The Good Omens Season 2 Finale Is Going To Upset A Lot Of Fans, But It's Been Decades In The Making
This post contains spoilers for "Good Omens" season 2.
So much for happy endings, huh? Now that we've finished burning through the second season of Neil Gaiman's Prime Video adaptation of "Good Omens," it's time to regroup and process exactly what just went down in the six-episode continuation of Crowley (David Tennant) and Aziraphale's (Michael Sheen) story. In this case, that most likely means screaming at God (or Gaiman) about the show's abrupt pivot from a fluffy, rom-com story into an angst-riddled drama in the last ten minutes. Luckily, though, Crowley and Aziraphale's big breakup seems to be an unhappy middle to a still-unfolding story.
The first five episodes of the new season were giddy and adorable, like the TV equivalent of walking on a cloud even at their darkest moments. Sure, there were obstacles in the way of Aziraphale and Crowley's domestic bliss, but the amnesiac Gabriel (Jon Hamm) plot line felt a lot smaller than last season's apocalypse, and much of this season's screen time was devoted solely to watching the dynamic angel-demon duo at its center grow ever closer. Couple that with an unfortunate pre-release leak (from Prime itself, no less) featuring a split-second shot of the pair's kiss, and it was hard not to envision "Good Omens" season 2 ending with the swooning, romantic moment fans have been waiting for.
Only, the show didn't end like that.
The season ends with a sudden heartbreak
Instead, season 2 did an abrupt about-face after Crowley and Aziraphale faced off against an army of demons and finally fessed up about hiding Gabriel. The season's final moments start with a romantic beat, as Crowley, the less pining-prone half of the immortal pair, comes to his senses and realizes he's in love with his bestie. It takes not one but two parallel couples to help him get it through his demon head, as he finds out that Gabriel actually came to Earth while attempting to reach his secret love Beelzebub (Shelley Conn), and gets a "Face it, you're in love" talk from shopkeeper pair Nina (Nina Sosanya) and Maggie (Maggie Service).
After he catches on, Crowley bolts to Aziraphale's shop to propose the pair run away together, only to find that Aziraphale has just been offered — and, as we soon find out, accepted — a job as head honcho in heaven by Metatron. There, he says, he can fix the broken system from the inside out, and even restore the fallen Crowley back to angel status. It's a fundamental disagreement in the pair's opposing ideologies, one that feels like a slap in the face to Crowley after Aziraphale has spent the past several centuries slowly learning to trust his friend and himself more than his dispassionate bosses. Crowley's love declaration feels like the air being let out of a balloon, because Aziraphale is stuck in a naive, one-track mindset and doesn't seem to be able to absorb what his friend is saying. When Crowley finally kisses his soulmate after hundreds of years spent loving him, it doesn't feel like a consummation, but an angry goodbye.
Where did this cliffhanger come from?
While I'm firmly in the "it's okay for bad things to happen to good characters" camp, the "Good Omens" finale feels particularly punishing after so much of the season led audiences to believe it would end with the pair coupling up, or at least having a proper talk about their feelings. The show doesn't let Crowley's declaration breathe, relying instead on a sudden tonal change that doesn't quite feel in line with the version of Aziraphale we know and love — who at this point seems like he would covertly scheme against heaven any day if it meant he'd get to do it alongside Crowley.
The conclusion also unfolds in an excruciatingly definitive way, as the final scenes present many points at which Aziraphale could say "screw it" and ditch his plans to run off with his best friend. He doesn't and instead, the credits roll over an agonizing inversion of "The Graduate" ending, with a split screen revealing that each pair is headed in a different direction (Aziraphale up to heaven, and Crowley off somewhere on Earth), despite the slow-building regret clearly etched on each of their faces.
While we go through the stages of grief, it's worth talking about exactly why "Good Omens" might have incorporated such a painful eleventh-hour twist in the finale. The end of "Good Omens" season 2 is a real kick in the pants, but the blow should be softened somewhat by the knowledge that it seems to be intended as a lead-in to a third season that pulls directly from a sequel novel plotted by Gaiman and his late co-author Terry Pratchett.
Gaiman and Pratchett plotted a sequel decades ago
Gaiman has spoken about the sequel, which was outlined but never written, several times on his Tumblr. He's shared that season 2 was something he "plotted with the brilliant John Finnemore that allows us to get gracefully from the end of book one to the place that the second novel would have started." To paraphrase a wildly misattributed platitude that Crowley would growl at us for buying into, everything could still end up okay in the end for our favorite ineffable couple. It doesn't feel okay now, but it's also not the end yet.
"Good Omens" hasn't officially been renewed for a third season yet, but with a passionate viewership watching, a beloved author running the show, and a brand like Amazon funding it, a third-season renewal seems like a no-brainer. Gaiman has written often about how the potential third season would follow a "Good Omens" sequel he and Pratchett came up with long before the latter's death in 2015. In one blog post, he explained that he and Pratchett first started plotting the sequel back in 1989. He says they planned more of it again in 2006 while seated next to one another at the audiobook-centric award show The Audies, then continued talking it through up until Pratchett passed away. As he put it, "Season 2 is the sandwich filler between" the adaptation of "Good Omens" and the unwritten sequel, a bridge between the two Pratchett co-created stories that will hopefully bookend the TV series.
Here's what we know about a potential season 3
Gaiman shared these insights before season 2 dropped on Prime Video, so he didn't explain exactly what bits of the second season will lead into the planned sequel plot, but it's pretty easy to guess. Aziraphale's ascension to a high position in heaven is a clear season 3 lead-in, as is Metatron's reference to a secret plan to kick-start The Second Coming. Tennant recently spoke to /Film's Vanessa Armstrong about the conception of season 2 of the show, noting, "I always remember what he was aiming to get to by the end of the second series, because of ideas that he and Terry had talked about with where the story might go." It seems likely that Crowley and Aziraphale's break-up, or at least Aziraphale's promotion, was a part of that early plan.
The author-turned-showrunner has kept the actual plot details from the unwritten sequel close to his chest, which makes sense since they'd spoil the future of the show at this point. However, there are a few details we can glean: He's said that the sequel was meant to be called "668: The Neighbor of the Beast," a wry reference to the "number of the beast," 666. Could the neighbor in question be Jesus, given Metatron's reference to the biblical event The Second Coming? We also know the sequel involved plenty of angels, as Gaiman has pointed out that the angels in the TV series didn't actually appear in the first "Good Omens" book. "I borrowed them back from the sequel and put them in earlier," he notes in a blog post.
The season's most upsetting moment is in service of a larger story
Though season 3 hasn't been announced yet (and WGA member and vocal strike supporter Gaiman wouldn't be able to write it right now even if it were), it sounds like the author has a good idea of where the story will go from here. "I know what happens, sometimes in detail sometimes in broad strokes, and I know the last ten minutes of it to the beat," he shared on Tumblr in reference to the sequel.
It may be cold comfort in the face of the season's jarring conclusion, but personally, I'm heartened to know that there's likely an opportunity for more Aziraphale and Crowley on the horizon, and that the sophomore season's big shakeup was almost certainly done in service of the story Gaiman and Pratchett first outlined 34 years ago. We might have to wait a few more years to see a proper define-the-relationship moment between our favorite angel and demon, but that's nothing compared to the thousands of years they've been waiting for each other.
"Good Omens" season 2 is now available on Prime Video.