Good Omens, the series

It is positively miraculous how they managed to start so strong and fail so stupendously.

Season one – Masterpiece

The first season was a masterclass. It stuck to the book with incredible faith, lifting out whole passages of the original text, elaborating in just the right places, with just the right levels of absurdity.

Gaimen is on record as stating that he kept in all Pratchett’s contributions at the expense of his own – conclude from that what you will. But the point is, it worked. The humour worked, the satire worked, even the fucking storyline worked. I didn’t agree with all their stylistic choices (Death, for example), but it worked.

The most noticeable change was in the introduction of a romance angle between Crowley and Aziraphael. Trust me there was no homo-eroticism in the book. It confused the hell out of a lot of fans. In the original text C & A are friends. They have spent so long on earth and around each other that despite being on opposite sides, they find they have more in common with one another than with other angels or demons.

And I think this is the part of the story that gets lost in the show. It is a critique of corporate and working culture. It isn’t really a story about good and evil. Its a story about choices and the power of individualism.

Season two – Shaky Foundations

Then the next season comes along and the cracks begin to appear.

Many people were incised over the sudden breakup and cliffhanger ending. I certainly agree about the latter. The person who invented cliff-hanger ending should be hung, drawn, and quartered. Further, for many, this was playing into the gays cant have happy endings trope.

For me, looking at the two seasons together, it looked very much like this was the setup of a third-act breakup. Which is a shitty place to leave audiences. But could have worked, if the writers had bothered to set it up.

Because the problem with season two wasn’t the climax. It was everything that came before it. It was the appalling lack of structure. Just think about it. Of the six episodes, four of them are devoted to the find the Mcguffin (Gabriel) side-plot. Nobody who came back for season two gives a flying fuck about Gabriel or this world. We were there for C & A.

But for the first four episodes nothing about their relationship changes. The way they relate to and think about each other is basically the same. Nothing in these first episodes has any bearing on the story’s ending, it is filler. And not even that interesting.

Then finally the writers remember there is supposed to be a romance plotline. So they close off the Gabriel plot by having Gabriel himself reveal the answer (and Im sorry, but these writers are not Agatha Christine). There was absolutely no stakes to this revelation, no work done by the main characters to find the answers. And I get where they were going with this, the emotional setup they were trying to create. But their setup needed more setup, because this solution felt entirely and ridiculously undeserved.

Then, in the space of a single episode, we go from maybe we could be falling in love, to breakup. Audiences were devastated and they had good reason to be. And I am sorry but this has Gaimen’s prints all over it. The desperate preference for a twist over story arc is very typical of his work (more on my opinions of Gaimen here).

I will say the acting and nuance of that breakup scene was staggeringly good. The way they are both asking for the same thing, but cant see past the situation. Many people have many different interpretations, but I do feel like Aziraphael’s insistence that they could only be together if Crowley came to heaven and became an angle stank of a kind of racism. That Crowley wasnt good enough for him as a demon. Others focus more on his insistence on choosing a broken system over Crowley. It, along with the many flashbacks, carried the show for me, and I suspect for many others. I certainly was invested in getting an ending for them by that point.

“Season” Three – implosion

Can we even call this a season of TV? It was all of an hour long!

And after watching it my first thought was to wonder why they bothered making it, when so little care or money went into it.

I suppose we can’t really discuss what-ever-the-fuck this thing was, without acknowledging the massive spanner in the show’s works that was the accusations against Gaimen. For a while there it looked like the show would be axed, and frankly it should have been. And I dare say the writers found themselves with impossible task. Take a script written by a man with a massive reputation and a fanatic fanbase, that was supposed to be several hours long, and dial it down to only one. But man, how did they fuck it up this badly?

This “season” has even less structure than the last. Its just a bunch of stuff thrown together with no rhyme or reason.

The second coming, which never actually comes (cheap blow but I couldn’t resist). First they lose Jesus, which was so obviously and unimaginatively a repetition of the previous season that I actually asked the TV what the fuck it was doing. Then a long sequence of Jesus being stupid on earth which I found rather dull. Again there seemed to be some metaphor being invoked but I have no idea what it was supposed to be. And the whole thing goes nowhere ‘cos right around the time people were supposed to be noticing he was magical is when they all die. Hell, even C & A forget about the stupid bastard. What was the point then?

And the long sequence of getting Crowley’s car back. Entirely nonsensical. How does the cunning Crowley lose his most prised possession in a bet? (Yes, I know sadness = bad decisions. But root it in the character). Why does Crowley, the demon, abide by the rules of the bet? Why doesn’t he just magic this arsehole’s face off? And why, why, WHY is he sleeping in an alleyway instead of the goddamn bookshop! Again I know they are chasing some metaphor here, and I acknowledge the graphics were cool, but it doesnt relate to any of the themes of the show or to the viewer’s expectations regarding either the romance or the Second Coming.

Another big problem for me was a lack of character building. We are told that a lot of time has passed. Yet the Aziraphael the story opens with is EXACTLY the same as the person who walked out of season two. Like, was I the only person expecting him to have grown into his new role? He is (nominally) in charge of this major project, but he doesn’t act like it, and the other angels don’t treat him like he is in charge. I have worked with many insecure bosses. I have myself been in leadership roles I was not prepared for. There are ways the power and the politics play out in these situations and it is not like this. And they axe half the characters – including the antagonist! And without bothering to setup the new antagonist, so the actual story lands up feeling manufactured as hell.

As for the relationship – which, let’s get real, is the only reason most of us turned up to watch this – well that doesn’t get any meaningful resolution either. Because no meaningful apologies are ever offered. For this to work Aziraphael needed to come from a place of humility to say: This is what I wanted to do. And I’m am sorry I hurt you in doing it. Possibly with a side order of: and you were right, its been a royal fuck-up.

And then to do better.

Instead, Aziraphael continues to maintain his belief that his course of action was correct. And that it is Crowley’s job to be dragged along trying to fix Aziraphael’s mess (regarding losing Jesus).

Instead, we get a scene with Aziraphael demanding – not even begging, demanding – that Crowley forgive him, right at the end when there is nothing left (so what would be the point of continuing to be angry?). It made me want to throw a glass of wine at the TV.

While the ending was the writers trying to have their cake and eat it. Firstly, the scene where they are offered the choice of creating a new world doesn’t make sense, because with no warning, and no awareness, C & A suddenly switch roles. I legit have no idea what the supposed justifications were meant to be in this, so the emotion of it falls flat.

Then, in this new world, which everything has been sacrificed for – which looks just the same as the one that was just torched – we suddenly get a human C & A who fall in love and live happily ever after. But the thing is, I don’t give a flying fuck about these two men. They are not the C & A I have been routing for all this time. As endings to romance stories go this is one of the worst, and I have read some doozies.

Overall

There are people (who have built whole YT careers on analysing Good Omens) who can talk more intelligently on the way this ending shat on the themes of the show. I don’t feel like it deserves that much of my mental energy. The final season had no themes. And to compare it to what came previously is ridiculous.

And I know a lot of people were hurt and upset by how the show closed out.

I think, sometimes you have to accept that stories dont always get endings, and that is okay. More okay than manufacturing something cheap and poor just to say here, look, its finished.