He tried to kiss a girl and it didn't work (she didn't want to run away with him from all the problems facing them) so he lived on a street for years, drinking and gambling and when she came to check if he's alright (after hearing he's not) he told her to leave.

She left (and everyone blames her because she should have tried harder).

Then he goes to her and basically neggs her the entire day, making her feel like everything she did was wrong (while she gets nasty comments from others about her hobbies and likes and how she never was enough).

She tries to explain why she left (for Crowley and everyone) and he insults her by saying she can never do what she set out to and it's clear because she is failing.

He suggests he goes to help her saying she can't do it (or anything apparently) on her own, while she already said the same thing, when asking for his help years earlier.

He mansplains everything to her from then on and basically pushes her to the side while the universe around them collapses and then they 'sacrifice' themselves for something pure and perfect he wished for a long time ago when he was little boy. A universe that runs forever that does not have to deal with the question of evil. Apparently.

Aziraphale is the character who drives most of the plot of s3, with Crowley barely doing anything of significance until the final confrontation with God.

This ends up being hugely damaging to Aziraphale’s characterisation, because the writers don’t care why Aziraphale would be taking these actions - only that they happen. Characters need to go from Point A to Point B, and they use Aziraphale to do this.

The Second Coming

Aziraphale knows nothing about the Second Coming when he agrees to take the job of Supreme Archangel, yet organising it has become his primary goal by the start of s3. He isn’t reluctantly planning it - in his first scene he is giving a speech where he is actively attempting to motivate the other angels.

Why is Aziraphale doing this rather than trying to reform Heaven? He does tell Crowley he doesn't want an 'awful, judgy' Second Coming, and had persuaded upstairs it didn't have to be the apocalypse, but that doesn't explain why he would be planning the new version of it. He has heard the archangels say they still want the End Times, and he's not naive enough to think they won't still try to co-opt it.

So why is he continuing to plan the SC rather than covertly sabotaging it? Does he want Joshua to give the inspirational speech he drafted despite all the risks? Or is he removing some element of free will for universal happiness/peace on Earth, and he thinks that's worth doing? Or is he being threatened? This shouldn't be something I need to headcanon.

The real explanation is that it doesn’t matter to the writers why Aziraphale would want this - without the Second Coming there is no Joshua, Joshua needs to exist and so Aziraphale has to plan it. 

Joshua

The way Aziraphale treats Joshua is perhaps the most egregious example of how Aziraphale is used to drive plot whether it makes sense or not. Joshua needs to leave Heaven, and so Aziraphale can’t be kind to him.

This means Aziraphale has to make several inexplicable mistakes with Joshua:

This is just such a Ridiculously Big Thing to happen in a story with consequences for Literally Everything in the Whole Universe and then also the slate on the previous interconnected web of causes and effects of everyone’s actions have been quite literally wiped as cleanly as it could possibly get. Pretty much everything that has happened before has to be measured via that lens of how much it has effected the Universe Reset, whatever it made the Reset possible or changed the type of reset or effected which characters were present at the Reset or how it might’ve effected their arcs and thus their decisions about the Reset. Even if there’s some implication of, like, reincarnations or cosmic echoes from the previous Universe affecting things, a Universe Reset is just an overwhelmingly huge Thing that has such overwhelmingly huge effects that it can easily overshadow everything else.

And all of this is not an inherently bad thing, a well-constructed Universe Reset plot, where you can totally retroactively see how every little detail along the way has led us to that moment, if not narratively, that at least thematically, can be a pretty damn cool thing. But one must be aware that this is the effect this kind of plot device tends to have on stories. And this is why Universe Reset plots are a particularly hard sell in Sequels. It’s very easy to have it feel like it just rendered the original story totally irrelevant.

And it feels like an especially Bad Fit as a Sequel for Good Omens, a story that originally took a pretty wide lens on the Apocalypse. Where saving the world was a Group Effort of at least eight humans and two supernatural beings, where the silly little everyday decisions of ordinary people and little coincidences that may or may not be manipulate by God had massive and/or unexpected ripple effects, and especially in the book there are a lot of fun little asides and tangents about the life stories of even minor characters and how people from all over the world are handling the sudden apocalypse-related weirdnesses.

Even when the world snapped back to Non-Armageddon Mode (a superficially kinda similar but distinctive thing to a Universe Reset), a lot of these specific little events and the memories of them did seem to remain, even if the majority of Humanity decided to shrug its shoulder and pretend everything is Normal. It’s fun to imagine how these specific people have been dealing with the aftermaths and the sudden return to ‘normalcy’.

That's much harder to pull off with a Universe Reset, it just kinda pulls everything into a very narrow focus.

And then it also feels especially discordant and unfitting when the Universe Reset Decision involves no actual Humans. And not only that, it’s basically up to just God and Crowley (with Aziraphale seemingly just here to relinquish his decision to Crowley and Satan here for just comic relief and symmetry). Like. not having any Human Involvement in ‘saving’ the world the second time would be a pretty lousy artistic decision for any sort of Narrative Resolution in a Good Omens sequel, but especially when it’s a Universe Reset because of that Narrative Bottleneck.

