#cardinal rule of romance -- they have to interact primarily without fighting

[brightbluedot]

god i finally figured out why season 2 bothered me so much: emotionally, and in many ways on a plot level, it felt as if season 1 (and, yk, the book) had never happened.

we end season 1 with crowley and aziraphale seemingly pretty secure in being unattached to heaven and hell -- after all, they both left their posts, and we leave them on a joyful “to the world.” in short: they’re on Their Own Side, Together in all of this, and they seem happy about that.

then in season 2, we’re supposed to believe that aziraphale wants to go back to heaven? for any reason at all? we don’t see any evidence of that before the very end. we see crowley suffering because he’s no longer affiliated with hell -- he’s living out of his car and having to deal with surprise visits. aziraphale, meanwhile, seems firmly entrenched and quite content as an earthly bookshop owner -- that’s all we see him concerning himself with apart from gabriel; he has no equivalent to crowley’s experience fielding questions about his old job. even when he takes gabriel in, it’s portrayed as a denomination-agnostic act of kindness, not factional loyalty. he just doesn’t seem to miss it, at all.

so that’s out of fuckin nowhere, for my money. and then in terms of the relationship progression -- girl WHY is that coming from random side characters sitting crowley down and the whole gabriel/beelzebub example? why couldn’t it have come from any kind of self reflection about or continued pursuit of how they’d gotten closer during and since the events of the book/season 1? we didn’t need heavy-handed external factors to convince us, the audience, that those two had sth goin on; it felt bizarre that they did -- not that they’re not allowed to be oblivious, that can be great fun and it’s certainly in character, but one would hope that the breakthrough moment could feel organic and be a result of interactions between the two of them in this new post-armageddon dynamic.

and then on top of that, like, WHY weren’t heaven and hell scared shitless of them anymore after the holy water/hellfire stunt they pulled? why was there not even a single mention of any of the human characters pivotal to the book/season 1? like, I understand that the actors might not have been down to reprise the roles, but not a single mention of adam and the them? of anathema and newt? even of fuckin shadwell? just, anyone? the core of Good Omens Proper is about how wonderful EARTH and HUMANS are. why was the sequel about contrived drama between heaven and hell? how was that supposed to power a love story for aziraphale and crowley, who are supposed to be Team Earth? whatever happened to “to the world”?

TL;DR: imo, if that final conflict was going to land at ALL, this really should have been an earth-centered story in which we saw BOTH aziraphale and crowley feeling aftereffects of their changes in professional status, while also grappling with what it means that they’re not pretending not to like each other anymore. otherwise, to me, it just feels contrived, cheap, and utterly divorced from everything that made us like them in the first place.