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indigovigilance · 6 months

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Continuity Errors

Crowley can stop time. We’ve noticed buggy things about time. Let’s talk about it.

I’m going to start with an overview of every time he has definitely frozen time in order to establish the mechanics of Crowley’s time-stopping power in the GO universe. Then, I’m going to talk about other events where Crowley may have stopped time, and it wasn’t (directly) shown to the audience.

or read this 3,500 word beast of a meta on Ao3

edit: if you're deciding whether or not to read this, check out the reblog notes!

Opening obligatory "do not put anything about this in Neil Gaiman's askbox"

Crowley freezes time locally, selectively exempting individuals

S1E2

In S1E2, Crowley freezes time at the corporate training ground to interrogate Mary Hodges, formerly Sister Mary Loquacious (played by Nina Sosanya, actor for Nina in S2). It may seem like she’s just hypnotized and time is progressing normally around all of them, but that isn’t the case. Immediately before Crowley hypnotizes Hodges, we can hear gunfire in the background; a few seconds before Hodges is released from the trance, we hear shouting and sirens. But during the time that Hodges is entranced, all we hear is three things: the dialogue, music, and what sounds like the ticking of a kitchen timer.

We could do a little bit of extrapolation from the fact that the beginnings of gunshots and siren sounds are temporally very close together, especially depending on how we measure time. Crowley turns the paintball guns into deadly weapons at 36:59. Crowley freezes Mary Hodges at 38:47. A ticking sound starts the same moment. We also hear what we will come to recognize as the “pause time” sound, a sort of wobbly sound. The ticking sound seems to stop around… 40:07? Right before the line about lovely little toesy woesies? It’s unclear with the overlapping tracks. At 40:11 Crowley says “let’s go” and we can hear sirens in the background start now. Aziraphale then snaps his fingers and unfreezes Hodges at 40:17.

So during 191 seconds of screentime, 84 seconds of it was spent with time frozen, if I accept the ticking sound to be the indicator. If time was only frozen locally, meaning just the paintball grounds and not the nearest police station and roads leading to it, then emergency services had just over three minutes from the time the first live round was fired to arrival. If time was actually frozen globally except for Crowley, Azirarphale, and Hodges, then emergency services got there in 85 seconds, or less than a minute and a half. Maybe Britain is doing something wildly different than here idk but I think the more likely explanation for the event timing is that Crowley is only freezing time in a local bubble. The shooters stop shooting but the police are still driving towards them while Crowley and Aziraphale are interrogating an entranced Mary Hodges.

The case with Hodges is kind of confusing because the audience is presented with a false dichotomy between “frozen in time” and “hypnotized.” It’s actually both. Crowley has frozen time around the three of them, but Hodges, like Aziraphale, was exempt. It just so happens that she was also entranced at the same time, which explains as well why Aziraphale can release her from the trance, since our best evidence indicates that he can’t control time.

S1E3 & S2E3

In S1E3, Crowley freezes Jean Claude, the executioner at the Bastille. Immediately before, we can hear the guillotine, screaming and jeering outside the cell. As soon as Jean Claude is frozen, however (13:29, complete with wobble sound), there is complete background silence, except for the dialogue between our ineffable aristocrats. When Crowley restarts time, background noise restarts as well. This evidence indicates that Crowley froze time for the surrounding area as well as inside the cell.

In S2E3, Crowley freezes Mr. Dalrymple. We don’t have definitive information about how much of the rest of the world is affected since the scene takes place indoors on a quiet night and there are no external cues of time starting or stopping.

S1E6: Freezing Out Satan

In S1E6, not only are Crowley, Aziraphale, and Adam pulled out of the normal flow of time: it seems that they are also pulled out of normal space. They appear to be in an ethereal desert where we can see their wings, but we don’t actually know where they are. The way we enter, inhabit, and then exit this time-stop is completely different from any of the other three explicit timestop scenes: Crowley must use his whole body to summon the power to cast the miracle, they travel elsewhere, then he must use his crankshaft to exit the time-stop.

I take this to indicate that freezing time when Satan is near takes a lot more power than freezing time around Mary Hodges, Jean Claude, or Mr. Dalrymple. Presumably, the power a being has, the more power it takes to lock them out of a bubble to stopped time.

Time Stop Mechanics

Here are my key takeaways from analyzing these four scenes:

Crowley isn’t so much freezing all of time as pulling himself and Aziraphale (and sometimes Adam) out of the flow of time. The effort this takes is dependent on the entities that they are “pulling away” from. It is easy to pull away from humans, so much so that they don’t have to pull away very far and can occupy the same space in a bubble of paused time. When he is “pulling away” from Satan, however, he must pull away much further, all the way to another plane.