It kinda recontextualizes Everything That Has Happened in the story, in Human History, in the GO Universe as a whole, as being about Crowley, about getting him to the point in his character where he comes to a decision. It's all been about the point about Free Will that this one Supernatural Entity had to learn. (While Aziraphale’s story is recontextualized to be about nothing but his relationship with Crowley, since his part of the Decision is framed so heavily around the relationship stuff rather than Aziraphale's own worldview on Free Will and the Universe and Humanity). Which is just like… so against the basic themes of Good Omens I don't even know where to start.

And then it’s not even does a particularly good job at that because Crowley's arc flips from "Aziraphale let's run away together screw everyone else" to "Aziraphale we must kill ourselves for the Greater Good" on a dime, and any sort of transformation or arc he's supposed to have is downplayed by a narrative that just doesn't want to explore his flaws and instead acts like he just burst out fully formed from God's brow. And there's just so much stuff, even just in GO3, that doesn't seem to fit into the Narrative Bottleneck, and just feels like a superfluous time waste because of it.

Which is ‘needed’ because it basically acts as a counterpart or replacement to this cut exchange from the Book.

Like, that whole moment was an essential build up towards the book’s own (Almost) Ineffable Self-Sacrifice Climax. But both Adam’s Callout Scene and the way it culminates with the Husbands' decision to go into a hopeless battle against Satan were pretty much entirely gone from the original Good Omens Miniseries (what is now ‘GO1’). With TV Omens generally playing Crowley and Aziraphale as more ‘traditional’ protagonists, they now have much more positive implied relationship with Adam and there’s a lot less need for them to sacrifice themselves to ‘prove’ they really care about Humanity…

But, if you’re, let’s say, a hack writer suddenly tacking on a new Heroic Sacrifice Ending for this story to try to milk more Content out of it, suddenly you do need to find a new way to call-out how Humans tend to get screwed over in the GO universe, how Cosmic Forces try to control their lives and how Crowley and Aziraphale play a part in it - so that their sacrifice can build off it and ‘make up’ for it.

But, like, this is hardly a bad scene by many metrics, but in this specific supposed role of trying to build up thematically and character-wise to the Heroic Tragic This-Time-For-All-the-Marbles Sacrifice, it just can’t pull anything off that supports GO3. And comparing this to that similar cut moment with Adam just emphasizes all of these issues.

First and most obvious, Nina and Maggie only ever get a chance to have that talk with Crowley, compared to Adam talking in the company of both Husbands and us clearly seeing that his words have affected both of them.

Compared to a scene where the two humans talk to Crowley alone, and never get a chance to talk to Aziraphale (despite that being the Husband they had the most established relationship with previously and being the one responsible for the most egregious ‘Messing About’ that they experienced, but we’ll get to that soon…). It’s emblematic of one of the Big Thematic Issues that I have with the Decision even if I were to accept the basic idea of ending the Ineffable Husbands’ story with a ‘Heroic Sacrifice’ for Humanity - it’s not really a narrative about Crowley and Aziraphale’s relationship with Humanity, as much as it’s about Crowley’s relationship with Humanity, while Aziraphale’s part in the Decision is framed pretty much exclusively around his relationship with Crowley.

GO3 just puts so much emphasis on framing Aziraphale’s agreeing to the Decision as a sign of his love to Crowley, and ‘finally giving him something instead of being a Taker’… which, like, man, this is a whole can of worms just on its own, but trying to stay on-topic of this post, it’s such a massive downgrade to Aziraphale’s arc that he doesn’t get this opportunity to reflect and develop his relationship with Humans, compared to how much Adam’s call-out clearly affected him in the book… Now he’s just not allowed to have personal motivations for the Decision because that will diminish the “””poignancy””” of seeing him agree to it ‘for Crowley’.

And then what was always been the big sticking point for me about this scene as a ‘build-up’ to the sacrifice. Adam was criticizing Crowley and Aziraphale for ‘messing people around’ by doing their jobs, the jobs they’ve been already consistently doing for 6000 years at the start of the story, the jobs they were still very proud of and comfortable doing, their only objection has been the whole ‘Armageddon’ business.

The harm Crowley was causing Humanity was a running gag throughout the whole book, and as silly and inconsequential as it might seem, the M25 debacle made it suddenly very serious, Aziraphale has been insistent that the interference that Heaven does in the affairs of Humanity is Ontologically Moral on some level, but Crowley was always there to poke fun at the hypocrisy, and now that the Angel realizes how eager his people were for Armageddon, he’s very disillusioned with it himself. This is something Crowley and Aziraphale have been doing and will have probably continued to do indefinitely if not for the events of the story (and by the end it’s not even clear what they’re going to do now, whatever their character development will win over their standard compliancy in the long term, how would they balance the still-looming requirements of their work with their new realizations…)

In GO2, we have a Crowley and Aziraphale that are already trying to retire, who already seemed to be on the path to not really bothering Humanity all that much, and the meddling that Nina and Maggie call them out on is something that was only brought upon by a whole sequence of very specific Wacky Circumstances that made it so they “”had”” to meddle for ultimately benevolent reasons (this was all a side-effect of agreeing to shelter Gabriel). That makes it feel a lot more like an isolated specific incident than something that is, like, a systematic issue about the whole universe.

