Good Omens Season 2: How Neil Gaiman Went Off Book With the Story of Aziraphale and Crow

SPOILER ALERT: This recap contains spoilers from the Season 2 finale of “Good Omens,” now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

In the 2006 reprinted edition of Neil Gaiman and the late Terry Pratchett‘s 1990 classic “Good Omens,” the co-authors did a Q&A in which they answered the question “Why isn’t there a sequel?” like this:

“We played around with ideas, but we could never work up the enthusiasm. Besides, we wanted to do other things (and some of those ideas probably ended up, bent to a different shape, in the works of both of us). Recently, though, we’ve both been wondering if ‘never again’ is set in stone. So there might be a sequel one day. Maybe. Perhaps. Who knows? We don’t.”

Well, now we do know, because on July 28, Amazon Prime Video dropped the second season of its TV adaptation of “Good Omens,” which sees Michael Sheen and David Tennant reprise their roles as apocalypse-fighting, millennia-long best friends: the fussy angel and rare-book dealer Aziraphale and fast-living demon Crowley.

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This second season goes beyond the original source material written by Gaiman (“The Sandman,” “American Gods”) and Pratchett (the prolific writer who created the enduring “Discworld” series of fantasy novels), which Gaiman adapted in full to write 2019’s first season of “Good Omens.” At the time, it was intended as a limited series. But the show was renewed for a second season in 2021, which is when Gaiman revealed he had hatched the idea for a sequel with Pratchett before his death in 2015.

“It’s thirty-one years since ‘Good Omens’ was published, which means it’s thirty-two years since Terry Pratchett and I lay in our respective beds in a Seattle hotel room at a World Fantasy Convention, and plotted the sequel,” Gaiman said in Amazon’s renewal announcement. “I got to use bits of the sequel in ‘Good Omens’ — that’s where our angels came from. Terry’s not here any longer, but when he was, we had talked about what we wanted to do with ‘Good Omens,’ and where the story went next.”

“Good Omens” Season 2, which was written by Gaiman and John Finnemore, goes back further in time than the original story did, to the “before The Beginning” period of Crowley and Aziraphale’s friendship, while simultaneously showing them thwart yet another disaster of Biblical proportions in the present day. Throughout the six-episode season, the two attempt to figure out why the archangel Gabriel (Jon Hamm) shows up at Aziraphale’s bookshop in London with amnesia, all while hiding him from Heaven and Hell so they won’t get in even more trouble with their former employers (having been cast out in Season 1).

In the finale, it’s revealed that Gabriel had slowly formed a secret romantic relationship with the head demon Beelzebub (Shelley Conn) following the events of the first season, when Heaven and Hell had to cal off the first apocalypse thanks to Crowley and Aziraphale’s meddling. As a result of the love that blossomed between Gabriel and Beelzebub, they both decided they did not want to pursue a second apocalypse, and when Gabriel fought the idea in Heaven, the other angels were going to wipe his memory and reduce his angelic status. Before they can do that, he slips off to temporarily erase his memory himself and stows it away where he can find it again (in a “storage” fly, given to him by Beelzebub), with the plan being he will make it to Beelzebub and she will restore it and they will get to be together.

When all is figured out, and Gabriel’s memory is returned, he and Beelzebub decide to run off together, abandoning their posts in Heaven and Hell and leaving their subordinates to bicker about who will take over.

While Aziraphale is being offered Gabriel’s job by angelic authority The Metatron (Derek Jacobi), Crowley is getting a talking to from Maggie (Maggie Service) and Nina (Nina Sosanya), two nearby shopkeepers whom Crowley and Aziraphale have been trying to set up throughout the whole season. After witnessing the whole Gabriel-Beelzebub love story, which was really quite romantic, Maggie and Nina tell Crowley to stop ignoring the underlying romantic feelings between himself and Aziraphale.

As Crowley is about to do just that and confess his deep affection for Aziraphale — and for him and Aziraphale to be an “us,” and go away together — Aziraphale tells Crowley he wants to accept the job running Heaven and bring Crowley up (reinstating him as the angel he was long ago, before he was a demon) to join him.

Crowley, appalled that Aziraphale would want anything to do with Heaven anymore after all the torture they’ve seen (and have been through themselves) at Heaven and Hell’s armageddon-obsessed hands, interrupts to tell Aziraphale how he feels about him. Though Aziraphale is noticeably touched, he is also very apprehensive about renouncing Heaven, and insists he wants to go back — and he wants Crowley to come, so they can be together up there instead.

With the angel choosing Heaven over the demon, Crowley, broken-hearted, kisses Aziraphale for the first time ever, in an attempt to sway him. Aziraphale is clearly flustered by the experience, and tells Crowley, “I forgive you,” before they go their separate ways.

Currently, there is no word on whether Gaiman and Amazon have plans for a third season of “Good Omens,” meaning that if this is the end of the series, the story concludes with Crowley driving away in sadness, and Aziraphale going back up to Heaven to lead what The Metatron called the “Second Coming.”

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Reinaldo Massengill

Update: 2024-01-09

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