Crowley’s ability is so powerful that he can use it to escape Satan. He could use it to lock out other powerful beings, if he wanted to, but it would take a lot of effort.

Aziraphale, a being with power somewhere on the spectrum between human and Satan, could be frozen by Crowley’s powers. The fact that Aziraphale is still present and active during all of these scenes, unaffected by the time stop is only indicative of Crowley’s choice to exempt him, just as he does with a hypnotized Mary Hodges and Adam.

Crowley has stopped time on Aziraphale

In a previous post I have addressed the possible symbolic meaning behind the Honolulu Roast sign that suddenly appears behind Crowley in the S2E1 coffee shop scene. This addresses the symbolic meaning of Honolulu with respect to Aziraphale, but fails to address the “roast” part, which I have the opportunity to do now. I begin by establishing two premises:

Crowley loves Aziraphale and after 6,000 years knows him very well.

Crowley is a dick.

Crowley sits down at the table across from Aziraphale and asks him what the problem is. At this point, there is no “Honolulu Roast” sign behind him. The camera flips to Aziraphale as he (badly) tries to deny that there is any problem. When the camera flips back to Crowley, a “today’s special: Honolulu Roast” sign has appeared behind him.

What does Crowley do next?

Crowley roasts Aziraphale.

Crowley proceeds to read Aziraphale to filth, rattling off all his tells and putting him in his place for even daring to think that he could mislead Crowley about his internal emotional state.

While we’ve seen a lot more of his soft side this season, we cannot forget that the demon Crowley, at the end of the day, is a prick. He really did pause time just so that he could go get a chalkboard, write a pun on it, and hang it on the wall behind him like a display card for open mic night. He’s still going to help Aziraphale, of course. But he’s going to make fun of him first.

Let me reiterate: Crowley literally paused time, got up from the table, put up this sign, then sat back down in (as close to) exactly the same position (as possible) to fool Aziraphale into not noticing the pause, because this joke is entirely for Crowley’s own amusement. We have some cinematographic evidence of this besides just the sign itself: the lamp behind him has moved slightly, and the camera angle focusing on Crowley has changed. Literally, the left hand side of the frame gets cut off due to the repositioning. From a production perspective, this scene would have been shot all at the same time, so should not have changed angles. That said, they did a by-hand follow-in of Crowley walking in and sitting down, then switched to a dolly, but… I have faith that they could have matched the shot line-up practically pixel for pixel if they wanted to. All to say: changing the camera position before and after, alongside the other conspicuous changes, seems like it was a deliberate framing choice used to indicate that Crowley tried his best to get back into exactly the same position, but was just a little off.

But Crowley’s prank is troubling from a perspective of honesty and agency. Based on the way the dialogue progresses, it seems pretty clear that Aziraphale doesn’t know that he was frozen. Whether or not Crowley could freeze Aziraphale was beside the point until this scene where we learn that Crowley would, even for a really dumb reason like making a joke at Aziraphale’s expense.

Before moving on, I want to note that the sudden appearance of this sign could be characterized as a continuity error, even though it was the result of a deliberate action by an in-world character. Jettison your traditional understanding of “continuity error” as “production made a mistake.” In this universe, we can have continuity errors by virtue that Aziraphale is experiencing time as if it is continuous, not noticing that he functionally blacked out for a few minutes and that things have changed around him. This is not a show-level continuity error. This is an Aziraphale-level continuity error.

Crowley can reverse time

Credit where credit is due: it was this comment on the Ao3 version of my meta, The Erasure of Human!Metatron, that became an earworm that got me thinking specifically about Crowley's abilities:

So thank you, LoveIsLove <3

Let’s go back to the Mary Hodges scene, or actually a few minutes before. Our ineffable idiots get shot by paintballs.

“Look at the state of this coat. I've kept this in tip-top condition for over 180 years now. I'll never get this stain out.”

“You could miracle it away.”

“Hmm… Yes, but… well, I would always know the stain was there. Underneath, I mean.”

Aziraphale finagles himself a favor without ever actually asking for it. Full points, princess. But let’s examine the actual content of the dialogue. This cannot be a complete 100% bluff; Aziraphale is not going to tell a straight lie to Crowley that they both know is false about the respective nature of their powers. It must be the case that there is some truth to this statement. There is a fundamental difference between what Aziraphale can do about the paintball stain and what Crowley is actually going to do about it. Furthermore, what Crowley does is something different than a miracle.