I guess if you squint you can kinda see the idea that the Husbands were maybe looking for an excuse to shove their noses into humanity’s business and that something would’ve happened sooner or later even if Gabriel never got Jim’d and/or the idea that as long as Heaven and Hell can’t leave Aziracrow alone, it will always be Humans who get the short end of the stick in these conflicts. But… this is such a looser, less coherent and less textually reinforced thread compared to “Heaven and Hell try to promote/tempt their ideologies unto Humans and this is literally why Aziraphale and Crowley are on Earth and what they are doing on an everyday basis”.

And there’s a cynical part of me that can’t help but wonder, like, this might not be the only problem here… but one of the bigger problems hampering that point is how specific and contrived the sequence of events that led Crowley and Aziraphale to ‘have’ to meddle in Nina and Maggie’s business. I can’t help but wonder if this is another case of GO2-3 being held back by its inability to make Crowley Wrong or Morally Culpable for anything ever. While Nina and Maggie only get a chance to call out Crowley, the Wacky Circumstances that led to the whole ‘Aziracrow playing Matchmaker’ thing mostly downplay Crowley’s agency and responsibility for the whole thing. It was primarily forced by both outside circumstances and then also it was Aziraphale’s attempt to bullshit Heaven that got Nina and Maggie involved in this mess, and Aziraphale is the one who performed the most egregious ‘Messing About’ Miracles in that whole Story Arc.

Everything feels like it was built around making sure that Crowley’s ‘guilt’ of the whole affair is as small as it could possibly be. Which is a far cry from them being both equally called out by Adam at the end of the book, and each having an arc confronting them with the ‘problematic-ness’ of their jobs from different angles. A GO2 that, for example, actually centered about how Crowley and Aziraphale’s current hedonistic existence might still involve ‘Messing People About’ might’ve been more thematically appropriate, but if Crowley was called-out by someone whose once-in-a-lifetime dinner at the Ritz was miraculously thrown off-course so that the Husbands could sit at their favorite table, that would make both of them equally at fault.

Really, the best course of action for a GO2 if we really must build towards this Finale would be to introduce the concept of ‘Miracle Accounts’ earlier and have the thread of that season build up to the idea of Crowley and Aziraphale still being stuck under Heaven and Hell’s thumbs because they’re not ready to give up on the lifestyle their jobs and Miracles allowed them. Building up the idea that the perks of being an Angel or a Demon are more like the benefits and privileges they get from being complicit in Heaven and Hell’s bullshit, making some sort of ‘Turning Human’ feel like the most appropriate solution and emphasizing the theme of “Change Requires Sacrifice”, which is the… most charitable interpretation of what the hell this Finale was going for. But this is also another route that makes it hard to offload as much of Crowley’s guilt and agency as possible on outside factor and/or Aziraphale, I guess.

And then also the placement of this scene in relation to the Decision kinda diminishes it's implied impact on Crowley and his Decision. In the Book Climax, Crowley and Aziraphale’s attempt at a Heroic Sacrifice comes almost immediately after Adam’s debate versus the Metatron and Beelzebub, so it was pretty much unambiguously clear that they were affected and inspired by Adam’s words and this is what led them to make that stand against Satan.

Meanwhile, like, I dunno, this is still one of the few scattered moments in GO2 that seem to act as something like a thematic buildup to the Finale, so I would like to acknowledge and analyze it as such, but sometimes it’s just so disconnected narratively that I start second-guessing that idea. Maybe this wasn’t a flawed half-assed attempt to make a counterpart to the Adam Call-Out that will connect to the Decision, maybe this is just yet another GO2 Plot Cul-De-Sac that wasn’t going to lead anywhere in Season 3…

Because between Crowley's chat with Nina & Maggie and the Decision, there are like 3 in-universe years and 90 minutes of Television (originally planned to be more like 6 hours), and when it comes to Crowley’s relationship with Humanity, we don’t actually get to see much effect or change in behavior that was inspired, even implicitly, by Nina and Maggie’s words. Like, its not like we get to see another opportunity where he might think he can totally make a human do what he wants, but instead he backs down and realizes that humans and are more complex than that or… anything else that implies he’s more respectful of human agency and less inclined to ‘mess people about’ than he was before that one conversation.

We see very obviously how their words affect his thoughts and decisions when it comes to Aziraphale, but not when it comes to Humanity. Nina and Maggie didn’t make him hate Heaven or Hell any more then he already did, they didn’t make him more inclined to try and fuck off to Alpha Centauri than he already was, they didn’t make him more protective of the Bookshop or more convinced that nothing could be changed or more inclined to spend years drunk in an alleyway. And then the main indication we have that their words did have an effect over the Decision is this very pointed choice of the word ‘Real’ in both occasions.

