GOOD OMENS #3

If you're a fandom scholar (that's not me), there is probably a lot to be gained out of studying just how much of an interpretive struggle there was between the Good Omens fandom and the actual authors, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. (Pratchett is apparently responsible for the majority of the text.) One of the novel's major bugs is that Aziraphale and Crowley, the angel and demon on whom most of the fandom fixated, are the most interesting characters in the narrative. That's a huge problem, because not only are they (very) supporting characters, but also the novel is clear that by its own philosophical and political logics they cannot be the main protagonists or the moral centers of the text. What you got, then, was a very dedicated fanbase that wanted to focus on pairing off the angel and the demon romantically as the logical outcome of the novel's narrative trajectory--which was not what Pratchett and Gaiman wanted. Over the course of the increasingly-fraught adaptations--this final one having nearly been axed after the ugly revelations about Gaiman--the fandom's desire to have a canon romance between the pair "won," in the sense that Gaiman clearly saw where the dollar signs lay. As one fan correctly pointed out not long after the first season aired, Gaiman, who had had a history of mocking the shippers, kept revising his authorial intentions on his social media accounts over the course of the next several months, so that what had not been a romance when it started was "confirmed" to be one within the year. (Ironically, part of Gaiman's problem was Michael Sheen, who kept aggressively advocating for his own explicitly romantic reading of the couple; interestingly enough, if you paid attention, Sheen hinted strongly at the series' actual ending, which I presume Gaiman told him and Tennant during the preparation for S2, in one of the S2 interviews.) The next two seasons were, then, about the romance, the commercial driver of the (new) fandom. And yet, they were also about Gaiman and now the most recent scriptwriters (or doctors?) trying to yank the series back to Pratchett's politics and away from some aspects of the fandom's readings. In many ways, that's what the botched final episode accomplishes.

S3 confirms two things about how the Good Omens alternate fantasy universe operates. First, its theology is what you might call "vulgar Calvinist," with no real free will for anyone; as Aziraphale says in the metafictional discussion with God at the end, he and everyone else (and arguably Crowley too, although Aziraphale wants to claim otherwise) were just "characters in her book." In a rewrite of the Nina/Maggie subplot from S2, which featured Aziraphale and Crowley trying to engineer a romance for them, God coolly answers Aziraphale's agonized question about why he was "given" Crowley only to lose him: it made her "smile." As even Aziraphale's phrasing warns us, this romance was also engineered. To God, Aziraphale and Crowley are "characters" whom she writes for her own pleasure, not individuals entitled to choice and organic self-development. This is one of the series' biggest rebukes to the fandom, a surprisingly big chunk of which thought "God ships it" was a romantic affirmation, when the point is that, in the world according to Pratchett, it's cruel. Second, as Satan hints, the series is running on a literal reading of Isaiah 45: 7: "I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things." (No theologians were harmed in the making of this adaptation, or probably even read.) Even the struggle between good and evil, as the series has envisioned it, thus turns out to be simply a "cosmic game of solitaire," with no point other than God's entertainment; it's not surprising that Jesus, as he himself ruefully acknowledges before winking out, can't ever really get much accomplished. In other words, while Good Omens is itself a comedy, its universe is not reenacting the Divine Comedy. Nor is this a loving God. It's one thing to play God-the-author as a novelist, the series suggests, where your characters are plot functions; it's quite another to presume to author another person's real-life existence, to force them into a plot of your own designing.

This is where we return to the novel's politico-philosophy. After I saw S2, my prediction was that Gaiman was setting up to push the novel's positions to their full logical conclusion, and that (minus Gaiman) is in fact what happened. (Theoretically, this is Pratchett's ending, although given Gaiman's aforementioned habit of rewriting narratives--sort of like the Metatron, as it turns out--I suspect that there still wouldn't have been a romance anywhere to be seen.) Yes, the script is terrible and full of plot holes, especially when it comes to Crowley's final decision, but the outcome does follow. The novel's politics are liberal, prioritizing radical free will and a skepticism about ideological systems; its ideal individuals, while certainly living "in a society," are individuals first. This is why, for example, the novel rejects Pepper's second-wave feminism, which leads her to perceive the world through the lens of a patriarchal system, and instead celebrates Sister Mary Loquacious's internal process of self-realization: "She'd discovered, under layers of silliness and eagerness to please, Mary Hodges" (99). As a corollary, the novel insists that the flip side of radical free will is personal responsibility, something that, like it or not, also drives its approach to handling bigotry. Sgt. Shadwell's "quite inoffensive" (183) racism, homophobia, and misogyny are properly handled, as far as the novel is concerned, by other people simply dismissing them as a character quirk instead of being offended; by contrast, the novel mocks Aziraphale for reacting so badly to a child calling him a homophobic slur, or believing that Crowley is making fun of him about his weight. It's not an accident that Aziraphale's "THE Southern Pansy" (295) moment is aimed at Shadwell: the point isn't so much affirming a gay identity as taking responsibility for his own feelings.

