vidavalor

Here's the thing... all of the words that Asa-Aziraphale tells Professor Not!Pronounced!Antony in this scene that his mother used to say? Scrumptious... Absolutely... Tickety-boo... Amusingly and Hop/Hope? We've heard Aziraphale and Crowley use those words between them when wording before. They're all established Nightingales vocabulary words-- with one exception: squiffy.

Just as Professor Anthony said he's never heard a person use the word scrumptious in real life before? (And that phrase was yet another Clue to this not being real, imho?) We've never heard Aziraphale or Crowley, in the show or in the novel, use the word squiffy when Nightingaling-- and we've even seen them get squiffy, in the drunk sense, with one another more than once in the past? But, more to the point?

From what I can tell, I don't think they ever would use the word squiffy when flirting with one another, which then adds a whole other layer of squiffy dubiousness to this Asa & Anthony scene. Why wouldn't Crowley and Aziraphale use this word flirtatiously?

Because, as I listed above, there are too many purely negative meanings of squiffy for it to be a word to use when wordily flirting with one another, which is fundamentally what Nightingales is.

The negative meanings of this word are not the kinds that are also sexually euphemistic-- like words related to death, destruction, battle, Armageddon-- which we've heard them use. Selection of words like that add humor to the choice but squiffy is not that kind of word. The meanings of squiffy? They're just... negative. Every single meaning of squiffy, besides the drunk/tipsy one, couldn't be less romantic or sexy, right?

This is a word that means untrue, not real, dubious, wrong, incorrect, not working correctly, rank-smelling... its other meaning relates to menstruation (not negative but hardly a top choice of flirting topics lol). This is not a word that Crowley and Aziraphale would use because to do so when wording would be to say that one another, and the two of them as a whole, were all these negative things. You wouldn't use etymology and wordplay to romance someone like they are doing with Nightingales and then pick a word like this.

Crowley and Aziraphale can, and likely would, use this word in everyday situations, like saying that the fridge has "gone all squiffy" if it's not working properly or that the drunk guy singing loudly in the street outside The Dirty Donkey is "a bit squiffy", but using it between them, in relation to one another and their relationship? That's a nah. Squiffy wouldn't get anywhere near close to making the cut for a Nightingales vocabulary word.

But this is the words-within-words show, right, and the word squiffy has been included in this super-squiffy scene to support our sense of this all being off, and what word is within squiffy? The word quiff. What's a quiff?

The original definition of a quiff was a hairstyle of loose locks of hair falling in curls over the forehead. Professor Anthony's hair is stylized in the original definition of a quiff. When Crowley's hair was curling over his forehead after sleeping in the alley in early S3? That was also a quiff. The more modern definition, though, is that it combines a pompadour and other styles but is basically just straight up in the front. How Crowley's hair is in the rest of S2 & S3, minus the flashbacks, is the modern definition of a quiff.

To the best of my memory, Crowley never had any style that met the definition of a quiff in S1 but his hair has been constantly stylized in one of the definitions of a quiff since 2.01-- so, for the entirety of what I'm saying is Aziraphale's nightmare and so not real. For all this stuff that's been a bit squiffy? Crowley's had a quiff when, really... he didn't actually have one in the reality back in S1. (Yes, I, too, also cannot believe I'm bringing Crowley's hair into this but *points at words* they led me here lol, and they are the everything in this story.)

In the penultimate scene of a non-real season on the words-within-words show, Good Omens dropped in a word in squiffy as a Clue to finding the lady on the ending. It said hey, if you are thinking this all seems way off? If you're creeped out by the Bizarro Dirty Donkey and Derek, the Bookshop Owner and these zombified versions of these characters and you just know this isn't real? Here's a word for you in squiffy that emphasizes that you're supposed to feel that way-- and that word is definitely, definitely not a Nightingale.

A play on the idiom "you wouldn't know a [fill-in-blank] if it bit you in the ass." Asa-Aziraphale's Nightingales puns here are based around the use of homophony-- nose and knows-- and euphemistic meanings of the verbs to know and to perch, which are below.

As always in Good Omens, it's the Biblical meaning of to know, which is to have sex with. It is one of the oldest sexual euphemisms in existence and was born from the whole 'Adam & Eve in The Garden' story, which is why Crowley and Aziraphale-- who, as we know, had more than a little to do with that story lol-- using it all over the place in Good Omens is extra-amusing.

