#davids is mostly about acting and crowley and plot

[hyperfixating-rn-brb]

"There is no Crowley without Aziraphale, and there is no Aziraphale without Crowley. Of all the things I've done, I thought less about who my character is here and more about how he relates to that character."

"But more than anything else I've done, this has been so dependent on what David is doing. When I look back I'll only ever be able to thin about what I did in it by thinking about what David did."

-Michael Sheen

[metvmorqhoses]

Nononono waitttt what do you mean about Good Omens season 2?? Why didn't you like it?

I personally thought it was better than season 1 - better paced. There wasn't a single boring moment. And sure, the plot maybe had fewer stakes, but seeing as this was a bridge season between season 1 (the of Good Omens book) and hopefully season 3 (the book that never came out, “668” or something like that), I thought it was good. Warm & fuzzy.

I need to know your opinion now

As abashed as I am to have to respond to such enthusiasm with, well... the very opposite of enthusiasm, please at least know that I consider the truth the best thing I have to offer in general and in regard to that unfortunate (yet somehow still-untouchable?) mess the second season of Good Omens has proven itself to be in particular, so accept it as some sort of well-intended even if perhaps unwanted gift.

This is probably the most unpopular opinion one can have on Tumblr right now, so I'll go straight to the point: Gaiman managed to ruin Good Omens (perhaps he isn't able to write it by himself, perhaps he got carried away with fan service, who knows), once one of the most delightful, witty, engaging, profound books/shows existent, changing its register and raison d'être in order to turn it into, per great popular request, the same lame simple plotless cheesy cookie-cutter gay romance without rime and reason apparently every single piece of media is deforming itself into lately.

The dramatic loss of... artistic quality this show suffered is appalling and even more appalling is the fact I seem to be one of the very few on this green earth to have even noticed? Did I perhaps read too much in the show before? I don't think so, it was indeed a masterpiece. I saw many die-hard fans of the series beyond puzzled at this last season too, straining themselves to try and make sense of it with wild theories, justifying them with the simple fact that Neil Gaiman is a genius and surely this hot mess must mean something, right? I wasn't aware the world was mostly populated by hysterically besotted people hailing Neil Gaiman's alleged greatness from dawn til dusk without contextualized merit, and the discovery didn't particularly excite me, to be quite honest. I think a healthy amount of fairness in the critique of any artist should always be the norm, but I digress.

I'll try to keep it as brief and matter-of-factly as possible, especially since some time has passed and the fumes of my rage aren't as scorching or as precise as they used to be lol

In a word, this season was subpar. Not only did it lack that original witty, ineffable meaningfulness, that intrinsic and very human sense of wonder and protectiveness towards life and its profound sense the original show brimmed with, but even from the most basic literary point of view, it literally lacked a plot worthy of this name, a story, characters that felt complex and real instead of caricatures who tried and reenact themselves, and in general what should have been, quite simply, good writing.

More than Good Omens' long-awaited season 2, this felt more like a high-budget filler fanfiction created by someone who didn't know what they were doing with story and characters most of the time, but who sure as hell wanted to please the audience to disastrous lengths.

The very first thing that irked me beyond belief, and it literally started from minute one, was the immediate, more or less subtle, change in acting from both Michael and David. Michael stressed it way more, with, in my opinion, quite tragic results, thing that from the start immediately allowed me to guess where they were going with their (already established as extremely complex) relationship, entirely turning the vibe from sophisticated allegory of Divine Comedy kind of love (love for your enemy, love for your friend, love in all its form and in its entirety) to banal romantic comedy-level gay drama, downgrading what Crowley and Aziraphale shared (the subtle abysses of it!) into the most boring and obvious of soap operas, obviously forcing them to act out of character in order to compensate (was any flash-back meaningful to their character or the story? Was there a writing reason behind any of them beyond writing for the sake of filling screen-time?).

