexual nature. If you go to a holiday party at your aunt's house in the modern era, your aunt still might say "oh, we're so happy you could come!" and she's not referring to your ability to achieve orgasm when she says that but your ability to be able to clear your schedule and travel to her house for a party. The "come" in that sense is the same "come" in welcome/wilcuma, in that it refers to an arrival at a usually planned destination. It's from this same sense of travel, though, that language has evolved to refer to having had an orgasm as having "come." The language around orgasm contains a sense of the experience of it being a journey and a climax being a sense of arrival at the end of that journey.
It's that aspect of use of "to come" in language history and evolution that Crowley and Aziraphale are using as innuendo where it overlaps with even some of the most common things we say all the time-- "thank you" and "you're welcome." They are also on a road trip in the paintball scene when they break out the innuendo around giving thanks, so the travel-related wordplay has another layer to it. They actually have a lot of innuendo around travel and forms of transportation and where those overlap in language related to sex that we could look at it in another meta that I'll probably inevitably end up calling 'Travel Sweets'... 😉
This is why, with the exception of the "thank you"/"you're welcome"s in the paintball scene-- when they're both already giving each other fuck me eyes all over the place-- the scenes in which we see either of them saying the words "thank you" to one another are, so far, always posed as questions regarding whether or not they should 'say thank you' in that moment instead of just saying the words 'thank you' aloud, which adds to the idea of 'thank you' being euphemistic. The scenes show them asking if thanks should be said instead of just saying it because when they ask if they should 'say thank you', they are really asking if the other wants a blowjob.
Such as, in 1793:
Aziraphale was legit going to blow Crowley right there but Crowley was looking to get the fuck out of the rapey torture cell first. I'm sure he was amenable to the angel giving thanks after some crepes, though... and 174 years later, in 1967:
This one is particularly interesting from an euphemistic standpoint because Aziraphale had just given Crowley Holy Water, which is a bit akin to Beez's fly in S2, in that it's something his body is capable of making. It's his holiness as an angel that allows him to bless water and turn it from water into Holy Water which is, ironically, a substance that could kill Crowley, who has otherwise been drinking Aziraphale's holy water for quite some time by 1967 and who then replies to Aziraphale giving him actual Holy Water with the suggestion that he bow his head and pray a little over his communion font of a partner.
The other bit of this is that, even though they're alone in this instance, they're speaking on multiple layers as if they are not, which they do not always do when they're alone but which we have seen that they've evolved into feeling more comfortable doing sometimes when it comes to more intense conversations. (2.06 is a great example of just how much more comfortable they are speaking in their own language because of how they both try to run to it within a minute of trying to abandon it. A conversation that starts out trying to be more plain-spoken has Crowley invoking nightingales code by the end of it.)
Crowley really is asking Aziraphale if he should say thank you in 1967-- if he should say the words-- as well as the euphemistic layer to what he's saying here because he's surprised and moved and he doesn't know what to say. The choice to phrase it like that, though, and to also include the euphemistic meaning of saying thank you, is also intentional. They keep it up throughout the whole conversation-- "I'll give you a lift, anywhere you want to go" and Aziraphale's "go for a picnic" and "dine at The Ritz" are as literal as they are euphemistic, as everything else in their language is.
There is one other scene where tip top returns, though, and it is during this moment here:
Crowley and Aziraphale have driven back from Tadfield. From conversation had in previous scenes on the way, Crowley might have been planning on staying at the bookshop for awhile when they got back and Aziraphale wanted that. But then, as he's getting out of The Bentley, Aziraphale spotted that Anathema had left Agnes Nutter's book in the backseat and then had his whole moment of trying to rush into the bookshop alone to read the book without telling Crowley what was going on. Crowley asked if he was alright and Aziraphale replied:
"Perfectly, yes. Uh, tip top. Absolutely tickety-boo! Mind how you go!"
Aziraphale is anxious to get inside and be alone with the book but his words, if stressed, are structured to try to sound reassuring to Crowley that, even if he seems outwardly anxious, he's not upset with Crowley himself over anything, even if he's basically telling him to go home when, most nights, the assumption would be that he could stay a bit. He's tossing bits of wordplay at Crowley while running for the door. Perfectly/Perfect is from the Latin perfectus, which is combined of per-, meaning "through; completely" and facere, meaning "do." Perfect, as a result, can mean "done completely" in etymologically-based innuendo. If Aziraphale is then also referencing tip top here again and adding in perfectly, the suggestion seems to be that they pulled over to say thank you on the way home from Tadfield. Aziraphale is using it as an excuse to not invite Crowley in for more by trying to say he's completely done as a result and needs to be alone and nothing to see here, Crowley, nothing unusual, not at all acting weird and out of the ordinary! Aziraphale is absolutely ticketyboo...
