The Second (Final) Coming

It’s been a three year wait since the release of Good Omens 2. That second season was a continuation of Good Omens, which took the story of two immortal friends, angel Aziraphale (Michael Sheen) and demon Crowley (David Tennant), out of the pages of the book written by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman and into a continuation that, as per Gaiman, had been planned by him and Pratchett before his co-author’s death. The sequel series was well received, and it brought the two characters together in romance before splitting them very far apart. This left the fans wanting, craving more…

Right up until it came out that Neil Gaiman was an absolute and utter creep. Anyone familiar with the story already knows the details, so we won’t go into it here, but suffice it to say that the author was accused, by multiple women, of sexual assault and misconduct and that, in effect, destroyed the author’s fanbase and derailed many of his projects and adaptations. The Sandman was quickly put out to pasture after two seasons (when it was obviously planned to run for several, following the general direction of the books), and Dead Boy Detectives was quickly scrapped after one season (whether or not its ratings really called for it). Gaiman was persona non grata in Hollywood after that.

But in the case of Good Omens the solution wasn’t so simple. Good Omens 2 had ended on quite the cliffhanger, and fans absolutely wanted resolution. They just didn’t want Gaiman anywhere near the production. So the author stepped back, and the heads at Amazon PrimeWhile Netflix might be the largest streaming seervice right now, other major contenders have come into the game. One of the biggest, and best funded, is Amazon Prime, the streaming-service add-on packing with free delivery and all kinds of other perks Amazon gives its members. And, with the backing of its corporate parent, this streaming service very well could become the market leader. came up with a compromise: put Rachel Talalay in charge of the last season, and trim what was planned as a six-episode arc down into a single, 90-minute movie. The resulting television film, Good Omens 3 at least tries to give fans what they want, even if the end result feels pretty slapdash and compromised all around.

When last we saw our demonic and angelic friends, Crowley had just professed his love for Aziraphale, but this came right as the angel had been offered the chance to run Heaven. Aziraphale had to turn his back on his love to do the right thing and try to put Heaven back on track. He wanted an era of peace and happiness so humans could be joyful and loved. But this also meant leaving Crowley behind, and the demon didn’t take it well. He became despondent, living in an alley behind Aziraphale’s book shop, getting drunk and gambling away his nights.

But fate, naturally, has a way of bringing former friends back together. When someone in Heaven steals the Book of Life, the tome that controls everything in the universe, bad things begin to happen. People start disappearing, and it could even lead to the end of the universe. This comes on the heels of the return of Joshua (aka Jesus, as played by Bilal Hasna), who is supposed to usher in the Second Coming. Except with the Book of Life missing, Aziraphale has to focus on that matter and, well, Josh gets misplaced. Now, to find Josh and, hopefully, find the book, Aziraphale has to team back up with Crowley as they once again try to prevent the end of everything.

If Good Omens 3 had been six episodes long I think all this plotting would have worked out pretty well. There’s a lot of meat for this season to pick through, both with the Second Coming of Jesus as well as the missing Book of Life. The two could have formed a solid A-Plot/B-Plot structure as the stories interwove with each other before leading to a cataclysmic ending that Aziraphale and Crowley had to try and avoid. Paired up it would have made for a very full, but fairly interesting, final season.

Unfortunately the story had to be trimmed down a lot to fit into 90 minutes and the end result is a film that doesn’t really have the time to focus on everything it wants to do, both of those plots plus the reunion of Aziraphale and Crowley, along with a lot of other more minor matters, that it functionally has to set whole chunks of its story aside just to try and get anything done in its short runtime. That means, for instance, Jesus’s storyline, which should be a big part of the film, is reduced to three or so scenes, with the character feeling more like a footnote in his own adventure.

The things that do work end up working really well. Of course, what works best is the dynamic between Sheen’s Aziraphale and Tennant’s Crowley. These two have such natural chemistry together that it’s stunning. Three seasons in (if we want to count this final movie as a “season”) and their dynamic feels so lived in, so natural, that you just want to spend all the time you can with them. They could have made Good Omens 3 six episodes of the two of them going out for dim sum and talking about literature and it still would be amazing to watch. The film, despite all its flaws, is absolutely carried by these two.

But it is flawed all the same. For starters, the Book of Life is a McGuffin introduced in this movie simply to bring the plot to its obvious and foregone conclusion. It doesn’t really make sense in the context of anything the series has shown us before, and its rules aren’t even internally consistent. Beyond that, it feels out of place as a plot driver when we also have Jesus wandering around, trying to do his thing. These two plotlines feel at odds within the span of this film. If each side had more time to be developed, more room to breathe in the context of a season, then I think they’d work. I like the ideas present here, but the film can’t devote the needed time to make them function.

Similarly there are side stories that the film raises and then ignores almost as soon as the scene changes. We learn that in Aziraphale’s absence the neighborhood he’d been living in has gone downhill, purchased by some developer so they can do… something. While we’re meant to understand that it was Aziraphale’s magic that kept the neighborhood going, we never delve into the story of the developer, if they’re evil, what’s going on there, or Aziraphale trying to bring the neighborhood back. It’s actually a storyline that sits at odds with where the film ends up going, making you wonder why they even bothered raising it at all.

There’s also a plotline about Crowley gambling away his magical Bently to a shady gangster, Brian Cameron (Sean Pertwee), which should cause the duo some consternation. Instead, though, Aziraphale shows up, easily wins back the Bentley, and then they set the car, and the gangster, aside for almost the entire length of the film. It’s such a non-starter of a plotline that it, like the story of the neighborhood, should have simply been left out of the film altogether. If you’re going to raise a story like this it has to actually mean something. It had to illuminate something about the characters or add a dynamic the plot needed to facilitate its machinations. But here, the gangster story is just something for Crowley to deal with while the story has nothing better for him to handle. It’s padding so his character gets to move around the board, but it’s otherwise meaningless.

Stuff like this should have been trimmed out to give more room to what matters: the Book of Life, Jesus, and our dynamic duo. The film spends a lot of time on crap that isn’t important, leaving less room for the stuff that is. This, in turn, means everything feels under-developed and uneven. There’s good material here, but it’s all buried under a ton of padding. It feels like the writers, Michael Marshall Smith and then Peter Atkins who were working off the script by Neil Gaiman, took a pass each at the material, said, “all of this is important because Gaiman wrote it”, and tried to preserve too much. They needed someone that could come in and say, “there are no sacred cows”, who was willing to really edit this down to a movie length story that worked, so that the elements that were preserved really mattered.

What matters in this story is Aziraphale and Crowley and they’re the only parts here that shine. I’m happy we got to see more of these two and, in the end, got a kind of conclusion for them (although I won’t spoil what it is here). It just sucks because Good Omens 3 had real potential and between Gaiman being a terrible human being, and then a pair of writers that weren’t willing to do the editing work that had to be done, we ended up with a compromised film acting as the last word on this story. Good Omens 3 is fine, but it could have been so much better than this.