Some relationships deserve to be left alone, alone in their subtlety and ambiguousness or you'll inevitably ruin them. Not everyone must kiss on screen, no matter how much the audience screams and throws up for it. This little woke drama completely ruined and eclipsed everything else those two characters were for each other, turning them from cosmic and devastatingly loyal best friends to petty and dumb lovers that need two plot devices (the messy pointless and quite frankly offensive representation-wise lesbians from across the street they literally met five minutes prior) to tell them they actually have feeling for each other and should share them. After literal millennia of this relationship, relationship that has its own inner workings and reasons, we needed the plot-lesbians to subvert the order of things and spur Crowley into action, obviously obtaining disastrous and lame results? Are we witnessing the interaction of immortal beings or five-year-olds? The only way I can genuinely make sense of this dumbness is considering those two female "characters" (that feel anything but real people) no more than that, characters, golems, put there by Metatron via the power of the Book of Life (again, so many Chekhov's guns with no use whatsoever in this season) in order to separate Az and Crowley using the only thing that could succeed in doing it - an ill placed declaration of love.

But even this doesn't match the true être of what Good Omens originally was nor comes full circle with the ineffable mystery season 1 ended with. It genuinely feels like Gaiman changed the whole rhyme and reason of the story, vibes, meaning, register, just to meet the modern needs of a category that is sadly phagocytizes everything else in both life and fiction. And I find it a true pity - and a bore.

And even leaving aside this personal boredom of mine at a non-existent plot that consisted in 1) a big mystery that promised cosmic repercussions (season 1 ended with the after-nonapocalyptic world that was slightly changed just because two enemies had loved each other and life too much not to oppose god's plan - fact that was probably god's plan all along), mystery that was actually no mystery at all (two random, from the original story's perspective, previous minor characters in literally ten supernatural minutes fell in love and run away together) and that meant virtually nothing in the grand scheme of things, but serving as a plot device so that the other two minor new characters could intrude into the protagonists' relationship so they could finally have the excuse to jump literary genre and kiss & queer tragedy the story away 2) an endless series of symbols, facts, episodes and characters that constantly seemed to hint at something but that in reality resulted in nothing story-wise (also, the change of heart in God's personality, first the witty and almighty trickster for the greater good, now the divine bully??), even leaving all this aside, I'm mostly disappointed the quality of the writing plummeted so inesorabily one of my comfort show turned into the symbol of an artistic era I'm utterly distraught to have to witness - the era of crowd-pleasers and un-imagination.

As for this being a filler season, writing in such an unresolved way (basic and predictable plot, colourless characters, cliché romance, hours of happenings that don't mean a thing in the current story) is unacceptable and a failure, even if you are a famous writer. You cannot waste hours of the audience's time going nowhere shielded by the sole future promise of sense. Writing doesn't work that way, and I'm sincerely appalled to see people noticing it and deciding to excuse it with a "surely next season everything will look genius!". It doesn't work this way. The faults were too many, they can't possibly be all resolved next season. This product wasn't great, even if your faves kissed and your little fanfictions came true.

The sad thing is, Good Omens used to be a work of art, not the next consumeristic piece of fiction to satisfy woke needs.

[marley-manson]

okay the full review in a pros and cons list lol

pros:

uh my ship canon. i win, motherfuckers. fuckin 15 year old me was right this whole time, as always, but it's nice to see it acknowledged for once.

the confession scene also just kicked ass tbh

i gotta admire the cheekiness of the back and forth hesitant phrasing of their relationship, eg crowley referring to '...us' and aziraphale's 'i need you!' 'we can be together' etc until finally crowley just runs back to kiss him

and you know aziraphale was about to say 'i love you' before cutting himself off <3

touching his lips after too <3

the reasons for the break up felt reasonable to me and justified with the season's flashbacks to crowley questioning things and aziraphale's resistance

some pretty funny jokes, i laughed outloud a few times

michael sheen and david tennant do have excellent chemistry

never gonna say no to side lesbians even if they were incredibly bland

i think the way it was structured like a fanfic was a pro honestly lol. the plot sucked, i don't care about it, so it's nice that the story itself also doesn't care

amnesiac gabriel was endearing

crowley not kiling goats was cute

ty tennant was in it for about a minute and spent that minute hitting on aziraphale and it was fucking bonkers

no het

like i think job and his wife may have literally been the sole exception including like references to offscreen spouses lmao, i'm v impressed, and if this is penance for last season then i forgive.