But even here, the use of ‘Real’ feels…. Not very thematically consistent. Nina and Maggie were saying that they were already Real People and that Crowley needs to respect that, but wouldn’t that also imply that the world they were living in was also “Real”? And yet Crowley claims that the original GO Universe was not Real, and that’s why they shouldn’t restore it and instead replace it with a new version that is “Real”. I mean… I guess you could say that the intention here is probably that the individual Humans were ‘Real’, but their universe wasn’t due to the whole ‘God’s existence is fucking with the possibility of Free Will’ thing. And Crowley’s conversation with Nina and Maggie made him realize how unfair it was for all of these Real People to exist in a world that wasn’t as Real as they were.

But you know… Crowley didn’t give Nina and Maggie the ‘Real’ Universe he apparently thought they deserved, nor did he give it to the 8 Billion other ‘Real’ Humans that were alive at the time these three had that little chat. The main reason why Crowley’s behavior seems discordant with Maggie and Nina’s words, the main reason why his Decision seems to be implying that both the Universe and the People were not Real, is the way he just seems to totally disregard the value of these people’s lives. And sure, he didn’t personally destroy the previous universe, he was trying to stop it until it was too late, but…. Once it was all gone, God has given him the option to ‘put everything back the way it was”.

Did She basically offer them to resurrect every soul who died when Michael destroyed the Book of Life? Well, that’s certainly what it sounded like, both on a basic 'what these words usually mean in most contexts' level and with how this line clearly alludes to the ending of GO1, where resurrecting everyone who died during Armageddon is exactly what happened.

And like, is it possible that in this specific case ‘putting everything back the way it was’ wouldn’t have brought anyone back as much as it would’ve replaced them with identical clones? Or that God meant that She was going to do another ‘let there be light’ and redo the Biblically Literalist Universe from scratch? Was there really no option to modify the current Universe to ensure more Free Will, and if so, could you make the argument that life in the original Good Omens Universe was really such an existential nightmare that all of these 8 billion humans are better off dead so that future people could live free of God’s meddling? Maybe. But whatever you want to infer or interpret, the fact is that we can’t know either way, because Crowley never asks any of these questions, never discusses any of these options.

Sure, there is a limit as to how much can and should be explained. This is still a story, and shouldn’t be reduced to just a bunch of characters standing around rattling off a bunch of rules and ‘what if’ scenarios to ward off the Nitpickers, rather then focusing on the narrative and the themes. But the vagueness of God’s suggestion here is actively detrimental to the narrative and themes of the story. Because the story that has been created here is that Crowley and Aziraphale have received an offer that sounded very much like it could bring back all of these people we saw die miserable and terrified and unfulfilled and they decided to give up on it without any real consideration or further explanation or justification.

Which, like, I think ‘when given an offer that sounds very much like an offer to resurrect them after a cruel and untimely death, one should at least seriously consider the option and at the very least ask for more details /clarification before writing the possibility off’ to be, like, the bare possible minimum of what it would mean to treat someone like a ‘Real Person’.

Because at the end of all of my rambling and comparisons, the real issue here isn’t at all with the Nina and Maggie scene. It’s just that this scene couldn’t shoulder the burden of justifying something as… extreme (world-shattering? Dramatic? Cosmic? Epic? Badly written?) as the Decision all on its own. And quite frankly, Adam wouldn’t have been able to handle such a monumental task either.

Yeah, Adam calls out Crowley and Aziraphale for ‘messing people about’, but there is a huge leap between the statement he actually makes, that their meddling is annoying and makes life harder for Humans (which is also more or less what Nina and Maggie say in their little conversation as well) and claiming that this prove that them existing as an Angel and a Demon is inherently antithetical to Humanity’s Free Will. Heaven and Hell’s (And Aziraphale and Crowley’s as individuals) attempts to meddle in Human Affairs has been generally portrayed as not-very-effective and not really causing any life/history altering changes, but there is still a very strong argument to make that it still causes troubles and minor annoyances and major frustrations to Humanity…

It’s just that the Decision suddenly decided to pull Free WillTM into this and made the whole thing feel contradictory to both the storyline 'building up to it' (where Crowley and Aziraphale’s attempt to matchmake Nina and Maggie caused them a fair bit of troubles and headaches, but they also pretty thoroughly failed to ‘make them fall in love’) and to, like, the entire series as a whole.

And Crowley and Aziraphale’s attempted sacrifice in the book was against a very present and self-evident danger of Satan coming up to throw a big deadly infernal temper tantrum. And, like, this wasn’t the Husbands’ fault by any means, but it was a situation that emerged from the ‘Heaven and Hell constantly preparing for Armageddon’ status quo that Crowley and Aziraphale were complicit in and benefited from all these years. Not to mention that three out of the eight Humans currently at the Airfield and in danger of getting Satan’d were there because Crowley and Aziraphale dragged them into this mess. It’s, you know, at the end of the day a situation of there being an immediate emergency and Crowley and Aziraphale taking some responsibility for it. It is a far cry from Crowley and Aziraphale having every single possibility offered by Actual Literal God (and also a Reality-Rewriting Book) and choosing to say that Humanity would be better off if they did not exist.