Crowley then blows on the stain, it disappears, and Aziraphale looks quite pleased. Yes, yes, he cajoled Anthony J Acts of Service Crowley into doing his signature move, but also, he’s genuinely thankful that Crowley did something for him that he couldn’t do for himself, because miracles don’t work like that. Notably, Crowley doesn't snap his fingers or make any other gesture that we normally associate with miracles, and we don’t hear the miracle sound, which is further evidence that this is not a miracle, but something different.

If you haven’t already, please read my meta entitled Jimbriel, Satan, the Book of Life, and what it means for Crowley. It explains in depth and with evidentiary support my theory about how erasure works in the Good Omens universe. The Cliff’s notes version is that erasing something, whether it be a name from the Book of Life or a paintball from a coat, is akin to erasing a pencil mark on paper; it’s technically gone but you’ll always know it was there. Underneath.

What Crowley has done, then, is not erasing the paintball stain.

He’s reversed it.

When he blows on the paintball stain, he is reversing time in a microcosm of the universe, truly making it so that the paintball never hit the jacket. In a world full of rubber erasers, Crowley has the only Control-Z. When things are “erased” by the Book of Life, they are changed, but when Crowley reverses something, they never happened (making Beelzebub’s description of the Book of Life actually a more accurate description of Crowley’s power). It is something unique that Crowley can do that Aziraphale can’t, and we haven’t seen any evidence of any other celestial being pausing or reversing time. Please feel free to reblog with links to relevant meta if I’m wrong about that.

In true Neil Gaiman style, Crowley using this power to do something mundane like get rid of paintball paint was an incredibly benign and subtle way to indicate that Crowley has an immense, untapped power that we have not yet seen him use for any major purpose.

I repeat: we didn’t see him use it. Because usually, like Aziraphale, we the audience are exempt from the time freeze, and we get to watch what happens. But this time, we were frozen out with Aziraphale.

Clock Theory revisited: a reinterpretation of “continuity error”

A summary of clock theory

Neil Gaiman’s ask and answer on clock theory

Neil Gaiman responded to an ask about the clock jumping forward from 9:25 to 9:40 before and after the kiss with a single sentence: “It’s a continuity error, I’m afraid.”

In the usual manner, Neil is not lying, but he is relying on you making an incorrect interpretation of his seemingly straightforward and innocuous but actually ambiguous and incredibly meaningful statement. As I stated with regards to the Honolulu Roast chalkboard sign, do not interpret “continuity error” as “production made a mistake.” Interpret “continuity error” as “Aziraphale believes that his experience of time is in lockstep with the actual flow of time and doesn’t realize that 11 minutes passed while he was frozen.”

Let’s consider the evidence:

Image at timestamp 41:04 “[Hold that thought!]” the clock reads 9:25

Image at 45:04 “If Gabriel and Beelzebub can go off together, then we can” the clock still reads 9:25

Image at 47:56 the clock now reads 9:40.

Image at 48:14 the clock reads 9:40

There are two four-minute gaps, from the perspective of the viewer, and we have views of the clock face at both ends of each gap.

Gap 1, from 41:04 to 45:04, the clock hands do not move at all, nor do they in any of the intervening shots.

Gap 2, from 45:04 to 47:56 (or 48:14, as you prefer), the clock hands move 15 minutes.

The Occam’s razor, Doylian explanation for why the clock hands don't move from 41:04 to 45:04 is that the clock is a prop. It does not have any timekeeping mechanism, the hands don’t move unless some human being opens up the glass, reaches in there, and manually adjusts it. They weren’t going to interrupt filming this moving scene to move the clock hands minute by minute, so it seems pretty plausible that the fact that it doesn’t move is just an artifact of production limitations.

The Watsonian explanation, which I do not favor, is that Crowley has frozen time for just the two of them. They are in a microcosm all their own. If true, this would have an abundance of implications, such that they are actually free to speak to each other freely, which they don’t. So I feel like with that alone, we can set this aside, but I’m open to being convinced otherwise.

If we accept the “clock is a prop” explanation for Gap 1, it doesn’t really hold for Gap 2 that they moved it a full fifteen minutes. So much care and attention to detail was given for all other parts of this show; I don’t realistically believe that a production staff member moved the hands a random amount. The music carries us from Crowley’s exit to Metatron’s entrance seamlessly, yet more time seems to have passed in-world than on-screen. There are two possible explanations:

There was more material that was supposed to be filmed to account for 15 minutes that got cut

We are supposed to figure out that there’s some “Greek play” style shenaniganery afoot

I will debunk explanation #1 with simply this: David’s contact lenses would sometimes rotate so that the slit pupils were not vertical. This error was fixed by VFX in post.