i thought it was cute that gaiman incorporated the song he wanted for season 1 into this season as a plot point

beelzebub's new actor was so much better. and the flies were somehow kinda cute, i'll give the gabriel/beelzebub ship that.

good old fashioned lover boy. we all wanted it, they gave it to us, i appreciate it

here's my review: gay enough

cons:

mostly sucked as like, a narrative

tennant's fucking performance as crowley was so annoying, he or the director doubled down on what i hated last season and stripped him of all the endearing humanizing aspects of his performance and the result was like watching donald duck screaming for 6 episodes

the chemistry was still there but the actual pining kiiiiinda wasn't, actually lol. oh they referred to it in scripted moments, jokes, parallels, and straightforward statements, but they didn't... show it, particularly. until the confession nothing even approaches the tenderness and emotion of like any of their season 1 scenes, let alone the car scene or the bus stop scene or the ritz or the french revolution rescue or the blitz or eden etc etc. and david tennant did not say one word in that cute hopeful pining tone

to be honest after watching the whole show this is the most disappointing part. like the car scene??? could i not get a sequel to that? let crowley be tender!!!!

i think the reason we don't get scenes like that, other than perhaps uncomfortable restraint due to acknowledging the romance textually, is that they went from crowley practically begging aziraphale to cave and fuck him for centuries to crowley now angry repressed and needing a push to say anything, which also felt wrong to me, like iffy fanfic characterization

it was bad enough that i was nervous they were going to depict neither as actually aware of their feelings. thankfully they did not, and it still feels like crowley has been pining for a thousand years and they've both been aware but dancing around it, with the way the confession was phrased. that should be a pro, actually.

also yk all the obvious things. dumb jokes, a lot of bad acting (i feel like the director is at fault though tbf), not into the twee tone in general for the most part, a lot of scenes that were way too drawn out, utterly nonsensical narrative, characters doing things for no reason other than convenience constantly (why do the lesbians stay to help fight the demons? because their characters are more important and need more screen time), 0 stakes wrt heaven and hell because they're all so wholly ineffectual as antagonists and neither crowley nor aziraphale ever gave a shit about their threats, etc etc

oh lol nina sosanya being cast again as a brand new character, no relation to sister mary loquacious. it's not a big con since i like her and was happy to see her again, but it did feel lazy lol. at least give me the identical twin cousin explanation

was crowley living out of his car a joke bc they don't have the set from last season? did god not restore his flat like the bookshop? what's up with that? and how much time has passed since last season anyway? why didn't he get a new flat? why is he living in his car? what's going on?

nightingale references at the end felt tacked on and awkward to me tbh

ohhhhh raphael!crowley's very obviously hinted at and i hate that headcanon :/

crowley's kinda hilariously gary stuish honestly, making me really miss the book and even season 1 where he was like, yk, fucking incompetent sometimes. here he's lounging on couches without a care while being threatened by heaven and hell multiple times, pulling off perfect shots with no practice, waltzing into heaven without a second thought, bluffing demons easily and successfully, etc. and that's in addition to being right about everything and also being raphael like what happened to my dumbass low-level loser fave who fucked up the apocalypse by accident and lived in terror of phone calls from hell???

heaven and hell are "toxic" lol? that phrasing is so awkward, and like, i'd say minimizing but i guess tbf they didn't pose much of a threat in this season. but still c'mon, why you describing 2 murderous doomsday cults/cold warring governments as toxic like they're your annoying ex? especially after the running gag about nina's shitty girlfriend constantly therapy speaking at her condescendingly lol. how about 'hey remember how they worked together to try to kill us last season?'