Just enough of a bastard to be worth knowing... That was that. It was nice knowing you... Just an angel I know, etc.-- all of these lines are referencing the fact that Crowley and Aziraphale are lovers by virtue of Crowley using the euphemistic meaning of to know.

Then, there is to perch, which is both a noun and a verb in how it's used on the surface, non-euphemistic level in our everyday world. A perch is the rod or bar or a tree branch on which a bird rests and, from that, it was personified into a verb that also describes the human behavior of sitting lightly on something. But, it's not just that by any means...

A perch/perching also means all of the following sexually euphemistic things: beer/alcohol (quite extraordinary amounts of alcohol); fish, as a perch is a type of freshwater fish, which is Crowley and Aziraphale's shorthand for sex; a bed or going to bed; and, also, dying, with a percher being old UK slang for someone who is dying. Death, as we know, is the ultimate sexual euphemism (le petit mort/"the little death" being the French-originated phrase for an orgasm; this post is all about examples of that in Good Omens.) So, bottom line?

To perch is euphemistic for to come, so, Asa-Aziraphale's line then means a whole handful of amusingly filthy things at once, like...

You wouldn't know a Nightingale if it perched on the end of your *knows*, meaning: you wouldn't know a Nightingale if it came from watching you come, as well as... The other, two meanings retaining the original word of nose: You wouldn't know a Nightingale if it perched on the end of your nose = you wouldn't know a Nightingale if it sat on/came on your face.

It's ironically a bit true because the whole thing is that Professor Anthony doesn't know the full etymology of what he's saying because he doesn't know he's a pale imitation of an original Nightingale. He can Nightingale a bit but he doesn't really, truly know what that means because he doesn't know the full history of it. He thinks the etymology of this etymology-based private language originated with the two of them but Asa-Aziraphale knows the truth.

Various Clues suggest Asa-Aziraphale remembers, and the horror of what he is dreaming here is that he essentially damned himself to an eternity without his Crowley-- the one who, earlier in the dream, was literally perching 😂 on the arm/hand of Aziraphale's desk chair...

The S2 part of the nightmare also showed that Aziraphale has never forgotten Crowley's funny potato/egg salad/excellent pun because the dream saw Aziraphale actually repeating it himself to Crowley in that scene before he starts punning to him in several languages while pretending he speaks bad French to Justine.

Crowley and Aziraphale using potato-- the Earth apple, etymologically-- and tart between them is funny, Michael using it to disparage Aziraphale is not, but we heard how harsh on Aziraphale these voices are in his nightmare. This is a dream where he's calling himself Lord Slorch, etc., and those dark voices would be part of his nightmare without question...

I think you are right that potato, potarto sounds like something Aziraphale's mind would make up. There's also that Michael (his proxy in the dream) is killing people in a very Aziraphale way-- with a pin that is a pen and visually a pun on pen/plume...

The pen also has an enormous vent/breathing hole and literally took Uriel's breath. Letters, words, the ability to speak and write being interwoven with breath and life is Aziraphale. (Compare with its mirrored opposite paralleling scene, too: What kind of pen do you need?)

Plus, there's just that... that scene of Michael killing Uriel is bananas lol. It's in some alley that is also a room behind the Chengs' restaurant where the walls are peeling back to reveal some of the record shop's posters but they're fabric, like a t-shirt?! A couple of The Four Horsepeople's bikes or the like seem to be there? Uriel is what feels like the 14th character in the span of about 2 minutes who just magically knows Aziraphale is in the Chengs' surreally overly-colored and plastic-looking restaurant-- including ones unrelated to Heaven, like Misty Cameron? All dream elements...

Colors are weird in a dream, rooms shift and warp, things appear in places that are weird-- and the posters are not the only things like that. The Windmill Stage Door from 1941 is on Whickber Street in the dream; objects from Aziraphale's bookshop are in Derek's Bookshop, etc.. The main poster you can see on the wall in the potato, potarto scene is one for the artist Sheila Sims, whom Good Omens made up for the fake albums on the walls in Maggie's shop in S2. Sim, a shortening of simulation, aka any environment that looks and feels real but is not-- including a dreamscape.