Ticketyboo is Victorian-era slang and, despite Aziraphale wearing clothes from the 1800s constantly, we don't actually hear him use a lot of slang from the Victorian era or the rest of the 1800s still in modern times, which is a bit surprising. (And also disappointing as Victorian slang is amazing.) Aziraphale is actually a lot more current with his language than he is with any other aspect of his life, which is pretty interesting from a characterization standpoint... but which also makes his use of ticketyboo more interesting, though, as a result.
Ticketyboo means "everything is great." Its etymology is a little uncertain but it is thought to be a mashup of the Hindi phrase "thik hai" and the British English saying "that's the ticket," with the two phrases crossing back and forth between dialects of British officers stationed in India and both the people in India with whom they interacted and people originally from India who emigrated to London and interacted with British people there.
"Thik hai" means "it's alright" while "that's the ticket" has a pair of positive meanings. It can reflect the good feeling when something that is morally right, just and good has either happened or been suggested, as in: "Jury selection has finally fucking begun in one of the 1400 Donald Trump criminal trials-- that's the ticket!" It also can be used as an expression of pleasure, as in: "Jury selection has finally--" (just kidding though I would also count that as pleasurable lol)... as in: you take a sip of coffee first thing in the morning after a difficult night sleeping and sigh "oh, that's the ticket"... or your partner gets that knot out from under your shoulder blade-- "ahh, that's the ticket..." It's something that feels right and good.
But there's one other part of ticketyboo to consider, and that's the 'boo' part. The etymology of this bit, in particular, is muddled but what is interesting here is that while the word became ticketyboo-- all one word-- it is thought to actually have originally been spoken as two words: "tickety, boo." The 'thik hai/that's the ticket' part refers to the 'tickety' part of the word... so, what about the 'boo' part?
The general idea to date is that 'boo' evolved from 'bo' and that 'bo' is mixed into it because of homophonic overlap with the French word from which it is thought to have evolved-- 'beau.' The reason why this is thought to be part of the history of ticketyboo is that MLE has some overlap with AAVE (African-American Vernacular English) in the United States and, since roughly sometime in the 1980s, "boo" has been a gender-neutral term of endearment for someone's partner that originated in AAVE, exists in MLE, and has since spilled over into mainstream American slang.
'Beau' means "handsome" in French and it is, as you probably know, also an old-fashioned term for a boyfriend or a male admirer. It referred to a suitor who was romantically pursuing a woman-- bringing her flowers (and chocolates, when she opened a bookshop in particular lol), picking her up in his car and taking her on dates... courting her, as it used to be called. You might have a boyfriend but your great or great-great grandmother would have had a beau.
It's from this term that the more modern "boo" has arisen. Someone's boo in our modern times is their romantic partner of any gender and not necessarily someone with whom you are still in a courtship stage but can also refer to a spouse or a partner with whom you are in a committed relationship.
As a result, the reason why Aziraphale might be using ticketyboo in 2019 when he has stopped most of the rest of the great Victorian slang he undoubtedly misses is not necessarily because he's randomly using fusty old language because he's stuck in the past. It could actually be because he is using old slang that Crowley also remembers in a modern way in their wordplay in the present, referencing where it overlaps with the more current slang with which it shares an origin.
Aziraphale is not so much just saying "ticketyboo" as much he's also saying its origins of "tickety, boo" and referencing boo/beau to both refer to Crowley as handsome and as his boyfriend/partner within the full history of the one word of "boo" that he says.
Aziraphale's response to Crowley asking if he's alright then becomes akin to basically this, from a wordplay standpoint:
Yes, perfectly! Just worn out from the day, am in tip top shape from that tip top though haha! Not at all looking cagey and nervous nope nothing to fret about everything is absolutely fine, not to worry, my weirdness right now is not about you! You're just the lovely ticket as you always are. Good night now, my handsome boo. Do be safe getting home.
Crowley was understandably, though, thoroughly confused by this because Aziraphale dropped ticketyboo while acting weird and not letting him come inside for a nightcap and at least a little canoodle but Aziraphale's weirdness was worth it for listening to Crowley sound out the term-- "TiCKeTyboo?"-- while trying to math out what had gotten into his angel. I think he called me his handsome boyfriend while having a nervous breakdown. Weird, but also probably in character...
On a darker note? Look at how much the ticketyboo scene is a more light-hearted version of the end of 2.06, in a way. Aziraphale sees the book that can stop the end of the world but he doesn't tell Crowley about it-- just as how Aziraphale learned of The Second Coming from "The Metatron" but instead of crossing the street to tell Crowley who, again, was standing beside The Bentley, Aziraphale keeps the information to himself and goes inside, shutting the door, leaving Crowley standing in the street for a moment before he gets in the car and drives off. Just an observation, not sure yet exactly how it would all fit together, but we'll see in S3...
