See How it Shines

No world-ending stakes, no Plot with a Capital P. Just our Ineffable Duo hanging out on Whickber Street, getting up to no good for 30 minutes an episode, 8 episodes a season.

Imagine the episode lineup we could have had:

Episode 1: Aziraphale and Crowley try to matchmake Maggie and Nina. Aziraphale thinks he’s being helpful, Crowley thinks it's a lark, and the women are entirely unimpressed, but they find out their neighbours are supernatural, setting them up as regular side characters.

Episode 2: Shax turns up and evicts Crowley. He secretly lives in his Bentley until Aziraphale finds out at the end of the episode and forcefully moves him into the bookshop.

The rest of the season could be made up of historical flashbacks (Job, the Resurrectionists, wherever you want to go in history...) treated as standalone escapades. Maybe an episode that peels away and show us the offices in Heaven and Hell instead for a bit, or a meeting between Muriel and Eric who are both supposed to be spying on A&C.

Episodes 7-8: Season ends with a cosy, low-stakes two-parter about a memory-wiped Gabriel turning up as "Jim."

Then it all resets and we join them back in the bookshop again next season, where maybe Crowley loses his Bentley gambling with a gangster and Aziraphale has to reclaim it for him, maybe there's another Whickber Street Traders event...just all the nonsense like that, minus the anguish. And a lot more of it.

I am the wrong person to talk to when it comes to erasure and replacements and how shiny new unblemished things are a clean slate and therefore better. My apartment is filled to the brim with old things. I am helplessly attached to that which is broken and battered and resistant in spite of the trials they’ve been put through. I treasure every chip and crack that marks the antique porcelain and vintage ceramic I rescue from flea markets and I adore the crumbling gilt gesso frames I pluck from the trash. I am not put off by mirrors that have begun to lose their silvering and I still think leather bound books are a treasure even as their spines splinter and unravel under the pressure of a long life. I honor the craftsmanship that cannot be replicated today and that has been forgotten or shoved to the side as unnecessary and frivolous. I save things at my job every day, works on paper in such bad condition after being exposed to the elements and that which is life that they’re financially meaningless but mean everything to those who love them in spite of their damage.

The more I think about it, the more I think fuck this “real world” decision and its bullshit explanation. The implications are awful if you think about it for longer than a couple hours and it borders on character assassination.

Nevermind the fact that Crowley chose to erase himself and Aziraphale from existence, which has been talked about to death as unfair and unnecessary, it isn’t even the just thing to do. This wasn’t a noble sacrifice for the good of humanity, it was a defeatist act by someone who had lost all hope and is just finally too tired for the messy work of making things better. Aziraphale and Crowley weren’t the ones who wiped the slate clean, sure, but they were explicitly given the offer to put it all back. They chose not to, and to me that complacency matters.

It was them who pointed out that tossing life away, whether it be one person or the whole world, to create some spiffy, new and improved thing is cruel. It doesn’t matter that the humans set to die in God’s flood turned out “wrong”. They’re here anyway and deserve to keep living and making mistakes. Nevermind the Heaven-approved children Job will be rewarded with, what about his children now? Are they so worthless as to be interchangeable?

Heaven and Hell don’t understand humanity because they don’t see billions of individuals, they see the singular, conceptual entity of human-kind meant to serve its purpose in the great plan. Aziraphale and Crowley saw Anathema, Adam, Madam Tracy, Shadwell, Nina, Maggie, Mrs. Sandwich, etc. God makes it clear this new world would be a reset, and they still go through with it without a passing thought for the loss of those people.

Shane: Why what did youu hear?

ngk