#Good omens Season 3 | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

milehighmegs · 22 hours

Text

The Window Theory

This is kind of a two-parter, and a bit long and circular, but it all connects, so just bear with me 😁

So, I just finished my 42598302621827732263435th re-watch of S2E6. When Beez says, "I just found something more important than taking sides," and she & Gabe join hands, Zira touches Crowley's arm. Ya know, this touch:

Look at Zira's face. I think, maybe- just MAYBE- Zira finally realizes that this is what Crowley's been talking about every time he's said, "our side." He reaches out to Crowley, but because he can't actually speak at that moment, it's his way of saying, "Oh my god. I get it now. I completely understand." And if you watch a bit longer, when Crowley walks away to take Nina & Maggie out of the shop, he keeps reaching for Crowley (couldn't find a GIF of it, but it's there). Almost like he's saying, "oh, oh yes, we are going to have a VERY good talk when this is all wrapped up."

There's also an element of "we're not the only ones," and "maybe, if the Supreme Archangel of Heaven can fall for the Grand Duke of Hell, this isn't as bad as I've been telling myself it is." If Gabelzebub haven't been- smote? smited? smitten- by God or devoured by Satan for falling in love (and not being coy or secretive about it), maybe Zira is FINALLY ready to actually be with Crowley, in the open, and without fear.

But we all know what happened after that.

Yes, Metatron is a bastard. But (and this is just a bit of a theory here) in telling Zira that he (Metatron) knew about the "de facto partnership" with Crowley, and then later about the Second Coming, he gave the whole game away**. Zira thought that Heaven wasn't watching all that closely. And maybe they weren't, right up until the two of them thwarted the Nopocalypse, but looked into the records and found out what they'd been up to for millennia. What Zira knows now is that not only are they aware of it, they are fully prepared to use it as a threat against him, but more so against Crowley. At that moment, however, that's all he knows. Metatron didn't mention the plans for the Second Coming until after The Kiss™. So after accepting Metatron's offer and desperately trying to convince Crowley to come with him and failing, but before the Jesus 2.0 bomb, Zira is visibly shaken (I mean, I would be too if I had just accepted that I COULD be with the love of my life, then got kissed like THAT by them, only to be broken up with right after they told me that they felt we'd been together all along). He didn't have a plan to protect Crowley. He didn’t think he needed one because he was so sure that his offer to go to Heaven would be accepted. He figured it was a given, knowing & understanding now that Crowley wanted to be with him, and part of the reinstatement of Crowley as an angel would facilitate that.

Now that Crowley has refused, Zira doesn't know what to do. He didn't have a backup plan. And he still, at that point, doesn't really know what Metatron needs him for. It's why he hesitates to leave at first. For the first time since The Arrangement, he doesn’t have a partner. He's alone, trying to figure things out, trying to find some way, ANY way, to make this work. He keeps looking out the window, ostensibly at Crowley, but... did you notice that we're never actually shown WHAT he's looking at? I have a feeling we'll find out in S3 what it is, but for now, he's flustered, anxious, and of course still reeling from what had just happened. He looks out the window a second time, and just, like... suddenly snaps out of it. We can tell, as the audience, that there's a lot of game face happening here, because we know Zira: we know his mannerisms, his moods, his reactions to certain things. And we also know he's smart. But I digress.

Something occurs to him (or he sees something out the window), which is why he suddenly feigns detachment and goes with Metatron. The wheels start to churn, but only insofar as it has to do with protecting Crowley. When the Second Coming plans for Supreme Archangel Aziraphale are dropped, everything changes. EVERYTHING. He suddenly realizes that the whole purpose of the offer, and the chance to take Crowley with him, was a trap. Metatron knew Crowley would refuse, and having made the threat, he knew Zira wouldn’t refuse. Zira understands the offer’s true purpose was to separate them so that they couldn't prevent another apocalypse. So now, not only is Crowley's life at risk, but Earth is once again under the threat of annihilation, and he doesn't have the one person he's always been able to rely on to help him prevent it. He goes with Metatron because he knows it's the only thing he can do to protect Earth AND his beloved.

That one last look at Crowley... I don't know, maybe something had passed between them through the window that we don't yet know about. Maybe Zira just had a sudden realization that had nothing to do with what he was looking at (perhaps the bullet catch mentioned below**?). Whatever the case, hearing about Armagedd-it's-back-on was a seismic shift in his attitude. You can see it in his demeanor: he’s no longer flustered, no longer searching for answers, no longer anxious about what happens next. In short, SHIT JUST GOT REAL. Because of this, Zira has to once again think fast, but keep Crowley in the dark, and get to work. That ride up in the elevator was spent hatching the most clever, most ingenious, dare I say the most devilish plan the Universe has ever seen. He is really and truly on OUR side now, the side that he & Crowley had been on for millennia, the side he was no longer pretending to NOT be on, the side that he finally stepped into with perfect love and perfect trust. With no way to tell Crowley about the Second Coming and therefore what he was planning, it seems like he chose Heaven over love. But he didn't. He did choose Crowley, but he also chose Earth, and in reality, he chose "us." It's just going to have to wait.