I want to go back to talking about "giving thanks" for a moment because we have to look at one, other scene that's very relevant to this and it's this one:
In 1.01, we are reintroduced to Aziraphale after the scene on the wall in Eden and the time jump of thousands of years. The very first thing we ever see him do is thank his friend for preparing the sushi he was planning on enjoying with the delayed-by-Hell Crowley. We see Aziraphale bow his head over the food and say "arigato"-- Japanese for "thank you"-- before starting his meal. Ojigi-- the tradition of bowing out of a sign of respect in polite society in Japan-- is a sign of reverence and, in situations like the one in which Aziraphale bows, is an expression of gratitude. Here's Aziraphale showing a devout sense of reverence to the skills of the human chef who prepared for him a meal he's going to enjoy with a pleasure that overlaps with sexual pleasure and that is his form of prayer before the meal. He and Crowley worship more at the altar of humanity and in ways that tie closer to an Eastern sense of spirituality than in devotion to those of a monotheistic God.
Pagans of The Good Times, as a certain Irish God with a song on Crowley's official playlist calls it. Hungry work...
Because, in addition to the general sense of a definition of prayer being "to give thanks to God," there is also Grace, the traditional prayer said at the start of a meal to thank God for the blessings of the food on the table. Crowley and Aziraphale's hidden language when it comes to sex is entirely structured around food as a result of the apple, the ox ribs and, eventually, the oysters. Alcohol, bread, fish...they've got a real water-to-wine, loaves-and-fishes, and fuck- Leviticus-sideways thing going on lol... so it is deliciously dirty and very funny that they developed euphemisms for giving each other a blowjob that are related to saying grace by bowing their heads in prayer and giving thanks.
For the food they they about to eat in S3, may The Voice of Frances McDormand make them truly grateful. Amen.
I feel we as the audience, we was cheated out of seeing Abigail buried or cremated. If she had no family who paid for the mortuary ? Is she ashes in an urn somewhere? Or do either Will or Hannibal have them ? Is she buried somewhere?
A guide to my insane ramblings about the celestial men!
The Changing Bentley Filming Tidbits - Lens Filters Lightbulb Headlight Moment Bildad's Hair
Whose POV is it Anyway? - Introduction POV "Your 'Something's Wrong' Voice" POV a Trip to Hell and a 25 Lazarii Miracle POV a Companion to Owls POV The Dirty Donkey & I think I Found a *Clue*! POV Bodysnatchers
Season 3 Speculation
Deciphering the Angelic Language Pt 1
The Bullet Catch and The Final 15 The Ineffables Fell in Love & God and Satan Make a Bet
Let’s put everything we know about that spooky statue of the Archangel Gabriel in one thread to make the conversation about its possible meaning as a Good Omens 3 clue more structured. Starting off with the relevant part of the official commentary from X-Ray:
Douglas Mackinnon got one thing wrong in his part of the interview — Gabriel wasn’t carved by “some guy in Italy,” but a British sculptor and prop maker David Field working as a part of the team at 3DEye in London.
Technically speaking, it’s a gorgeous piece of hand-carved expanded polystyrene with a clay sculpted head on top of it — even if the Archangel’s smug likeness isn’t that pleasant to look at, all things considered. The scenic artists from 3DEye made it look like stone afterwards.
The body itself took ten days to sculpt and is a faithful copy of the famous statue on Ponte Sant'Angelo in Rome called Angel with the Cross by Ercole Ferrata. It stands on the inscription “Cuius principatus super humerum eius” (“Whose government shall be upon His shoulder”, Isaiah 9:16), and this quote makes much more sense for Gabriel than the cross in his hands. The usual iconography of the Archangel uses a trumpet or a white lily instead.
Ponte Sant'Angelo was originally used to expose the heads of those sentenced to death — each of the angelic statues on it carry Arma Christi, the Instruments of the Passion. Like the Second Coming, what seems to be a hopeful message to the Chosen Ones can also be a warning for the others.
The statue of Gabriel, first shown in full in the cemetery scene of the Good Omens 2 title sequence, reappears at the very end as a part of the bridge leading to the biggest Easter egg — at least according to Peter Anderson, the animator behind it — which is the lift in the background, implying how we’re getting closer towards the Second Coming. Notice how the cross broke down in half at some point between these two scenes!
And it disappears in the plot as well: Gabriel’s memory depicts it only from his point of view, with the camera deliberately moving slightly to the right and stopping at his eye level. The centered, establishing shots show the statue with empty hands as a bookend.
I believe that this cross is meant to serve as a foreshadowing, a reminder of the absolution of sins and eternal life through Christ’s sacrifice and Second Coming. We see it only through Gabriel and Aziraphale’s eyes — when Beelzebub looks at the statue, the cross is not there.