oh gabriel/beelzebub of course lol, whatever happened to neil gaiman being unable to read fanfic or even people's headcanon posts for fear of accidentally plagiarizing ideas? bring back the separation between fandom and creator stat, fandom has way too much influence here and fandom fucking sucks

a little petty but honestly the kiss could've been good, yk? there's no reason it had to be bad, they could've just given into it for a bit for a hopeful romantic moment before aziraphale freaks and pulls away. like can i get 2 dudes to kiss with tongue at some point on my television here?

needs more queen

[clarionglass]

tagged by @dheiress to post the first line of my last 20 fics (thank you! <3)

Rules: List the first lines of your last 20 stories (if you have less than 20, just list them all!). See if there are any patterns. Choose your favorite opening line. Then tag 10 other authors!

aight my lads here we go, there’s going to be a few unpublished wips and other piece of dubious writing in here bc i doubt i have 20 stories but anyway, here we go (this is very long! press j to skip or just get that dash scrollin bc this might take a while :// ) in very rough chronological order going backwards, starting with the published work:

1. so i ran to the river (tma grifters au, unpublished yet but will be soon!): The sunlight feels different on a face fresh out of prison, and it feels even better to Jonathan Sims now that he’s truly home.

2. crowned by an overture bold and beyond (tma pretentious college au, based loosely on the secret history):  It was a cool, rainy day in late March when I first approached the Magnus Institute--one of those days that served as a reminder that the London spring, that fragile creature, was still all too vulnerable to the occasional strike from the claws of winter.

3. we should ride this wave to shore (tma chatfic where everything is beautiful and nothing hurts): Friday, 3:14 P.M. “archives research & statement envestigation” Timothy Stoker renamed the group “drinks drinks drinks” Timothy Stoker changed Sasha James’s nickname to saucy sash Timothy Stoker changed Martin Blackwood’s nickname to martini kart Timothy Stoker changed his nickname to stonked stonked: so how bout it lads saucy sash: oh god.

4. i am the maker of rules (dealing with fools) (tma chatfic, an elias-and-peter-focused accompaniment to wsrtwts): Monday, 7:39 P.M. Elias Bouchard to Peter Lukas Elias Bouchard: Peter, I need to talk to you. Elias Bouchard: I’ve had the most infuriating day at work.

5. An Optimistic Tragedy (good omens orchestra au that i swear to god i’ll finish one day): Three years ago Eve shifted in her chair, her mind clearly on things other than Milhaud and the music in front of her.

6. The Spaces Between the Stars (the Beast of a dw fic that i can’t even begin to describe; a mate and i have been working on this since 2015 and it’s a sprawling mass of writing that encompasses Many google docs--what’s on ao3 atm is a very small percentage of it,,,,): The Doctor clutched the TARDIS railing as if somehow, it could take the pain away.

7. Carol of the Bells (a chrismas chatfic companion to aot! i’ve always been a sucker for a chatfic but oof looking back on this one my formatting style sure has changed): [Friday December 13, 1:31am] Anthony Crowley to Angelface: u up? ;)

8. An Exploration into The Nature of Human Beings, sub. Homo Sapiens: A Research Paper by Milton Jones (british comedy rpf. this is my oldest piece on ao3 and it shows, but there’s a special place in my heart for this dorky lil fic about an alien researcher making a place for himself in british comedy. fun fact! i actually added the final three sentences to this a couple of days ago, and will post it when i do my next fic update): <<I knew you’d be down here, as per usual. Do you never stop working?>>

and now for the stuff that i like but hasn’t yet/will never/one day, if i get my act together, might be posted to ao3... please ask me about these bc i love them, even though i’ll probably never post them :)

9. untitled mitchell spy comedy (a show that @monimolimnion​ and i want to pitch to the bbc in which david mitchell and victoria coren mitchell are married spies who work for MI5 and MI6 respectively, and most of britcom pops up in one place or another. it’s nothing more than a Lot of planning and a few snippets, but i love returning to this doc): [David is sitting at his desk, shaking his head at an open file.] David: They’re taking the piss. That’s what they’re doing, they’re taking the piss.