**If you wanna go really deep with this, the whole reason for the bullet catch episode was to mirror Furfur’s threat with the Metatron’s, and Furfur also revealed the plan too soon (I think there’s also another reason for this episode, details below). Like a bad Bond villain, they were too cocky. In 1941, Zira was able to think fast, palm the photo, and protect him & Crowley. But note that he didn’t tell Crowley what he was doing (there was neither time nor opportunity); Crowley only found out after the fact, when they were having dinner later. Zira protected "us" even then because only hours before, he realized that he loved Crowley and (I'm pretty sure) that Crowley loved him back. At the time, however, he didn't think anything could come of it. But that touch in the bookshop... that's when he knew. So when Metatron made the offer, there was no need to protect anything because he thought Crowley would come back to Heaven. Since that went down like a lead balloon, Zira is left helpless & scrambling. Then that look out the window... I think Zira remembered the bullet catch. That silent "trust me." The “aim for my mouth then shoot past my ear.” The diversion tactic. Again, until the Second Coming plans are revealed, Zira only plans to find a way to protect Crowley in secret. When the stakes rise, Zira ups his game. THAT’S the reason for the changing looks on his face on the elevator ride. THAT’s what the smile is about. He’s doing the calculations, setting up the illusion, perfecting the con. And just like the magic act he & Crowley pulled when they saved Job’s children, just like when Crowley seemed to be the random volunteer to pull the trigger, Zira knows his partner will be there to help him pull it off one more time. Even if it means leaving him, leaving him in the dark once again.

#good omens #ineffable #aziraphale #crowley #aziraphale x crowley #good omens season 3 #good omens season 2 #go s 3 #go s 2 #good omens theory #good omens analysis #aziracrow

37 notes · View notes

recoord · 3 days

Text

Why Good Omens season 1 has already fulfilled Sir Terry Pratchett's wish

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:

["It won't be confirmed unless enough people watch Season 2 to make Amazon happy...

...But obviously Season 3 is all planned and plotted and, if I get to make it, will take the story and the people in it we care about to a satisfying end."]

What happened?

Were the profits and ratings high enough to create two more seasons out of thin air? At this point, seasons 2 and 3 seem more like a greedy stretching of a beloved story already told in its entirety in the first season.

Has the first season already fulfilled Sir Terry Pratchett's wish?

As read above, Neil Gaiman himself said: "Season 1 of Good Omens is Good Omens."

Gaiman was very opened about how pleased he was with Season 1 and how he made it having Sir Terry Pratchett's wish in mind.

Interview for The Verge (May 30, 2019)

Link : Neil Gaiman had one rule for the Good Omens adaptation: making Terry Pratchett happy

Interviewer: Do you feel pressure from knowing this has to be the definitive best adaptation it could be?

Gaiman: No. All I wanted to do was to make something Terry would have liked. It wasn’t like, “Make the best thing.”...

...Gaiman: The lovely thing about Good Omens [the miniseries] is that it’s still Good Omens. If you loved the book, this is that thing that you loved. And I will make you fall in love even more with Sergeant Shadwell. I will make you fall even more in love with Newt than you thought you could, I hope. It does demonstrate that I do kind of know what I’m talking about, which is a nice thing to know.

...Gaiman: So with Good Omens, I feel like what I got to do was put the thing I made with Terry on the screen and then buttress it. What I added isn’t completely different from the original. It’s not out of left field.

Neil Gaiman on an interview for The Guardian in 2019.

Link: Neil Gaiman: ‘Good Omens feels more apt now than it did 30 years ago’

There are times, he insists, when “you make something you like so much that you don’t really care what anyone else thinks of it.” There’s a clue to this, perhaps, in the show’s final frame, which reads “For Terry”. “He didn’t believe in heaven or hell or anything like that,” Gaiman says, “so there wasn’t even a hope that there was a ghostly Terry around to watch it. He would have been grumpy if there was. But I made it for him.”

Why was Good Omens season 1 so good and you could really feel Sir Terry Pratchett's contributions?

Gaiman himself has already told us the answer:

Neil Gaiman for The Verge (2019).

There was original material to work with (Good Omens, published in 1990), on which we certainly know that Sir Terry Pratchett himself actively worked from start to finish.

Is there a proper sequel to Good Omens the book on which to base 2 more seasons of the series?

