I'm gunna munch

Turns out I cannot stop disappointment posting, especially after getting some sleep and really being able to think on all the reasons why the ending fundamentally bothered me so much.

One of the biggest ones is the strange turn in the depiction of the GO god.

Because both sides, under the guise of being forced along by a divine plan, were in fact making all the wrong decisions of their own free will exactly like humans do.

From all the mentions of them in the book, to the actual voice we get to hear in the show, I was SO sure and felt it was so canon that the natural direction the show was leaning towards was the concept that angels and demons did have free will.

The ending of the book and S1 reinforce this especially. Everyone is convinced Armageddon has to happen! They tell Adam over and over again that this is the way things are, its part of the plan, and as supernatural beings, they all have no choice but to follow it.

But Adam doesn't. He says nope that's wrong, and does things his way. Even Aziraphale and Crowley. They act against their orders for years, sneak their way out of their executions, and this seemingly omnipresent god doesn't do a thing themselves in response despite all this supposedly being their will.

Then season 2 rolls around and Gabriel goes missing. THEE supreme archangel. Only for it to turn out in the end that he chose to do his own thing, as did beelzebub. They both turned against their orders and "purposes", and once again, there are no consequences beyond those attempted to be imposed by their immediate peers/coworkers. The almighty couldn't seemed to have cared less.

Even when the "bet" in regards to Job is falsely won. There's no way that god didn't know, and yet victory was still claimed and rewards were given out accordingly. I'll die on the hill that that was more of a test of the angels, and what they'll let happen, than it was of Job himself. And Aziraphale and Crowley are the only reason they passed, because they used their free will to do the right thing.

The series was moving in the perfect direction for the message to be that everyone has free will. That the angels and the Metatron especially were an excellent parallel to humans who do hateful things in the name of religion and claim the moral high ground because they're just following the will of a higher power.

But instead we got the bookshop scene and the last 30 minutes and a god that's holding the world and our angel and demon at gunpoint, telling them this is the way it has to be, and being very nearly cruel in her comments about Aziraphale's love for Crowley and how this story has to come to an end.

They should have kept her a mostly passive force in the story, it ruins so much of the series charm. The S1 and 2 almighty would never.

Instead, they should have put the responsibility on the angels and demons to fix things. Show them all that they do have the choice to make things better. That they can follow the example of Gabriel and Beelzebub and Aziraphale and Crowley. That there were consequences for the archangels coldness, and demons that can love despite their damnation

Like what was the point of going out of their was in S2 to show us that Aziraphale and Crowley were NOT outliers in their independence???

season 1 and 2 kept hammering the idea that individual lives matter. not replaceable copies. not "close enough." actual people, with continuity and memory and history. Crowley and Aziraphale repeatedly chose imperfect, messy existence over grand cosmic plans. so ending with "the universe gets reset and everyone is replaced by alternate versions" isn't just horribly depressing. it's philosophically backwards. like the story literally abandoned its own argument in the final act.

the Job parallel especially points that out pretty cleanly. The whole emotional weight there was: replacement children are not the same children. new children (even if they had, by some chance, looked and acted Exactly The Same) doesn't fix the tragedy of losing the original children. that mattered to them. so yea, this ending feels less like "hopeful transcendence to tear down The System" and more like “congrats on your happy ending! everyone is dead, but the cottage is cute!" bold creative choice ig. like serving tea with eccles cakes after detonating reality.

my frustration is basically: the story spent years arguing that personhood matters — memory matters, continuity matters, these exact souls matter. and then solved the finale with a cosmic reset that wipes out the very identities the narrative taught us to care about. very much like the nuclear apocalypse they were trying so hard to prevent. it goes against the very thing Crowley was staunchly opposed to during The Flood. against everything they did in the Job minisode. against literally the entire Jim/Gabriel narrative, about Jim not really being Gabriel without his memories. and also, to quote Crowley, "the angel you knew is NOT me."

"but they found each other again! we got them back at the end!" no we didn't. that is NOT them. and to say that they are is kind of insulting tbh. they LOOK similar and maybe have some of the same interests, but just bc a blonde and a red head are into books and astrophysics doesn't make them THEM. their memories, their history, everything they went through together and fought for, the experiences that shaped their characters, those 6000+ years — that's all GONE.

Also. people keep saying stuff like "it was the only right choice" as if there were only two horrible choices? if the story introduces negotiation and moral choice, we'll naturally start imagining alternatives. once “God offers options” enters the chat, people will obviously ask, “wait. why was this the chosen solution?” when they could've gone for idk, literally anything else. God literally offered to put things back as they were. they could've chosen to have THAT universe, THAT world —THEIR world— put back into place and then added their own conditions to tear down Heaven and Hell. they could've chosen to keep their memories. they could've chosen to make everyone human from then on if that's what the writers were so hellbent on. they could've chosen to make God erase her own memory for all i care idfk. but this ending feels like a bad consolation prize.

after EVERYTHING they did, and everything they went through, they deserved SO much better than this. THE WHOLE WORLD did.

Wasn't one of the major thematic points the fact that no one is completely good or bad, we simply make choices, therefore the dichotomy between heaven and hell and angels and demons is an illusion? Both demons and angels suffer and are lonely under the system. Wouldn't it have made more sense to create a world where angels and demons can have the opportunity to learn and grow with humanity the way Aziraphale and Crowley did?

The finale doesn't actually address these points because they remove the problems by just starting everything over, which is in direct contradiction to everything they fought for in season 1 and with the Job minisode.

I agree that the ending should have always involved dismantling the system and creating an entirely new one. But it should have been a new system in the world they knew with the humans they'd come to love, and allowed everyone a chance at redemption. Or at least the autonomy to choose for themselves.

Crowley making one choice for the whole universe and undoing all of their work isn't thematically consistent and doesn't actually address anything that's been introduced this far. Why go through the trouble of establishing all this world building just to erase it?

How is the new human world better? What is the consequence of no heaven and hell other than Crowley and Aziraphale can be openly together (in the time period they occupy. I'm pretty certain homophobia would still exist)? Is the human experience fundamentally altered? Wasn't the whole point that humans actually do what they want regardless of heaven and hell's agenda because they're unpredictable and have imagination?

Isn't one of the themes from season 1 that the four horsemen, war famine pollution death, are actually man made concepts (well except for death)? And that one of the reasons Adam left the world as it was was because he felt humans needed to take responsibility for the earth and have the opportunity to fix their own mistakes? Isn't that why he didn't rebuild the whale population? Doesn't killing off all the humans and not letting them have a choice in making the new world really undermine that?

Isn't one of the themes that humanity is worth saving, and one of the major points demonstrating that theme being there are two nonhuman beings who still love humans despite witnessing them commit the same mistakes over and over? Isn't that nuance kind of lost when they become human themselves? Then their love for humanity is more self preservation and without the benefit of a long term view. DO they even love humanity as much when they're humans? I didn't exactly see a lot of general human love, mostly interpersonal romantic connection between them two.