And, well, Adam didn’t need them to do a Heroic Sacrifice, since he obviously just took care of it on his own. Did he want them to sacrifice themselves to save Humanity? I honestly don’t know. I kinda feel like he might’ve found that gesture well-intentioned but also condescending, since, again, he took care of all of these problems on his own. But obviously the basic goal of stopping Satan and making sure none of the Humans (including all of Adam’s closest friends) don’t get hurt is something Adam would strongly agree with.

But would he have wanted these two to undo their own existence just to make sure Heaven and Hell would leave Humanity alone like he wanted to? That I am a lot less sure. And if he was told that this ‘sacrifice’ also means giving up on the possibility of restoring his life, the lives of his friends and the specific world that he knew and the Tadfield he knew… I don’t think he’d be on board with that, even with how much he disapproved of Heaven and Hell. At the very least he’d push for finding some sort of third option. A way to reduce Heaven and Hell's influence as much as possible so he could keep his home and his friends.

And this is just the same with Nina and Maggie. If the Decision was supposed to be inspired by their conversation with Crowley, why is it basically nothing that they actually wanted? Did they believe that the only way to make sure supernatural entities don’t meddle in their lives is to make sure they live in a universe without any? Would they have thought it would be worth it even if it means giving up on the chance to restore their own lives and their own future? Do you think Nina would have wanted her process of healing from Lesley cut short like that without anyone asking for her input (or that of any other Human, for that matter)? Do you think Maggie, the woman who struggled for years to keep a failing Record Shop afloat just because this is her family business would have advocated for throwing away this entire Universe and replacing it with a ‘Better’ one?

That means God built free will into all of Her creations from the very beginning. If that weren't true, the angels could never have Fallen. If that weren't true, Aziraphale would never have given away his sword. If that weren't true, humanity would never have been able to give in to Crowley's temptation.

"Well, you tempt them into that."

"Yes, but they can say no. It's the ineffable (free will) bit, isn't it?"

That's not an exact quote from the book, but yeah.

If everyone had been nothing more than puppets in God's hands from the very beginning, everything would have gone perfectly according to plan from the start. But every one of Her creations possesses free will - it was there from the beginning. Without it, none of what we saw throughout the book, or the first season, could have happened at all. Everything would have unfolded exactly as God wanted, without a single deviation.

P. S. Btw I don't think Crowley even realized he was giving humanity the knowledge of good and evil through that temptation. In Good Omens, it comes across as little more than a joke on his part. Sure, he was carrying out Hell's orders to stir up trouble in Eden and make Heaven's plans go sideways, but it never felt like he deliberately set out to grant humanity moral awareness. As I see it, he basically did it for the fun of causing a bit of chaos, without any conscious intention of giving humans the knowledge of good and evil.

The Problem is Aziraphale and Crowley fought so hard for CENTURIES to have a happy and free life together in the universe they helped create, only to be cheated from that experience and erased from their existence in order to create a new universe that they are unfortunately unable to enjoy themselves together as who they already were. Something that God made very clear to make a point of before she granted their wish. A wish, by the way, wasn't of their free will... because she created the situation that forced them into making it.

God forced that outcome. She created the events that resulted in them making their being cornered and limited. She allowed for all the pieces that created that situation to fall into place. She watched it all happen, watched them fight even though she knew they were fighting a losing battle, and then in the end she berated them, made them feel defeated and helpless with no hope of trying to fight anymore.

She got what she wanted. She got to get rid of the universe with all the humans that displeased her so much and got the excuse to get rid of all her disobedient children in heaven & hell by turning them into humans that were much more to her liking, so she didn't have to deal with their rebellious behavior anymore.

It doesn't matter that these new humans are living happy lives together. It doesn't matter that there are two Aziraphale and Crowley looking humans that found each other and are happy in love. Good for them....but the ending for Aziraphale and Crowley and the universe they created with all the humans they loved, that WE loved and grew connected to.....their ending was cruel and unfair

THATS why we are angry and heartbroken with such deep grief that we are struggling to move on from it and will never be able to accept any positive views on the finale.

If people can't understand that then I don't know what to say anymore.

The Good Omens universe, the humans, all the characters we loved in the book, s1, s2, and Aziraphale and Crowley most of all deserved better. They deserved more than what they got in the end.

One of the many reasons why I do not support the idea of the new universe in Good Omens being Godless:

Souls and reincarnation cannot co-exist with a Godless universe.

First of all, who created the souls in the first place? Must be a powerful force in the universe? Something... like a GOD?

Speaking as a Buddhist who love Good Omens, I am well familiar with the concept of reincarnation. The thing about having souls is that you need something like a system to govern/put them in order after people died.

Imagine, if there was no one looking after the souls when they died, what would the souls be doing? Who is going to tell the souls how they can reincarnate? Who's going to make sure the souls actually reincarnate and won't just be flying around aimlessly? Maybe humans souls can figure it out but what about the animals?

Animals have soul. Humans have soul. In some beliefs, even plants and objects have souls. Souls get recycled over and over again. animals can become humans in the next life, and vice versa. Who's going to make sure this happen?

Another thing: When you reincarnate, you need to forget everything about your past life. In Chinese belief, you have to drink a soup from an old lady in the underworld to forget everything. If the universe has no system like this, who is making sure the souls forget their past life?