10. In the Demonic Style (a good omens au of @teashoesandhair’s glorious smooching contest piece, which is the first piece of fiction writing in the reblog chain. i’ve promised a chapter 2 to this, which i’m halfway through, and feel incredibly guilty for not finishing. still, my quarter-year’s resolution is to finish something old whenever i post something new, so maybe it’ll get done soon!): “It’s the end of the world” was not a good statement with which to start one’s morning in any circumstances, but the angel Bryndael was in the middle of cataloguing his newest shipment of tea samples when said statement reached his ears, and he didn’t much appreciate being disturbed.

11. magpie (good omens canon-mostly-compliant fic based around the song magpie by the unthanks/the magpie folk song/nursery rhyme): Wednesday (approximately 11 years before the end of the world) From a bird’s-eye view, St James’s Park was beautiful at this time of year.

12. untitled ficlet for tales of dwrwedd (a present for my writing buddy! the link is to her fic, i just wrote a bit of her two witcherverse ocs being soft as hell): The two women seated by the hearth didn't look old, either of them. But there was something about the pair--in their movements, or their mannerisms--that suggested an age far beyond what their unlined faces would suggest.

13: Tempo d’Attacco (an original bit of Light Crime a la midsomer murders, set in a university music department that is naturally a thinly-veiled copy of my own, hence why it will never ever be posted anywhere. i wrote this for my supervisor at the end of honours (her character is the sleuth) :P ) Dr Marisa Tan didn’t exactly start her morning well, on the day that everything seemed to upend itself.

patterns...... i’m not seeing that many, tbh? idk if i could call this in media res, but there’s certainly a good bit of plot starting without heaps of setup. 

my favourite? hmmmmmm i’d say my favourites would be crowned by an overture bold and beyond, and in the demonic style. i gotta say, going back to revisit a lot of my older writing has been nice! time and distance have been v kind :)

i’m hella bad at tagging things so if you see this and want to share your own writing please go ahead! i’m very shy when it comes to Fandom Interaction (tm) so i don’t feel comfortable launching myself into people’s notes (i loved this tho! i just need other people to make the first move lol), however i will give a specific shoutout to @monimolimnion whose writing i adore and who needs to do this!

[idea-w-retorcie]

Michael Sheen Massive Praise Post

I don’t think I have ever actually expressed how much I do appreciate this guy so now it’s high time to do so!

We all agree that Sheen was great as Aziraphale, but it’s still mainly David Tennant to have his own fanvids with Crowley alone and not Michael (nearly no Aziraphale alone fanvids there!). Much as I love their characters as a couple, I’d love to have some sort of POV of each of them as well, but all I have is a lot of Crowley (at least when it comes to fanvids).

Is Aziraphale less interesting because he’s an angel? Well, I think fanbase generally prefers Crowley. Like, we love both, they’re inseparable and there’s usually loads of both of them as one, but if you have to choose just one… Well, I think, it’d be Crowley, not Aziraphale to be chosen by most of fans. Aziraphale is not the dramatic good demon. He’s a bastard who thinks he knows best what’s Right and what’s Wrong or rather he pretends to know. Such a hypocrite! Sure, he’s changing slowly, his certainty is really just a fasade, he’s good at heart and so on, but Crowley is the one we would agree with and sympathize with in the first place. Most of us, at least.

Considering it all, Michael Sheen deserves even more credit for his portrayal of Aziraphale because he managed to make this character as interesting, as lovable as Crowley in fandom’s eyes. I think Aziraphale as a role is way harder to portray than Crowley. And he succeed anyway! It’s pretty obvious here, on Tumblr that Sheen as Aziraphale stole fanbase’s heart. My thoughts are based solely on observation of Good Omens fans here. Of course, you can disagree. I may be wrong. Only idiots think they’re totally right. ;)

I’m so happy to see that on Tumblr Michael Sheen is appreciated properly by the fanbase of GO, but anywhere else, I guess, it's  DT mainly. Don’t get me wrong, I love DT, he’s my favourite actor, actually, but it’s just so sad that Michael Sheen, fantastic, outstanding actor, the one who’s so great when it comes to interacting with fans, so supportive of fan activities and stuff, has no great fanbase on his own. Like popculture, various, huge fanbase, focused on him only, not just on this one single role in Good Omens.

