Good Omens Season 3 Delivers An Abridged, But Satisfying, Ending
97 minutes of goodbye.
If there’s anything that the last few months of genre TV have taught us, it’s that endings are hard. Stranger Things’ confusing final episode sparked a conspiracy theory, while The Boys’ final season is causing discourse with each ongoing episode. But at least it has episodes.
It’s a blessing that Good Omens Season 3 is happening at all. Mired in real-life controversy, creator Neil Gaiman stepped away from the project, and many fans were worried that the show would end after the heartbreaking confession and betrayal of the Season 2 finale. Thankfully, Aziraphale (Michael Sheen) and Crowley (David Tennant) live on, albeit in a shorter, feature-length special that tries its best to tell the story of the Second Coming but really just wraps up the story of these Ineffable Husbands. But let’s be honest — that’s all we really wanted anyway.
Good Omens 3 gives Crowley and Aziraphale the ending they were owed after the Season 2 finale.
Good Omens 3, as the final episode is still called, picks up a bit after Season 2, when Aziraphale left Crowley for a cushy job in heaven, leaving Crowley heartbroken back on Earth. Now, he’s sleeping in alleyways, while Aziraphale is “upstairs,” running Operation Second Coming like the Navy. Unfortunately, he’s a bit over ambitious, and things run amok when one by one, crucial elements of the plan start disappearing: the Megatron (Derek Jacobi), the Book of Life, and finally, Jesus himself (a perfectly-cast Bilal Hasna).
Jesus ventures down to Earth, looking for that red-haired, strange-eyed angel who showed him all the cities: Crowley. He finds him, heavily inebriated, and he sets on a strange quest that brings him among the people of Earth. This time, instead of feeding the masses with loaves and fishes, he feeds them with day-old pizza.
Unfortunately, that’s the only really terrestrial storyline in the episode. The rest is all a political thriller between Heaven and Hell (mostly Heaven), and it can sometimes get caught up in its own breakneck pace. It feels wrong to blame the season’s problems on the format, but in every chapter of this final adventure, it’s difficult to ignore the scene-long premises that would make for great episode-length subplots, or the characters who deserve more screentime than what they get. When Aziraphale challenges a crime boss to a cryptic crossword competition, or Jesus tries to relate to people with fish-related parables, the glimpses of potential shine through, and it’s more frustrating than anything.
Jesus (Bilal Hasna) makes for a great addition to Good Omens 3, but he had the potential to be so much more.
The plot is rapid-fire, but it eventually gets where it needs to be, with a series of tough conversations and plenty of discussions about the nature of humans and good and evil. Aziraphale and Crowley have always been both too good to be demons and too worldly to be angels, and in this season especially, that balance is crucial.
But this episode is here for one reason and one reason alone: to give this show an ending. Without going into detail, there is definitely an ending, and it’ll definitely do the fandom justice — it’s the most fanfiction ending of a show I have ever seen, and that is one of the biggest compliments I can give. It’s the ending that this show, and this fandom, deserves, and even if it’ll go down in history with an asterisk at the end, it still could be one of the better series finales of recent years.
Reviewing a project like this is difficult because, as much as I want there to be a full season of this story, the controversy surrounding Gaiman rendered that impossible. But these characters shouldn’t suffer because of the sins of their creator; they deserved their happy — or, at the very least, final — ending. Much has had to be jettisoned to get here, but it’s worth the journey.