And that is not even counting the aspect of Karma. Where bad people should reincarnate into terrible new life as a punishment for their crimes. And good people is more likely to have an easier new life. Again, who's going to make sure this happens? The bad souls don't just steal all the good reincarnation spots?

If you think deeper about it, so many problem arises. We can't just have billion of souls running around the universe unchecked! SOMEONE have to be out there to wrangle them up and make sure they behave.

All of these questions have been bugging me so much. You can't just throw the concept of reincarnation out there to soothe yourself about AziCrow being soulmates without thinking of the actual world building and the logistic of having souls.

Anywho, wow this post became pretty long. Imma end it now to get back to my art projects. Hope I didn't forget anything.

God: leaving Heaven unattended, come back to the angels waging wars on each other. Oh dammit better do damage control and separate the kids so they stop fighting.

God: Leaving Earth unattended and sometimes come back to see depraved things have happened. Oh that won't do. Let's tell the clearly unhinged and traumatized angels to deal with these regions somehow. (And the angels decided turning everyone into salt was a good idea lol)

God: Things got out of hand again, better flood 'em this time.

AziCrow's decision, how I see it, is just the same as what God has been doing. That's why She agreed to it so easily. The only difference that intriqued Her was the erasure of Heaven and Hell, and the evolutionary aspect of the new universe.

But they asked for it to be Godless!

No, She definitely did NOT erase Herself. God isn't stupid. And like every authority figure in the world, there is no way God would let these two characters have their wish. She has the ultimate power. why would She? There is no way the new universe is truly Godless. Maybe there's no Ineffable Plan, but it is not Godless.

No book of life, you say Well the Book of Life seems to be a record. It keep tracks of people and things related to life. It doesn't determine the future, but keep updating itself based on what is happening in reality. Changing the book is altering the past and not deciding the future is how I see it. Michael didn't write for the other Archangels to die. They had to burn the actual page to kill them. My point is, the BoL existing does not interfere with anyone's free will. It's just a tool to track down everyone and everything in the Good Omens universe from the way it's depicted. (Also a... teleportation device? Huh??)

Something is definitely out there. Their human versions just don't care enough to think about it.

As for whether it is meddling with the world or not? Well, if we take the ending with everyone present in the cafe, and Metatron/Derek still in Asa's life, as universe fact and not just because of filming budget and schedule, then yes. God is still meddling to get all of these people together.

She's still playing with her sims. Just in a different save file.

God's still playing her game.

Nobody won.

AziCrow actually lost, big time.

But AziCrow could have tricked her somehow!

1- It wasn't shown in the Movie. Nothing indicated they did this.

2- God is the most powerful being, with omniscience, in this universe. Being erased by her is not something you can come out of alive. She could delete them down to the smallest particle. They can't just turn very tiny to escape her.

But reincarnation!

1- Not a thing in Christianity for Angel/Demon to have souls. At least not to my knowledge.

2- Cannot have Reincarnation without a system to manage the souls. The logistic is not as simple as "they becomes souls and then reborn." It's more complicated than that. The concept of reincarnation, if you actually read about it in cultures that talk about it (not the whimsical, romanticised version of it), cannot exist in a universe without something/someone to keep everything in check. Things would fall into chaos.

See this post of mine for more thoughts on Reincarnation.

Crowley and Aziraphale loving the humans they are actually living amongst, appreciating Humanity for the specific inventions and modern conveniences and foods and art that we have created over the centuries and that we love too, the text making it clear that humanity’s influence shaped them into the Beings they are now, that we taught them of Free Will and moral gray areas that allowed their bond to form, that despite their powers they still have relatable human problems and sometimes they are amazed by our kindness or morbidly fascinated by our depravity or amused by our sheer brazenness and sometimes they find us annoying and silly and sometimes they find us delightful…

That will always feel to me like such a better picture of ‘loving Humanity’ then watching this hollow martyr simulacra of Crowley talking about ‘People’ in such an abstract and distant way. Having this apparent pouring saintly selfless love and care for the Concept of Humanity that’s totally unconnected to the traits and achievements of the Humanity he has come to know over the years, because he’s willing to sacrifice everything for future ‘People’ that as far as he knows, will be nothing like the Humans he knew over the last 6000 years (and the fact that they are pretty much the same is its own can of worms), and just generally coming off as pitying and condescending. Not even having some sort of empathetic insight from the years he spent Miracle-less on Earth.

And Aziraphale and Crowley loving living on Earth so much that they were willing to betray their sides like that is such a beautiful way to make us the readers appreciate the experiences of being alive on Earth ourselves. Book!Crowley doesn’t even argue that life after Heaven’s victory will be ‘better’ by some sort of abstract scale, he just knows that it won’t be worth it for Aziraphale if it means giving up on good music and fine wine. When Crowley first starts thinking about how much he does not actually want Armageddon to happen, despite the rather luxurious lifestyle he leads, the first Earthly Pleasure he knows he’d miss is just… the experience of having a nice sleep after a heavy meal. Crowley faced Hell’s Wrath for the sake of having a nice sleep after a heavy meal. Because it is those kind of experiences that make life worth living.