Adam spends a lot of time ventriloquizing Pratchett at the air base, but Aziraphale and Crowley also get handed some didactic exposition. Adam tells Beelzebub and the Metatron that they aren't actually interested in "beating the other side"; instead, their game will simply go on forever, and "[y]ou'll just keep keep on sending people like these two [...] to mess people around" (362). Moreover--in dialogue partly handed over to Crowley at the end of S3--"I don't see what's so triffic about creating people as people and then gettin' upset 'cos they act like people [...] Anyway, if you stopped tellin' people it's all sorted out after they're dead, they might try sorting it all out while they're alive" (363). One of the biggest problems that I don't think the fandom discussed after S2 involved sending the Nazis to Hell. "Of course, the Nazis should be in Hell," you say. But in the novel's logic, sending the Nazis to Hell suggests that Heaven and Hell are justifiable sites of eternal reward and eternal punishment--that the system works properly. The novel argues that the right time for justice is human time, and the right way to achieve justice is to do it rather than defer it. That is, the novel theorizes that Heaven and Hell offer consolations that let humanity off the hook for their own decision-making. It does not offer guarantees that a fully-human moral system will work, which is not the point; the point, as Crowley himself says in S3, again drawing on the novel, is that the truest extremes of "grace" and "evil" lie within humanity itself, and not in Heaven or Hell. And this is why moving Aziraphale and Crowley to the center skewed the adaptations, because even they, humanized as they have become, are not human: we repeatedly see human characters arriving at moral conclusions that they aren't capable of making themselves, as in the fight over murdering the Antichrist in S1 or their manipulation of Maggie and Nina in S2.

The novel, however, does not eliminate the Heaven/Hell system, although Adam insists on an end to the messing about. Instead, Adam resets the universe because, humans being what they are, it is not possible to radically alter it from above without endlessly having to interfere. Change must originate from the ground up, not the top down. But in resetting the universe, he neither eliminates the powers of angels and demons--somebody miracles up that reservation at the Ritz--nor even his own powers. And here is where we see why S3's ending is probably the only one that follows completely from what the novel articulates, and why Crowley's apparently random change of heart is supposed to follow from the text. (It doesn't, because somebody deleted the entire thought process, but bear with me.) At the airbase, when Crowley decides to scram, Aziraphale gently reproves him:

"There are humans here," he said.

"Yes," said Crowley. "And me."

"I mean we shouldn't let this happen to them."

"Well, what--" Crowley began, and stopped.

"I mean, when you think about it, we've got them into enough trouble as it is. You and me. Over the years. What with one thing and another."

"We were only doing our jobs," muttered Crowley.

"Yes. So what? Lots of people in history have only done their jobs and look at the trouble they caused." (369-70)

Aziraphale and Crowley do not exist outside of the Heaven/Hell game, no matter how much they may have resented it over the years. They are fully complicit in it, and as a result, as Aziraphale insists, they have a moral obligation to choose to work against it in this moment. The humans and their thriving means more than their own survival, no matter what comes next. What Crowley realizes in this moment is that he "hadn't anything" to "lose" (370) by accepting responsibility and helping to protect the humans he has helped get "into enough trouble"; responsibility, that is, is the grounds of moral action, not some irksome burden. This dialogue does not happen in S1; we do, however, see chunks of it appearing in S3. Crowley has spent S1 and S2 trying to run away from Heaven and Hell, usually trying and failing to do so with Aziraphale in tow; as both S2 and S3 make clear, he cannot do that. He and Aziraphale may be unwilling participants in God's cosmic game of solitaire, but they are still participants, and in choosing the humans and the possibility of their true free will, Crowley finally accepts the moral responsibility that he had been rejecting for the past two seasons. When he and Aziraphale land all by themselves in the bookshop, the universe having otherwise been erased, Crowley actually sees what his fantasy of running away to Alpha Centauri looks like in practice; a world of just the two of them, as he has repeatedly fantasized, would be an arid blank in which they could never be happy. A reset to the status quo simply returns us to what we saw in S2, in which both of them are repeatedly manipulated by their higher-ups, no matter how often they try to resist, and in which, again, they could never be happy (not least because now they would both know that even their romance is subject to divine fiat). And, as both the novel and the previous two seasons make very clear, Aziraphale and Crowley do not interact with humans as humans (rewriting memories, trying to script people's lives, and so on). Moreover, they cannot do so, because angels and demons warp human realities by their very nature; hence the collapse of Whickber Street once Aziraphale leaves, for example. (Even in S3, Crowley immediately reaches for his miracles to get rid of the gangster, and Aziraphale rewrites Misty's mind.) There is no way to enact the novel's ideal world and have these characters still going about somewhere as occult/ethereal entities. Or even as humans, because they do not know how to human. So, yes, the only way to fully bring the game of solitaire to its conclusion is to take away all the cards, themselves included.

The rather sweet ending, in which they reincarnate as Asa Fell and Anthony Crowley, also maps out a new relationship dynamic for them. In the series, Aziraphale and Crowley never truly have an egalitarian relationship for more than brief bursts of time, even when we see them in Heaven (before the Beginning, Crowley clearly outranks Aziraphale; when they run into each other again after the battle, Crowley is a soldier on the run and Aziraphale is the conquering general of the Great War). Up until the ending of the original timeline, the characters tend to unconsciously battle for some kind of power over the other: Crowley over-invests in casting himself as Aziraphale's rescuer in situations where Aziraphale does not need rescuing, to the point where Aziraphale eventually finds it hurtful (prior to the confrontation with the demons in S2); Aziraphale's "choice" in S2 and S3, while explicitly done "for us," simply reverses the dynamic. In other words, they are trapped in a miniaturized version of God's and the Metatron's scripting of the universe, prioritizing their own plans for the other--even what in theory are loving plans--over what the other truly needs. Asa's shy attempt to ask Anthony out, at Derek's (the human Metatron) suggestion, initially is all about scripting: he repeatedly writes Anthony's rejections for him. But Anthony simply offers him what he needs.