I blame it on the fact that Michael was not  in many popculture, high quality productions and there’s a lot of him being just supporting character, not the main one. DT has Doctor Who, Jessica Jones, Good Omens, Broadchurch… Michael Sheen, on the other hand, has… Twilight. I don’t wish to insult Twilight fans, but still we do need more of Michael Sheen in things like Good Omens. Otherwise, no huge, proper Michael Sheen popculture fanbase can be formed.

I myself saw him in so many productions and just didn’t remember him in any of them. But then Good Omens was announced and I started doing some research on him and I found out I knew him already! I just… didn’t remember him! Mostly because those productions he was in were not my jam or he was just supporting character in them. It’s a real shame!

But it could be so much better, even without new, main roles in things similar to, let’s say, Doctor Who.

I mean, for example, we have Bright Young Things. Great idea to make a movie, great cast, mostly, but result’s a bit dull. How much better that movie could be if Miles (Michael Sheen) was its main character! With that queer, dramatic, camp acting I love so much? The movie could be awesome! Not to say… GAY RIGHTS! It’d be fantastic production, a bit absurd, a bit sad about queer people in 20s with queer main character struggling with his identity!

Same goes to Passengers. Just a normal movie, nothing special (it is so for me, you can disagree), but imagine the very same movie from the perspective of Arthur (Michael Sheen), an android, who observes the couple, learns watching them. If we could also have some witty narration to it (much like God in Good Omens) it’d be great, wouldn’t it? Instead of that boring couple on a spaceship plot, we could have android observing the human couple, changing thanks to them, while having all sorts of identity issues. 

But we don’t have it, unfortunately.

My point in this chaotic praise post is that Michael Sheen is intriguing actor and he needs more recognition. And that’s my point!

Oh, but what do I love about his acting so much? His acting style is so very emotional, a bit dramatic, camp even (I do love camp aesthetics, by the way), queer-like. He has very expressive eyes and elegant smiles, those tiny twitches and graceful or, on the contrary, nervous gestures. It all makes you think, while watching him, that there’s some buzzing energy inside him, some constantly changing flow of thoughts and emotions. He reflects them so well, even those slight shifts, shadows of thoughts on his features. You can actually read the character he’s portraying without him even speaking. All it takes to understand the character here is just watching his body language! Oh, and his voice! Such a nice voice to hear; soothing, low, but not too low and I love his ability to make it slightly higher than it is or lower and a little bit harsh. His manner of speaking is also pretty elegant, clear and easy to understand for me as a non-native speaker. It probably means that his way of spelling words is super correct or something.

He’s certainly too good to be supporting character or acting in low quality stuff. There’s not enough of him being the main character and in good stuff.

Yes, that’s my point! :)

[elsinore-and-inverness]

A long, spoilerific, very enthusiastic and overly honest review of Good Omens

Episodes 1-3: I want to start out by saying that as a Doctor Who fan I love love that due to special effects choices I couldn’t remotely maintain suspension of disbelief. This didn’t seem to be intentional but rather the result of it being made by (DT don’t look) people who may have seen subtlety on the doorstep but thought it might be selling something and asked it to leave.

The first two episodes seemed a bit crunched for time and over-explained. I found myself wishing they would slow down, although this “not enough time” effect may have been very deliberate and I could also see how to people who hadn’t read the book they might have felt slow-paced. But they rather extraordinarily re-created the effect of reading the book for the first time. Especially due to a remarkable slipperiness of Tennant’s acting that meant I felt like I didn’t totally have a read on what he was doing with the character until episode three. To create this effect with a character as gloriously flamboyant, multilayered and complex as Crowley, confidently cross-stepping the line between camp and quiet takes astonishing finesse and understanding and trust in long-form media. 

Nina Sosanya’s earnestness made the convent scene work and justify itself beyond exposition and weird floating metaphor visuals. The children’s authenticity and the demons’ deadly-serious goofiness provided strong through-lines and the angels reciting lines from The Sound of Music was frankly terrifying.

