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To preface my own opinion on the finale, before S3 came out I wasn’t opposed to an ending with them as humans, which I think put me in the minority. And after watching I’m still very conflicted about the finale as a whole and especially the ending, but I think overall I liked it more than I didn’t like it. And I’m still so glad it came out instead of nothing. There is still always post season 1 and post season 2 fanfiction after all.

That all being said I do have a bunch of criticisms of the way some of the most important themes in the show, especially around free will, were handled in S3.

So my first point is, dolphins. No actually not dolphins sorry, free will.

Starting with Crowley’s decision to create the whole new universe without him and Aziraphale. Now, I think it’s 100% in character that if Aziraphale and Crowley did have to make a choice between their own happiness and having their own side, and being able to exist and stay together, versus humanity being able to have free will, they would choose humanity. Absolutely from the beginning of the story Aziraphale and Crowley’s attempts to prevent Armageddon are partly selfish because they sure do like living on Earth with all the art and music and food it has to offer, in fact they can be very selfish at times. They’re people after all. But the reason they love the Earth and want to keep it in the first place is because they love humanity and the things they create. So that’s not at all where my criticism of Crowley’s decision comes from.

The thing is I really don’t see how creating the new universe ‘solves’ the issue of humans not having free will. First of all, especially in the book and S1 of the show, one of the most important themes from the get go has been that humans have free will despite Heaven and Hell’s attempts to decide for them what they should and shouldn’t do. Sure Crowley and Aziraphale have been stationed on Earth to tamper with their affairs, but it is literally stated again and again that all their little attempts to stir humanity to be evil or good are literally pointless in the grand scheme of what humanity is capable of doing on its own. It’s literally a recurring joke. Even with the original Apocalypse that Heaven and Hell desperately want, Adam’s humanity ultimately stops it from happening because again FREE WILL.

Also Jesus is literally an example of God and Heaven tampering with human affairs and that’s literally portrayed as a good thing in the show. So the messaging doesn’t even make sense.

The humans literally don’t need this gesture, they just need the Earth to not be destroyed after 6000 years so they can continue exercising free will as they always have been (which Crowley and Aziraphale could make happen without completely remaking everything). I mean the arguably most important part of the whole Good Omens story is how people constantly exercise free will even if their entire circumstances set them up to not do that. With Adam deciding not to destroy the world, with Anathema deciding to live without Agnes’s second set of prophecies, with Aziraphale and Crowley being Aziraphale and Crowley. Literally the core of the story. It’s insane that despite Crowley and Aziraphale’s whole ‘purpose for existence’ being to serve the interests of Heaven and Hell it doesn’t stop them from using their own free will to do what they think is right and what makes them happy, that is so cool of them. I mean I wasn’t opposed to the human ending before watching the show. Because for one it would allow them to be completely independent from Heaven and Hell in a way that they haven’t been before. (That doesn’t mean they didn’t have free will before, it just meant they were having to live in constant terror as the cost of it.) And additionally they’ve spent so much time on Earth among people, so coming to terms with mortality like everyone else after all their time spent being immortal would be really interesting to see. Although whenever I thought about a human ending before it was in the context of them as they were before, 6000-year-old beings, becoming human, with all their memories, and I’m not actually sure how I feel about the fact that it’s not how it happened here, I’m actually not sure at all.

Now, what I would understand, is if the show focused less on the idea that “Heaven and Hell’s unsuccessful tampering with human affairs somehow contradicts with them having free will” and instead focused more on the idea that if humans are punished in the afterlife based on on some ineffable criteria nobody understands, then they are not truly free to make decisions, as long as those actions are being weighed on some arbitrary scale that decides what the rest of eternity is like for them. That makes more sense to me as a legitimate reason why Crowley would want to get rid of Heaven and Hell, but it’s pretty clear from the show that that’s not how it was intended, given that in this particular narrative the concept that people who are undeserving sometimes go to hell, and vice versa with heaven, isn’t really ever discussed. So either way I can’t really see why free will and Heaven and Hell are so incompatible to the point where it’s supposed to be the final grand reason Crowley and Aziraphale as we know them die(?). Anyway I assume Christianity still exists as it always has in this new universe considering it isn’t staggeringly different from ours so I assume people would be controlling one another with religion anyway.

Anyway all that being said the people who most of all need Heaven and Hell to stop bothering them to be able to freely use their own free will are the angels and demons themselves, i.e. Aziraphale and Crowley.