Sixpence: In 1941, Aziraphale is smirking when he mentions the sixpence because of the innuendo there: six, from the Latin sex (ahem, six shots of espresso in a big cup lol), and the euphemistic aspects of the word pen in there, but there's also pence, aka pense, meaning to think/to dream, with pen as to write/to create. The sixpence is the happy ending where it's Aziraphale's nightmare and the final shot is of him waking up to go use the dream to make a world of good omens with the real Crowley. This is the one that I think is the lady/the true answer-- and it's represented by the coin that is genuinely there in Aziraphale's hand the whole time in this foreshadowing magic trick.

The farthing? The word means a fourth part. It's the last bit of the story thrown in there in the end-- the Asa-Aziraphale & Professor Anthony world. It's the horror that is Derek the bookshop owner and my dead mother used to say tickety-boo. It's the plot which is fun since it's a nightmare but would be absolutely godawful if it were actually the ending. The farthing is the entire deception in the coin trick.

Aziraphale places the sixpence in his palm. No trick-- this is the coin, and he really places it there. This is the real ending. The trick is in the farthing, which he then seems to place in his hand alongside the sixpence. Only, he didn't really-- it was never actually placed in his palm with the sixpence at all, it just was made to look like it was. We think there are two coins to choose from because it seems to us like two were put there but, really? There was only ever one-- the farthing was a deliberate deception. This is how it works with the S3 ending, too, as...

...while we think there are two possible coins at play here? He says the magic words. Banana fish gorilla shoelace with a dash of nutmeg. Aziraphale's magic words are of his and Crowley's magic words-- they are Nightingales Cant. And then what happens to complete the trick? Then, with the blink of an eye and a whooshing breath of rushing air...

...the farthing has vanished. The world of the dream disappears with a breath and the opening of his eyes, as all dreams do, and all that remains in his hand is what was there all along: the sixpence.

You didn't think Aziraphale's magic tricks weren't part of the ending, did you? 😉 It's a trick for close quarters, as Crowley pointed out in 1941 with that funny pun, but showing it to us then helps us to figure it out now. S2 was The Bullet Catch; S3 was The Farthing Has Vanished.

The big thing here happens as a result of these two fellas and the director's chairs...

As we know from the story? Bookshop, as a word, is really just Crowley and Aziraphale and wherever they're making their life together. If they ever moved anywhere else, that place could be called the bookshop between them, even if it was just a house. I bring this up because we obviously know now what these chairs in front of the bookshop in the teaser are referencing, right? The chairs in front of the South Downs Cottage.

The camera angles even are a play on this because they first showed us the Chengs' restaurant (which, according to the compass in the bookshop, is south of Whickber) and then swung the camera down a bit in the next shot of the bookshop-- south downs.

There is also that stars are people, metaphorically and euphemistically, in this story and between Crowley and Aziraphale. So, visually referencing Asa-Aziraphale and Professor Anthony looking at the celestial bodies in the sky by putting a pair of chairs side-by-side on the sidewalk in front of the bookshop, facing the people of Whickber Street, is echoing that South Downs Cottage scene, right?

But look at what's happening here... unlike the first and last scenes of the teaser, both of which are done so that they could be from the show itself? The bit where the guys set the chairs down? It's in front of a bookshop that is very much a set. It's not real to us here, visually-- we can see the top of it. We can see the wires and rigging and electrical. It's a construct. It's fake. But, as soon as they put the chairs that represent the end down, what happens?

The lights come on upstairs in the bookshop, then in the rest of the shop, as if people are waking up, and a spotlight holds on the A.Z. FELL AND Co. on front of the bookshop before, thanks to the camera angles? The concept of this place as a set retracts ahead of the final shot, which then becomes one that could be from the show itself. Why?

Because the teaser is representing the nightmare. It begins with a shot not of a set but of the darkened bookshop at night back in reality with abrupt music warbling and cutting of during it that signals a shift to the non-reality of the dream. The music then changes and it shows the set near the Chengs' restaurant for the middle part of the teaser. It moves the camera back to show us the lanterns expanding up the street and that Goldstone's is gone and the like to represent the changing Whickber Street of the nightmare in S2 & S3. But then...

...it cues up the South Downs scene where S3 winds down by putting the chairs in front of the bookshop set, signaling that the South Downs scene isn't real, just as it echoes the Aziraphale waking up of the final shot.... and then it goes a step further than S3 actually did to give us what is actually shot to be a scene as if from the series itself. A flashforward to the future. How can we see it doing that? Go back to the chairs...