I am actually tearing up just thinking about it now, it’s the perfect balance of silly but also poignant appreciation of being alive. For the kind of experiences we should linger on and enjoy and aspire to have as often as we can, even if we can't do it as often (or quite as long) as the Demon Crowley can. It is so so much better than GO3 trying to suddenly swerve into telling us that Crowley and Aziraphale’s life were an Existential Nightmare by some badly-conveyed metafictional philosophical standpoint, and we should be happy with our lives because it’s Objectively Freer and Better and More Real from that same abstract metafictional philosophical perspective.

Good Omens had a message, which was all about choice and free will (we have always had them), and the value of earthly life with all its imperfections. It had distinctive characters who both embodied these ideas and were also lovable, fully rounded individuals, most of all a demon and an angel who'd "gone native" after millennia among us. They weren't explicitly presented as lovers, but they were definitely a pair, in some sense, by the book's end. Crowley was crusty and snarky with a cream centre, and Aziraphale was acquisitive and waspish but at bottom caring and thoughtful (heaiing not only Anathema but her bike, giving Mary Hodges a lovely dream, recognizing the value of Adam's "human incarnate" nature).

What happened was that, due to the stunning quality of the original screen production, its just-right romantic subtext, and the performances by Tennant and Sheen, there was clamor from fans who wanted more. Amazon saw dollar signs -- and so did the surviving author, who on his own is notorious for bleak narratives, bitter endings and desecration of beloved things.

Look up a Gaiman short story titled "The Problem of Susan." Susan, the older Pevensie sister in C. S. Lewis' Narnia books, "outgrows" the palpably Christian fantasy world of Narnia and only cares about "lipstick and stockings and invitations." Some people see this as disparagement of sexually mature women; I resonate more to my own experiences of watching the friends who shared my childhood imaginative world "grow up" into dreary preoccupations with popularity and primping. Neil G. presents yet a different reason why Susan turned her back on Narnia: in old age, she recalls her last trip there, which ends with Aslan the Christ-lion performing a sexual act with the White Witch, his supposed adversary, in the middle of a corpse-littered battlefield, both of them mocking Susan the while. The message being that? All religion is a two-man con designed to make people fight each other, and idealists are fools, I guess...? Whatever your views on faith, the story came across to me as Gaiman defiling a beloved work of fiction, a comfort world to millions regardless of religion, just for the fun of the shock value. I took a shower after reading it.

This is the guy who, by dint of survival, got control over what happened to the narrative and the characters of Good Omens. With no one around to hold his leash (somewhere in an interview Sir Terry joked about insisting Neil remove a few character deaths) he, and his author buds, were free to misuse the material any old way they wanted. The Crowley who gave up on everything and the Aziraphale who was a callous jerk were about as authentic as, say, a version of Captain America who supports Trump and persecutes immigrants Cuz 'Murica. It was childish and reprehensible, a disservice to everyone who loved the book for decades, the creatives who turned Gaiman's original, relatively faithful adaptation into a masterpiece, and especially to Messrs. Tennant and Sheen, who palpably loved their characters and were forced to utter lines that were completely dissonant from the characters they'd developed and the message of the book.

Neil Gaiman said he wouldn't make a sequel to Good Omens

Neil Gaiman at SXSW in Austin, Texas in 2019:

[Gaiman also confirmed the series will only be six episodes, with no intention of trying to go for another season if successful. "The lovely thing about Good Omens is it has a beginning, it has a middle, and it has an end," he said to appreciative applause. "Season 1 of Good Omens is Good Omens. It's brilliant. It finishes. You have six episodes and we're done. We won't try to build in all these things to try to let it continue indefinitely."]

Source: Entertainment Weekly (2019)

2018 - Neil Gaiman on X- Twitter

Tweet link here

Also Neil Gaiman in 2023:

And the supposed lack of free will is never portrayed as a problem. We aren't actually shown anyone struggling in any way because they're prevented from acting by a force beyond their control. Crowley seems to think they can't make a difference (even though they already did in season 1?), but his epically destructive levels of depression make his conclusions questionable at best here. I'm talking about actual evidence we have witnessed with our eyeballs.

If you had paused the show at the moment Crowley and Aziraphale landed in the bookshop on a first watch and had to brainstorm the problem that they needed to resolve in that moment, I doubt anyone would have seriously presented the existence of god and the lack of free will inherent because of god's existence as a serious suggestion.

I'm just saying 12 episodes and an hour in, we're suddenly told our main characters have decided they need to give up each other and their entire selves so they can... get rid of a presence that hasn't had any active impact on everything we've watched so far? So they can resolve a problem that we didn't even know existed (and I could argue that we have plenty of evidence that proves the exact opposite is true in this world, actually)?

And then we're shown the result of their sacrifice and... it looks exactly like the old earth. So getting rid of god and giving humans free will didn't have any noticeable impact AT ALL, as far as we're shown, on how human history turned out?