You might assume, when watching Good Omens, that Crowley’s serpent-like eyes are created using contact lenses. Or perhaps you’d presume they’re CGI. Actually, they’re a mix of both.

“The CGI versions were usually because the contact lenses had swiveled in David’s eyes … and we had to fix it,” says Mackinnon.

If they could fix Crowley’s eyes in post, there is absolutely no reason to expect that they couldn’t or wouldn’t have fixed the clock hand positions in post, especially if it was someone’s job to reach in there and change the positions to try to maintain set continuity in the first place. Additionally, there is deliberate use of clocks to symbolize various themes across both seasons. A Doylian error like this is not something that would have been overlooked and survived into publication.

So we are left with explanation #2. Time has passed that we, the viewers, don’t observe. What was happening during that time that we missed? More importantly, who knows that this time has passed? Aziraphale doesn’t seem to, and it’s unclear what the Metatron does or doesn’t know.

Some fans have posited that the Metatron is doing the time manipulations, but canonically, the only entity we have observed manipulate time is Crowley. We assume the Metatron is powerful because the angels are all afraid of him, but we’ve never actually seen him do anything, and so have no primary evidence for this. All over, he’s got some big “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” Wizard of Oz vibes happening; I’m not convinced he could miracle his way out of a wet paper bag, and there’s a chance that in Season 3 we’ll find out that he’s all bluff. Not so with Crowley.

My hypothesis is that Crowley froze Aziraphale and everybody else for a one block radius, including the Metatron, and did something important in the bookshop before it lost its protection. Please see my meta on Sovereignty, Citizenship, and the Bookshop for an evidence-based argument on why the bookshop was the only place in the universe that Crowley could have safely hidden something. Since Aziraphale is no longer the head of an independent embassy, whatever Crowley was keeping safe in there isn’t safe anymore, and needs to be moved. Universe time continued to pass and the clock reflects that, but Aziraphale and the Metatron aren’t aware that they were paused.

Which also gives us a new interpretation for the kiss.

The Kiss, revisited

Crowley didn’t want to send Aziraphale a message.

Crowley needed a plausible cover for the immense effort it was going to take him to freeze time against Aziraphale and the Metatron that he knew was standing outside.

How do I know he knew?

No nightingales.

Juliet. Wilt thou be gone? it is not yet near day:

It was the nightingale, and not the lark,

That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear;

Nightly she sings on yon pomegranate-tree:

Believe me, love, it was the nightingale.

Romeo. It was the lark, the herald of the morn,

No nightingale: look, love, what envious streaks

Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east:

Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day

Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.

I must be gone and live, or stay and die.

No nightingales could be the end of a romance. I argued as much in my inaugural meta just six weeks ago (and what a six weeks it has been, people!) But “no nightingales” could also be a secret signal to two people who have a unique bond through Shakespeare that Crowley has realized he is not safe, and he needs to leave, and he’s trying to tell Aziraphale that without letting their spectator in on the message.

Now he has to stop time to secure whatever item he’d been keeping safe in the bookshop. But keeping Satan at bay required him to lunge upwards, using his whole body to freeze time. He can’t get away with anything like that here in the bookshop, that would give up the ruse.

But what if he lunged at the person everyone knows he’s in love with and violently kisses them on the mouth, his entire body tense with the effort of freezing time in the presence of two ethereal beings? No one would notice the difference, or think anything nefarious of it; a Class A surreptitious time-stop.

One last crackpot theory.

Aziraphale knows what Crowley did. Well, he knows that he froze time, and for the first time realizes that Crowley has locked him out, and that he used the kiss as a cover. The violation of agency, trust, and their romantic bond are all breaking across him in the instant that time restarts, after Crowley has gone away for 11 minutes and returned to almost, but not quite, the same position inside Aziraphale’s arms. It is an intimate act that Aziraphale is fully tuned into, and for the first time, he’s noticing the continuity errors.

His horror-filled expression is one of broken trust. But his bond to Crowley is too strong for even this to break it. He knows that whatever reason Crowley had to pull this trick on him, it must have been a good one. It must have been to protect him.

“I forgive you.”

***

One more completely crackpot theory based on the Gavin Finney interview at The Ineffable Con last weekend.

The camera was supposed to circle them. Finney says that this was to show that they are the center of their universe, and their world is spinning.

Okay, okay. But could it not also have represented the spinning of clock hands? I’m just saying.

Closing obligatory "do not put anything about this in Neil Gaiman's askbox"

Find my entire collection of metas here