Something thatâs been very interesting to me, in this new wave of post-miniseries Good Omens fandom, is the apparent fannish consensus that Crowley is, in fact, bad at his job. That heâs actually quite nice. That heâs been skating by hiding his general goodness from hell by taking credit for human evil and doling out a smattering of tiny benign inconveniences that he calls bad.
I get the urge towards that headcanon, and I do think the Crowley in the miniseries comes off as nicer than the one in the book. (I think miniseries Crowley and Aziraphale are both a little nicer, a little more toothless, than the versions of themselves in the book.) But maybe itâs because I was a book fan first, or maybe itâs because I just find him infinitely more interesting this wayâI think Crowley, even show!Crowley, has the capacity to be very good at his job of sowing evil. And I think that matters to the story as a whole.
A demonâs job on Earth, and specifically Crowleyâs job on Earth, isnât to make people suffer. Itâs to make people sin. And the handful of âevilâ things we see Crowley do over the course of the series are effective at that, even if the show itself doesnât explore them a lot.
Take the cell phone network thing, for instance. This gets a paragraph in the book thatâs largely brushed off in the conversation with Hastur and Ligur, and I think itâs really telling:Â
What could he tell them? Â That twenty thousand people got bloody furious? Â That you could hear the arteries clanging shut all across the city? Â And that then they went back and took it out on their secretaries or traffic wardens or whatever, and they took it out on other people? Â In all kinds of vindictive little ways which, and here was the good bit, they thought up themselves. Â For the rest of the day. Â The pass-along effects were incalculable. Â Thousands and thousands of souls all got a faint patina of tarnish, and you hardly had to lift a finger.
In essence, without any great expenditure of effort (look, Iâd never say Crowley isnât slothful, but that just makes him efficient), heâs managed to put half of London in a mental and emotional state that Crowley knows will make them more inclined to sin. Heâs given twenty thousand or a hundred thousand or half a million people a Bad Day. Which, okay, itâs just a bad dayâbut bad days are exhausting. Bad days make you snap, make you fail at things, make you feel guiltier and more stressed out in the aftermath when you wake up the next day, makes everything a little worse. Bad days matter.
Maybe itâs because Iâm a believer in the ripple effect of small kindnesses, and that means I have to believe in its opposite. Maybe itâs just that I, personally, have had enough days that were bad enough that a downed cell network (or an angry coworker because of a downed cell network) would honestly have mattered. But somebody who deliberately moves through the world doing their best to make everyoneâs lives harder, with the aim of encouraging everybody around them to be just a little crueler, just a little angrier, just a little less empatheticâyou know what, yes. I do call that successful evil.
Itâs subtle, is the thing. Thatâs why Hastur and Ligur donât get it, donât approve of it. Not because Crowley isnât good at his job, but because weâve seen from the beginning that Hastur and Ligur are extremely out of touch with humanity and the modern world and just plain arenât smart enough to get it. Itâs a strategy that relies on understanding how humans work, what our buttons are and how to press them. Itâs also a strategy thatâs remarkably advanced in terms of free will. Hastur and Ligur deliberately tempt and coerce and entrap individuals into sinning, but Crowley never even gets close. We never see him say to a single person, âhey, Iâve got an idea for you, why donât you go do this bad thing?â He sets up conditions to encourage humans to actually do the bad things theyâre already thinking of themselves. He creates a situation and opens it up to the results of free choice. Every single thing a person does after Crowleyâs messed with them is their own decision, without any demonic coercion to blame for any of it.
You see it again in the paintball match. âThey wanted real guns, I gave them what they wanted.â In this case, Crowley didnât need to irritate anybody into wanting to do evilâthe desire to shoot and hurt and maybe even kill their own coworkers was already present in every combatant on that paintball field. Crowley just so happened to be there at exactly the right time to give them the opportunity to turn that fleeting, kind-of-bad-but-never-acted-upon desire into real, concrete, attempted murder. Sure, nobody diedâwhere would be the fun in a pile of corpses? But now forty-odd people who may never have committed a real act of violence in their entire lives, caught in a moment of weakness with real live weapons in their hands, will get to spend the rest of their lives knowing that given the opportunity and the tiniest smidgen of plausible deniability, they are absolutely the sort of people who could and would kill another human being they see every single day over a string of petty annoyances.
Crowley understands the path between bad thought and evil action. He knows it gets shorter when somebody is upset or irritated, and that it gets shorter when people practice turning one into the other. He understands that sometimes, removing a couple of practical obstacles is the only nudge a person needsâno demonic pressure or circumvention of free will required.
I love this interpretation, because I love the idea that Crowley, whoâs been living on Earth for six thousand years, actually gets people in a way no other demon can. I love the idea that Crowley, the very first tempter, who was there when free will was invented, understands how it works and how to use it better than maybe anyone else. And I really love the idea that Crowley our hero, who loves Aziraphale and saves the world, isnât necessarily a good guy.
Thereâs a narrative fandomâs been telling that, at its core, is centered around the idea that Crowley is good, and loves and cares and is nice, and always has been. Heaven and its rigid ideas of Right and Wrong is itself the bad thing. Crowley is too good for Heaven, and was punished for it, but under all the angst and pain and feelings of hurt and betrayal, heâs the best of all of them after all.
Thatâs a compelling story. Thereâs a reason we keep telling it. The conflict between kindness and Moral Authority, the idea that maybe the people in charge are the ones whoâre wrong and the people theyâve rejected are both victim and hero all at onceâyeah. Thereâs a lot there to connect with, and I wouldnât want to take it away from anyone. But the compelling story I want, for me, is different.
I look at Crowley and I want a story about someone who absolutely has the capacity for cruelty and disseminating evil into the world. Somebody whoâs actually really skilled at it, even if all he does is create opportunities, and humans themselves just keep living down to and even surpassing his expectations. Somebody who enjoys it, even. Maybe he was unfairly labeled and tossed out of heaven to begin with, but heâs embraced what he was given. Heâs thrived. He is, legitimately, a bad person.
And he tries to save the world anyway.
He loves Aziraphale. He helps save the entire world. Scared and desperate and determined and devoted, he drives through a wall of fire for the sake of something other than himself. He likes humans, their cleverness, their complexities, the talent they have for doing the same sort of evil he does himself, the talent they have for doing the exact opposite. He cares.
Itâs not a story about someone who was always secretly good even though they tried to convince the whole world and themself that they werenât. Itâs a story about someone who, despite being legitimately bad in so many ways, still has the capacity to be good anyway. Itâs not about redemption, or about what Heaven thinks or judges or wants. Itâs about free will. However terrible you are or were or have the ability to be, you can still choose to do a good thing. You can still love. You can still be loved in return.
And I think that matters.