As seen in the BTS photos and videos, it’s not an editing error, but a deliberate positioning of the physical props on set. The cross was clearly meant to be a removable part of the statue and displayed in a specific way to convey a message to the audience.
The question remains: is it a reassurance, something to look forward to, or maybe rather a warning?
Not helpfully at all, the traditional use of angelic imagery in Christian cemeteries matches both interpretations.
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Kinda disturbing how in the show heaven turns out to have surveillance photos of crowley and aziraphale it’s quite dark if you think too hard about it — how they can never truly feel safe and they have no privacy, not really
There’s a surveillance photo of them fighting in St James’s Park over the holy water. That one is especially fraught. It’s a low moment for both of them and they had an audience for it.
Okay so it's actually worse than that, because the show fully implies that heaven did not know about them the whole time. What's actually taking place is a panopticon situation.
The panopticon (for those who aren't familiar with the details) is a theoretical prison thought up by Jeremy Bentham in 1791, which he proposes to have full surveillance capability at all times. The important part for him is that prisoners never know when they are watched, due to a detailed layout giving a central tower full visibility into their cells, which lack a wall on that side.
You may have seen this image; it's a popular illustration for what a panopticon might look like, but it misconstrues the actual functioning of the prison. The beam of light and the open glass windows of the tower would never exist, and Bentham goes into heavy detail about how the tower ought to be constructed to allow wardens to view prisoners without the prisoners being able to see them, including an extensive explanation for how to prevent even shadows against the blinds. The actual goal of the panopticon is for prisoners to know they could be watched at any time without overextending the resources of the state, so prison staff would actually move between several of these atriums unseen by prisoners. At any given time, there might be someone in the tower watching you or there might not. The goal of a surveillance state is not to watch every citizen at all times but to maintain the threat and capability to do so.
You see what I mean? We know that heaven never kept a particularly close eye on Aziraphale, allowing him to get away with all kinds of things, but the intense fear of observation remains all the same, especially from Crowley. Because Crowley knows they're living in a surveillance state, and fully believes heaven to be something that sinister. To be watched 24 hours a day is oppressive in its own way, but it's so much more terrifying to know at any given moment that someone might be watching you. It's just enough freedom to try and get something more out of life but to also live in constant, unbearable fear of that being taken away.
You know the eyepiece of a spyglass, or a telescope? That's an oculus. The bit you look through on a microscope to see the tiny lives so far beneath your own? That's also an oculus. That skylight in Aziraphale's bookshop? Guess what that's called.
The oculus of Aziraphale's bookshop is a symbolic reference to the panopticon, in that it is a giant eye looking down and always watching Aziraphale even in his own space.
(Oculus literally means "eye," btw.)
And this is why Aziraphale and Crowley have spent 6,000 years never speaking freely or touching or spending big chunks of time together but instead acting at every meeting as though they are barely acquaintances, and unfriendly ones at that: they know there's a nonzero chance they're being watched or listened to at any time.
It's why Aziraphale freaks out in 1601 when Crowley mentions they have an Arrangement and have helped each other dozens of times, even though he's clearly not opposed to the Arrangement itself.
It's why Crowley won't let Aziraphale call him "kind" or "nice" in 1793 or 1827: those are flagged words in Hell's audio surveillance of its own agents.
It's why in 1862 Aziraphale insists they have little in common because he's an angel and Crowley is Fallen but Crowley doesn't take offence at that, despite everything they went through in 1827: he knows Aziraphale has to mount an angelic-sounding protest in case Heaven are listening.*
It's why Aziraphale tells Crowley "You go too fast for me" in 1967 about THEE slowest-burn relationship in history: in 1941 a single surveillance photo and a rumor of them working together is enough to endanger Crowley's life.
It's why both Garden of Eden and Hell look like the Ministry building in fucking Brazil, one of the bleakest dystopian films ever made.
Aziraphale and Crowley have no privacy. They are always potentially under surveillance, and they know it. They know they can count only on their masters' inattention affording them the opportunity to meet at all, and they have backup plans in place for how to excuse themselves when they are discovered.
Panopticons are no longer theoretical prisons. Humans have built dozens of them, because they work really well at doing exactly what they're designed to do: instilling fear and despair and enforcing compliance.
And btw this is why I think it sucks such major goat ass to scrutinize and gossip about David Tennant's and Michael Sheen's relationships with each other and their partners. Imagine what that makes their lives like. Did we not learn from middle school how awful it is to have to live with people always watching and whispering about us? Did we not learn that from Good Omens?
*Notice how Aziraphale has become, after c. 850 years, comfortable enough to mention the Arrangement aloud, though. Kind of the same way he gets drunk in 2011 but doesn't so much as sip Mr Dalrymple's whisky in 1827. It takes him time. And yeah, maybe some of that is because he's more rigid and conservative in his behavior, but we know from his conversation with the Starmaker that some of that is because he's very rightly afraid.