I'm just saying, you can't ask me to get on board with my favorite characters doing a self-sacrifice for a problem that contradicts everything that came before it and wasn't actually even discussed until the actual moment when they decide how to resolve it.

I'm someone who values predictability and consistency very deeply. Good Omens was that source of stability for me. And I know a lot of people share that feeling. The fact that Aziraphale and Crowley's ending had essentially been known in advance to us was one of the things that made this story so special to me.

i’ve seen a lot of posts over the years discussing whether crowley is, in essence, good or bad. but here’s the thing: no one is fundamentally good or bad. full stop. in fact, that’s one of the major themes of good omens, and it doesn’t just apply to humans.

we are the sum of our choices, a messy amalgamation of nuance. as a person you will do good things and bad things over the course of your life, but a lot of that comes down to circumstances (think of the edinburgh minisode). we do what we can to survive in the circumstances that we’re given. it’s all so much more complex than something like intrinsic morality.

crowley’s job is to inflict evil. does that make him a bad person? he does, after all, do a lot of bad things.

he also saved the world. that’s pretty good. exceptionally good, even.

i don’t think someone “fundamentally good” would try to hit a hedgehog with his car, and i also don’t think someone “fundamentally evil” would risk his life to save the world.

crowley and aziraphale spent millennia among humans and thus no longer fit into the mold, which goes to show that the mold has always been optional. free will can be learned. angels aren’t fundamentally good and demons aren’t fundamentally evil, they’re both just doing the jobs they’ve been assigned. we are often victims to our circumstances, but if we can manage agency, we can break out of those circumstances and make different choices.

Doesn’t it seem strange to anyone else that Azi doesn’t react at all when Crowley says that Hell was calling him back?

Crowley never actually told Aziraphale throughout the entire second season that Beelzebub had summoned him back in the first episode.

If they were completely alone, Azi would at the very least be surprised and ask when this happened, why Hell was calling Crowley back, why he hadn’t told Aziraphale about it, and so on. That’s exactly how Aziraphale would behave if it were just the two of them. And then he immediately starts talking about Heaven, about what a good place it is, while constantly glancing out the window overlooking Nina’s café, where Metatron is standing.

(On top of that, Azi says “you’re the bad guys!”, not “they’re the bad guys!”. Even throughout the entire second season, he only ever describes Crowley as "good," "kind", "nice". That’s another sign that those words weren’t actually meant for Crowley at all.)

Also there’s that fucking “not at all” through gritted teeth, along with one of the most forced smiles Aziraphale has ever given, at least that I’ve seen. His smile is basically forced throughout the entire F15, but here it’s especially fucking obvious. I can barely even see his bloody lips moving.

Basically I re-read The One True Copy and Honestly I Can’t Believe The Nerve Of This Man Would You Just Look At What He’s Done To Our Story

I’ve talked about this so many times at this point. The book and seasons 1 + 2 stated that humans always had free will to begin with. They literally come up with things beyond and original to anything from heaven and hell. The whole idea of there being Good and Evil is literally what creates the concept of free will in the first place. The reason some humans can’t do as well as others is because there is inequality of the humans’ own making, therefore some are born in castles while others are born in poverty. And Crowley even BELIEVES that he’s “[hung] around humans” long enough to have some free will of his own. Please tell me how God has to do with literally any of this???

The issue was literally never about free will. Having free will or not, being influenced by God or not, being influenced by Satan or not, was shown to be fairly insignificant in the book. Despite anything that heaven or hell or God ever did to the humans, what they did to each other was always better and worse. God is literally completely irrelevant. Actually, God only speaks once (in an Infamous Bible to ask Aziraphale where his flaming sword went) but otherwise does not interact with anything or appear anywhere else in the book at all. The fact that the finale tries to paint God as the one true thing that was always keeping humanity from having a “chance” never ceases to blow my mind.

I’m willing to bet my life Terry Pratchett wrote this one

Certainly not giving Depressed-And-Suicidal “God will always stack the deck against me” Crowley here, is it???

***For context for the next one: Adam is talking about getting rid of both The Them and The Johnsonites gangs as a metaphor/allegory for Heaven and Hell going to war to try and get rid of each other

While they mainly suggest that either gang coming out as the sole winner is as undesirable as either heaven or hell winning for eternity, I think this serves to make a point about how getting rid of both sides entirely is also a bad idea. The neighbors, the bystanders, the rest of humanity, may see it as “a plaque on both your houses,” But “it’d be a jolly sight less interestin’ if we all weren’t here.”

And remember, Terry Pratchett was responsible for The Them scenes in the book.

“That’s because the people trying to sort it out were [Gai]men.”

*cue vague sounds of frustration as I tear my hair out in the background*

NG deserves jail time for taking this quote from Adam and giving it to Crowley to serve as his Righteous Hero Speech. Also, they didn’t sort anything out while any of the humans were alive and only declared that they had ‘sorted it’ after the entire universe was dead 💀

I cannot believe this line. It is literally presented as sarcasm, as satire, and yet the finale unironically adopts this entire philosophy in the end.

*cue somewhat louder sounds of frustration as I tear out what little hair I have left in the background*

*Me crossing out every single line in the finale script I just printed*