Good Omens Review: Preliminary Thoughts

Recently I suggested to my boyfriend that we watch the first season of Good Omens, which was included in some bundle or other to which we had a free month’s subscription. He kind of watched the first episode while doing other things and I in a partial fugue state consumed 4 of the six episodes over the next day, finishing the last one night later.

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There’s a certain type of content to which i feel i owe a professional obligation, or perhaps professional interest in consuming, analyzing, responding to, correcting for. Perhaps it is my theologiac-prophetic impulses which compel me thus. If all text is scripture ☸, what better place to seek counsel than in the errata of the gods? Therefore such content need not earn my approval to draw such interest, often to a higher intensity than much better works of art which i might consume and, startled at my own inadequacy to engage them in discourse, merely move on after a respectful moment of meditation in the shadow of the frame. (👁️). I count the novel The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August among such artifacts, its conceit so excellent and the ideology of its execution so—…vapid, i suppose. Lent: A Novel of Many Returns, on the other hand, is a dual citizen. The Good Omens tv adaptation falls in the former category.

There’s a lot to love in this show! The framing device of angels and demons operating qua undercover agents, up through the double agent switch, is one i’ve loved for a while, as evident by the motifs in my xercizes and other such drafting table content. I like the theological metaphor of God not playing dice with the universe so much as a byzantine form of Poker for infinite stakes in a pitch-black room with a dealer who want stop smiling. like that’s poetry right there. trying to stop the end of the world because it would mean the end to their earthly pleasures as well as each other’s company, an angel and a demon form a war council, stake out a third position between Heaven (utopian, authoritarian, callus, genocidal, ineffable) and Hell (gross? the movie spends a lot of time really emphasizing Demons = Bad, Demons = Gross, the exception being Crowley, who is neither evil nor gross, his only supernaturally distinguishing features being his firey lizard eyes (hidden behind walled glasses 98% of the time, presumably to facilitate viewership sympathy/viewership and give Tennant the minimum number of days in contacts. Alternatively, it may have been CGI and done for cost saving.)) The end of the season makes this its explicit thesis.

While this makes sense, the gimmic inhabits some shawdy world building. Consider the guiding ideology of Heaven’s angelic forces, trust in the ineffabile/Divine/Great plan, which allows our heroes to escape the hereto forth inevitable war between angels and demons (a war they are all so invested in for reasons the show isn’t so much interested in occluding or characterizing as mocking, trading on the stupidity of its secondary characters whose motivations orbit an essential unfeeling dedication to the needs of the plot.

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There were some big r/menwritingwomen moments, which I’ve sadly come to expect at this point from Gaiman. The interactions between occultist Anathema Device and Witchfinder-Private Newton Pulsipher was…weird, very (the ethics of consent and prophecy in this universe are troubling but that’s not really brought up, I think Gaiman probably just wanted a sex scene in his armageddon crosscut with a flaming car stunt and kids riding bicycles). The interactions between the witchfinder-sergeant and the spiritualist Madame Tracy was really sad, occasionally abusive. The puritan-meets-witch-cum-lady of the night gag is repeatedly played for laughs with a particularly hard meanstreak towards sexworkers. Likewise I didn’t like the portrayal of the seance as a callus for profit hoax, which is of course the obvious and lazy dichotomy between Supernatural Realism and the culture (including a culture of belief in the occult) in which the narrative takes place. idk

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I’m currently reading Capitalist Realism which makes me think about imagining the end of the world and about being unable to imagine the end of capitalism. the season ends with the status quo ante apocalypses, which is to say, prior to the identification of the antichrist is. Everything the main characters loose (principally Azeraphel’s bookshop and Crowley’s car), things which some of them have mourned, are returned to them without a scratch, which is the kind of thing which earns dreamfiction its bad name (i for one have been left irrevocably changed after many a nightmare, after which the knowledge that i was “merely dreaming” can be of severely limited relief).

I think they should have shown us more about what its like to be raised as the antichrist, or as one supposed to be him. Warlock’s story in that regard is more interesting to me than Adam’s. Adam begins his characterization as the charismatic leader of a gang of children, chiefly characterized by their stale acting. I doubt such a performance is the result of the young thespian’s talent or effort. Piper in particular had to work with some pretty stilted dialogue, and eventually all four get turned into roughly puppetered golems—Adam in order to become the antichrist ex machina, his friends roughly hijacked subjects for Adam. Then Adam’s essential goodness (i guess?) frees them and they go back to being the (slightly) more deftly wielded instruments of the salvation of the world rather than its destruction.

To clarify, i do find it interesting to pose the antichrist as accidentally working class, if that figured into the story. but the significance appears to be that one one took the time to teach him good versus evil, to equip him with the armor of the ungodly or to put him near the instruments of worldly power. Instead, he gets handed conspiracy theory magazines out of which he conjures Atlantis and perpetual energy, miracles which are erased from being and partially from memory when the apocalypse and the remaking of the world are indefinitely deferred in favor of the modest values of family backyard shenanagains. Like, come on. Adam’s parents are implied to be unable to really afford this dog, he’s explicitly from a nonaffluent family, his friends are litterally unable to imagine there existing 37 unique flavors of icecream (when does this take place? the internet is mentioned but i get big time 1980s vibes.

I liked the soundtrack. I liked that Crowley likes Queen and that he only reluctantly/unintentionally fell from grace, that he changes his name and it takes Aziraphale a while to get used to it. He’s very transcoded, very punk, he’s a mischief maker not a murderer. I like that they ganged up against the Nazis, though this raises the question, Why Doesn’t Azirepheal Stop the Nazis? are they getting demonic support like the Order of Cackling Nuns (that was some great worldbuilding)? Or does he just stay so loyal to the divine plan that he doesn’t intervene miraculously to save millions of lives, only to benefit the people he comes into contact as a day to day London bookseller? More politics of the unimaginabile?

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Some fundamentals which merit mention—Sheen and Tennant (does that come from tenancy? landlord’s daughter?)’s performances are on point. They were very gay and cute and i loved that part.

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☸ The antitheosis of the author? (deification, see of Washington⚶)

⚶Godhood of the founders, seance republic.

👁️Note to self, you really must !Re-Listen to Season 2 of Within the Wires

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