1x06 The Very Last Day of the Rest of Their Lives

[7.6/10] This episode was an odd combination of roundly satisfying and overly pat. You could feel the show going for the clockwork ending, with all of its disparate storylines coming together in one big bundle. The connections between them are solid enough, but the final answers feel a little too easy for a series that was grappling with some big questions.

And yet, ultimately I like its answers, which provides a little cushion. Sure, there’s something a little convenient about Adam’s regular friends managing to defeat his four horsemen friends simply by saying what they really believe in (and using Aziraphale’s lost flaming sword). But the fact that, in the end, both Heaven and Hell (a.) aim to start the war to end all wars because it suits their ends and (b.) don’t know whether that’s part of the “ineffable plan” anymore than the humans do, is an interesting place to land.

So is the turn away from both Heaven and Hell and turn toward humanity, represented by Aziraphale and Crowley recognizing Adam as not the incarnate of either place, but as the incarnate of humanity, something that both angel and demon have come to appreciate given their time on Earth. There’s an existentialist bent to that idea which I find really interesting, which culminates in Adam using his “will it to reality” powers to make it so that Satan, his absentee father, is no longer his “real dad,” but that the man who raised him for the last eleven years is. There’s powerful symbolism is that too, which feels like either Gaiman or Pratchett or somebody exercising a more personal type of demon through the story.

And yet, it’s something I think I like more as an idea than as the end of the story, where Good Omens gets very direct and declaratory about its themes and messages in a way that feels overly tidy, even for a show that mostly wore its thoughts on its sleeves. You’d be hard-pressed to walk away from this season finale without getting what the show is trying to say, with the Voice of God filling in the details just in case. (Don’t get me started on the cheesiness of the whole thing building to Adam being trapped in a garden and deciding to steal an apple, replete with on-the-nose voiceover dialogue about what that symbolizes.)

Still, as the cap to a lot of disparate storytelling threads, I actually found it a pretty satisfying answer to the questions the show had been raising, even if it felt like we had a fair bit of fluff between the beginning and the end to get there. What I was less on board with was the way the show spent another half hour trying to end things and do what amounted to an epilogue.

Again, Adam’s bit with the garden was too cornball for my taste. I still don’t especially care about Anathema and Pulcifer, and their burning the new book of predictions felt too heavy on the symbolism once more. I’ll admit to being charmed by the sweetness of Madame Tracy and Stadwell ending up together, but I’m tempted to place that more on the supreme comedic talents of Michael McKean and Miranda Richardson than on a romance that’s been pretty underfed. (I’ll also throw a shout out to Jon Hamm here, who’s been unexpectedly shaky for much of the season, but who absolutely nailed the “I try to seem like a nice person, but I’m actually a domineering douchebag deep down” vibe in this episode.)

Still, as Good Omens must, in the end it comes down to Crowley and Aziraphale. Their switching bodies and/or faces was a bit of an obvious feint, but still led to an amusing moment when one steps into the hellfire and the other bathes in the holy water. It’s not as clever a twist as the show seemed to think, even if there’s perhaps no greater bit of commentary than the two realms working together to slay the newly-minted outsiders whose sole bit of treachery is averting the end of the world.

All that said, the two of them as good friends is just a surprisingly sweet note to end on, even if their final conversation is filled with portents of what’s to come and more pat statements about what was. Overall, this show rises and falls and what they’re given to do, and the performances of Michael Sheen and David Tennant that elevate the proceedings at every turn.

As a whole, this season had a decent amount of filler or less interesting stories, but was buoyed considerably by the characters and performers it put at the center of the narrative. It had an ending that felt too neat and then overextended by the end, but which had something laudable to say. And it offered tons of striking, often gorgeous images, without always knowing what to do with it. For a first season, Good Omens gave me more things that I liked than that I loved, but Tennant and Sheen, and Crowley and Aziraphale, are unique and compelling enough to keep me coming back.

Rewatch!
-this season feels messy. Everyone knows the star plot thread is going to be aziraphale & crowley but the whole story is something about ineffability, free will, morally greyness vs moral black or white ness, so it feels like the show has been pulled in two directions. The plot requires Adam, anathema, shadwell to be there so the resolution works but all the emotional energy is invested in aziraphale and crowley. It feels like a book adaptation, and less like television
- I came to rewatch to boost stats for good omens renewal, but also because i wanted to know if my initial feeling that "s2 retreads s1's character beats" was right. Sort of yes and no. For crowley, no because his thread is working up to saying something to aziraphale. For aziraphale... kind of yes, in a way. In s2 he's still unwilling to accept things as they actually are and resort to "you're a demon/the bad guy/we're not even friends I don't like you" even as he's more overtly soft and romantic there. Here in the climax his line to crowley is "do something or I won't speak to you anymore" lol. aziraphale's denial comes to bite him back, &c
- crowley's crank which he used to make the heavens appears here first! And he kept it all through the fall and 6000 years of history and it's all about how he really isn't the warrior of the pair. Nerd.