In the beginning of the first episode before I turned on subtitles I misheard Gabriel’s “I have reliable intelligence that things are afoot” as “I have reliable intelligence that things are fucked” and I’m honestly disappointed that wasn’t the actual line. I also misheard Crowley’s “the humans beat me to it” as “the humans made me do it” and that also would have been a much better line. 

I felt that the story picked up some in the second episode. I adore Anathema’s lack of regard for social conventions, and now I’m wondering if the fact that I get asked about ten thousand questions every time I enter the UK is less normal than I thought. The heightened tragicomedy of Newt’s computer problem in twenty-first century London was very affecting and I was less put off by the “maximalist” design elements of Tracy and Shadwell’s flats than I thought I would be from the set photos, they seemed fairly believable. Anathema’s sheer confusion at the Bentley loudly playing “Bicycle Race” was probably my favorite moment of the episode, the other contenders being the face Crowley makes when he gets rid of the paint on Aziraphale and the fact that the Bentley was STILL playing “Bicycle Race” even louder as it drove away.

I know Sheen was very proud of Aziraphale’s reaction to reading the prophecy about him, and the fact that the reaction could read from the back row of a very large theatre and I can only agree with him on this. Sheen, as usual, is amazingly chameleonic. It may just be because I’m not as familiar with his work as Tennant’s but there was no point at which I was looking at Aziraphale and thinking “oh yeah, that’s Michael Sheen.” I think he might be a few fathoms further towards the character actor end of the continuum, as my favorite Crowley moments were places I felt like a bit of Tennant was shining through- “Do ducks have ears? They must have- to hear other ducks”

Aziraphale has one brain cell and I am here for it. It’s lovely to have confirmation that this brain cell sees one Anthony “it’s just sort of a J really” Crowley as a much higher priority than mostly-incorrect books of prophecy. The first half of episode three is a gorgeous, aching love story and the scene in the car in Soho in the 60s was everything. “You go too fast for me” says Aziraphale- 5960 and/or 944 years into a relationship. 

Miscellaneous thoughts:

-Oysters are an aphrodisiac 

-Crowley has so much/so many gender

I was very busy acting in a show, doing pre-production on a different show and picketing university buildings so I took a week-long intermission 

Episodes 4-6: Crowley, an intellectual: Have you considered exoplanets?

I suppose the radiation flares on Proxima Centauri b wouldn’t affect an angel and a demon? I like that Crowley’s mindset at this point seems to be “we’ll be fine, but please don’t kill the humans” but I kind of miss seeing him panicking and reading and re-arranging his CDs. 

There’s some genuine absurdism in episode four, especially in the scene in the cinema that I think could have totally fallen apart if it was written by more that one person. 

They’re really maintaining tension very well with the Adam and humans plot and the delivery man scenes were lovely and Aziraphale’s getting to be quite tragic.  But I think the apartment-phone-call-discorporation sequence is very tightly plotted in the book and it’s kind of lost something here in coming unravelled. Episode five is fairly perfect, if toppling headlong into melodrama at times. I like how they explained Crowley not having a bigger reaction to finding Aziraphale at the airbase. The song choices are doing so much and I love Crowley to bits. The horsemen of the apocalypse are genuinely quite chilling. They create a really strong sense of impending doom. If there’s one thing I miss from cutting the other bikers of the apocalypse it’s the “Revelations: chapter six” joke.

Although it’s keeping quite close to the book, they introduce new material very excitingly in the last episode. The scenes in heaven and hell were hilarious. I really want to know how much David and Michael thought about carrying over mannerisms of each other’s characters.

Reversing the order of the final scenes reinforces that, at least structurally, the tv show is a romantic comedy. There’s been a recombination of elements that leads to a different final note than the novel leaves off on. 

Miscellaneous thoughts:

-Why on Earth does Crowley have a photo set for his own contact on his phone? Who does that?

-baby snek. baby.

-I hope they got to finish their ice cream date