Neil Gaiman says the following on an interview for GQ in 2019.

Link: Neil Gaiman Says No to Adapting His Own Books—Except This Time

...But with this, it was like: Okay. Terry is gone. He wanted me to do this. He wanted me to do it for him. And that gave me a kind of weird impetus. And it meant that I felt very much at liberty to take every conversation that Terry and I had ever had about Good Omens. Not just the book, as written, but everything beyond it. We planned a sequel, never written, so I got to steal the angels from the sequel. I got to steal from every conversation Terry and I had about how we would do this. It felt very personal, and I guess kind of… holy. If that doesn’t sound too ridiculous. But it was a mission.

Two conclusions can be drawn:

1) Informal conversations about the plot of a sequel do not equate to an officially written sequel.

2) Neil Gaiman has already used many of the ideas he and Terry Pratchett had planned for a never-written sequel to Good Omens and those ideas were largely added to and executed in the TV adaptation of Good Omens (2019).

Why keep stretching those ideas if the co-writer is no longer able to actively contribute and help to create a proper sequel?

If Gaiman were the sole creator of Good Omens we'd have a different conversation, but that's not the case. The first season of Good Omens was already a beautiful homage to Good Omens and Sir Terry Pratchett's work on the book.

Did Terry Pratchett write around 75% of Good Omens?

Link for the post here.

Link for the post talking about the video and sharing the video here.

Edit: I wanted to bring this point up to point out Terry Pratchett's important contribution to the making of the book, not to highlight it as an excuse to distance Gaiman from the novel. We will have to accept that he also contributed to the creation of the book.

Sir Terry Pratchett's last wish

2017 - Rob Wilkins on Twitter (X)

Terry Pratchett’s Unpublished Work Crushed by Steamroller

By Sophie Haigney - The New York Times

Terry Pratchett, the well-known British fantasy author, had a wish fulfilled two years after his death: A hard drive containing his unpublished work was destroyed by steamroller.

Mr. Pratchett, a wildly popular fantasy novelist who wrote more than 70 books, including the “Discworld” series, died at 66 in 2015. That year his friend, the writer Neil Gaiman, told The Times of London that Mr. Pratchett had wanted “whatever he was working on at the time of his death to be taken out along with his computers, to be put in the middle of a road and for a steamroller to steamroll over them all.” Mr. Gaiman added at the time that he was glad this hadn’t happened.

Now, though, it has. Mr. Pratchett’s estate manager and close friend, Rob Wilkins, posted a picture of a hard drive and a steamroller on Aug. 25 on an official Twitter account they shared.

Shortly thereafter, Mr. Wilkins wrote that the deed was done.

I have not been able to find the exact reasons why Sir Terry Pratchet wanted his unfinished and unpublished works destroyed, but we can respect his last wish as a way for him to have control over what he felt he was ready to share with the world and what he was not.

Is Good Omens the exception?

With all that has been presented so far, I can only conjecture, but not be sure. I can believe that there was Terry Pratchett's permission and desire to make an adaptation of Good Omens, the original book published in 1990, but to my mind, creating two more seasons of a never-written sequel doesn't fit as part of Terry Pratchett's desire.

He is not among us to actively participate in a sequel and if his last wish was to destroy his unfinished works, I can believe that he would have wanted to give his approval to something new before it was published under his name.

Sir Terry Pratchett talking about a never-written sequel to Good Omens

“Neil and I thought about a sequel an awful lot initially. We talked about it on tour. And I think it was a big relief to both of us, when one day we looked one another in the eye and said, 'I thought you wanted to do a sequel.'..

Interview for the Magazine Locus. Locusmag archive page

This is me speculating, but I don't think there was real enthusiasm for creating a sequel until Gaiman alone saw profitable potential in the TV adaptation....

Good Omens also belongs to the those who love the story

I think it's okay to still love the story of Good Omens. Personally, I will always be grateful with the story and the characters for giving me confort in troubling times, but I find seasons 2 and 3 as some kind of excuse from Gaiman to keep profiting and benefiting from the story (more now than ever due to the SA allegations*).

Aziraphale and Crowley will always live happily in a lovely cottage as long as we want to. Even before season 2 was announced, many of us had already accepted that. Many artists have imagined lovely endings for our innefable husbands and in my eyes their works won't be any less valuable than whatever Gaiman had planned.

Note:

I don't like talking about Season 3 of GO without mentioning the current 5 SA allegations against Neil Gaiman (Main writer of seasons 2 and 3 and showrunner), so in case you want to know more about the allegations against Neil Gaiman. Here there's a great Round Up link (Podcasts links, transcripts, etc.)

Credits for the Round Up link to Muccamukk. Thanks a lot!

*more thoughts on supporting season 3

32 notes · View notes