The very last shot in S3 is the chairs from behind as we go up to the nebula in the sky-- synonymous with Crowley, who invented them-- and the whooshing sound begins. We hold on the nebula in the night sky-- hold on metaphorically Crowley, to whom Aziraphale will be returning momentarily. The sky around it snaps away, turning black, consciousness rushing back up behind Aziraphale's eye as he begins to wake up. This was echoed in the teaser by what happened when the director's chairs were put down in front of the bookshop. The lights went on and the set began to retreat-- like a person waking up and leaving their constructed dreamscape. And why the chairs anyone can sit in but which are known as director's chairs, of all chairs?

Well... the ending images of S3 made a point to show us the chairs from the back, just in case we didn't see enough of them from when Asa-Aziraphale was sitting down to notice what kind of chairs they are because it matters-- these are what are known as Adirondack chairs.

Adirondack means tree eater and a dack is an old word for a duck so there are other humorous levels to this but the main thing is actually just in how it breaks down to: a dir on dack/deck, with dir being the abbreviation for director, and on deck meaning what comes next. So, adirondack = a dir. on deck... the S3 chairs referencing the chairs from the teaser and saying they are actually what comes next. It's pointing us back to the teaser for help with answers to the ending of S3.

It is saying that, off of these Adirondack chairs-- off of Aziraphale waking up after this dream? What comes next is that he and Crowley get metaphorical director's chairs-- making their own destiny, not this terrible ending. It doesn't end with the Adirondack chairs in this obviously fake, creepily subpar world. This is the end of the nightmare, not the end of the story. And emphasizing that? Is that the teaser then gave us one more scene-- one that was filmed to not look at all like it was on a set but from the show itself. It's a flashforward to the future.

The set fades away after the chairs and the lights indicating waking up and the shot resets. For the last shot, the camera refocuses on the bookshop front door-- a common, recurring shot from the show. It moves in a bit closer as we see a person come in from behind the door on our right. We can't see her clearly but we can see snippets in the window.

She has red hair and a white graphic t-shirt, like a band shirt. She has a silver, non-wedding ring and pink nails-- with pink being used throughout Good Omens as it usually is, a color of love and good health. Seeing pink in Good Omens is a good omen. And we're about to see several bits of evidence that this is not meant to be a crew member on a set...

We see her hand come in front of the door and she takes the bookshop's closed sign between her fingers in a way that is, as some of us noticed when this first came out, how Crowley lifts things, as we saw in 1941...

She flips the sign over to open and then we see her from the side as she walks away, further back into the bookshop, for the last scene of the teaser-- and the real last scene of the series. We realize she can't be a crew member. Why? Because she looks to be about twelve years old, if that. As she walks away, we see her profile and realize she's a child.

The Setting the Stage teaser? It didn't just set the stage for S3-- it set the stage for The World to Come beyond it. Open-- they pen more than one kind of book of life together...

This redheaded girl existing and helping out in the bookshop in the post-nightmare world means that Crowley and Aziraphale get their happy ending. She's family if she's opening the sign on the door. What we watched in S2 and S3 set the stage for her.

The Setting the Stage trailer gave us a flashforward glimpse of the bookshop in the future. It's still there, of course, as that was all a nightmare. The world only ended in Aziraphale's dream. The bookshop still stands and, one weekend day in the not-too-distant future? A girl that looks like them will be turning over the open sign of a shop that is now hers, too. That's how it actually ends. In true Good Omens form? They told us before the end even began.

It's not the only thing they flashed forward to, either...

If you read any of the linked posts in this post about the nightmare, you'll see that I came to the conclusion that Aziraphale will wake from the nightmare realizing that the biggest next step he can take to build this world where he and Crowley can live openly together? That is to reach out to Gabriel, as that's what his dream was emphasizing that had been considering doing in reality. The dream basically shows him, and us, how Gabriel is the key to the happy ending-- it starts as it ends, but it also ends as it starts, with Gabriel coming to the bookshop, as every ending is a new beginning, right? Well...

Funny then that we've had this photo of Gabriel talking to Aziraphale in the bookshop (those are Aziraphale's knees on the bottom left) since S1 without being able to understand what it meant until now. Nothing more Good Omens than giving us part of the ending back in the beginning of S1, in a way we couldn't find the lady on until after S3. 😉

That's probably Aziraphale's diary from 1827. Does Gabriel know there's a statue of him in Edinburgh? No? Would he like to go see it together sometime? Say, with Crowley and Beelzebub...? There's a little pub nearby...

It starts as it ends, and it ends full circle from how it started...