^__^

This quickly sharted blob is commentary on multiple things at once

Have fun deciphering what they are 🧐

And what if I said their friendship is one of the most important relationships in the show (I'd be right 🙂‍↕️)

And mostly lines which are Crowley's inner monologue thinking about how little influence Heaven and Hell actually have on Humanity and how they already have free will!

And don’t get me started on how much it emphasizes the irony in having these four supernatural beings determine the fate of the universe and humanity with no feedback from Actual Humans and the irony in the story trying to pretend it has always been about humanity instead of underplaying this aspect of the novel in favor of the Ineffable Husbands Melodrama when Crowley starts using lines cut and stolen from Book!Adam.

they scrapped all of [redacted]'s original script and started over

it was light and humorous all the way through

az was not treated as dumb or naïve for taking that place in heaven

az and crowley made up in the beginning of the film and were a team trying to stop the end times for the rest of the finale

the message would have been "we need to fix what is broken, not burn it to the ground"

Az and Crowley would show some form of affection towards each other, like a hug or maybe a kiss

Az and Crowley decided they didn't need god anymore, nor follow her rules

the metatron would have been dealt with properly

what would have been a PERFECT ending:

Az gave Crowley hope by explaining that they just need to fix what's broken, not start over, and Crowley admitted Az had a good reason for going to heaven in the first place

Az and Crowley say "I love you"

Az and Crowley being pretty much "useless", while jesus and the humans are doing the important bits by "being fundamentally people"

the plot was solved when heaven and hell teamed up against humanity (including Az and Crowley who's now explicitly on "their own side: humanity's side.") and Team Earth convinced Team Celestial how stupid this whole charade had always been

god had NOT been controlling everything this whole time and had always been more like a narrator of the universe, rather than one affecting the story

If you want to imagine the future, imagine a boy and his dog and his friends. And a summer that never ends. And if you want to imagine the future, imagine a boot... no, imagine a sneaker, laces trailing, kicking a pebble; imagine a stick, to poke at interesting things, and throw for a dog that may or may not decide to retrieve it; imagine a tuneless whistle, pounding some luckless popular song into insensibility; imagine a figure, half angel, half devil, all human... Slouching hopefully towards Tadfield. ...for ever.

I submit humbly that that ending is not the voice of a writer (the interview in the illustrated tie-in edition specifies that "the kids mostly originated with Terry") who would ultimately be down with annihilation as the Only Solution To The Problems Of The World.

Bonus reminder: I'm betting this passage is Terry's ("vanload of hippies on a blotterful of Owsley's Old Original" has that ring to it). I ask you, does it describe a character who would only a few years later in story time -- after sixty centuries of ups and downs -- (1) wallow indefinitely in a drunken sulk, and then (2) tell God to finish erasing the world, including himself and his best friend, and start over?

Because, underneath it all, Crowley was an optimist. If there was one rock-hard certainty that had sustained him through the bad times -- he thought briefly of the fourteenth century -- then it was utter surety that he would come out on top; that the universe would look after him. Okay, so Hell was down on him. So the world was ending. So the Cold War was over and the Great War was starting for real. So the odds against him were higher than a vanload of hippies on a blotterful of Owsley's Old Original. There was still a chance.

But you know what? I just saw pictures of angelCrowley and 'Anthony' back to back, and maybe this is me being stupid and in denial, but I’m only realizing now that this 'Anthony' is, in fact, a "reincarnation" or whatever of angelCrowley and NOT demonCrowley, the being we spent the story with, the being he became after millennia of experience on Earth - I mean THE Crowley, our Crowley, Aziraphale’s Crowley, and I just...

It makes me even more furious than I already am. They erased nearly everything that was making this character interesting. After showing us time and again how terrible Heaven was, how free will is important, and why labels shouldn’t matter as long as you stay true to who you are deep down ("just a little bit a good person", "just enough of a bastard", "just an angel/a demon who goes along with Heaven/Hell as far as he can"), they told us that a fallen angel was a bad thing, that it shouldn’t exist after all. They ended with two 'angels' falling for each other.

I wonder, what happened to shades of grey?

I fell in love with those two because they were are for more complex than what it says on the tin. I don’t give a damn about the purest of angels. I care about characters who ask questions, who doubt, who evolve, who fight for what they believe in, who love unconditionally, despite the odds.

And to think about all the other narrative decisions made in that finale...

Well I wonder why, following the ending of the non-canon Good Omens Finale