The Good Omens Season 2 Finale Is a Test of Faith

Being a television critic can be rough sometimes. Often, we’re asked to pass judgment on things we haven’t seen in their entirety, that are unfinished or otherwise in a state of flux. Usually, it works out, universal themes and arcs being what they are.  But every so often, there’s a show like Good Omens, whose second season finale wasn’t screened for critics and is such a gut punch it makes you kind of want to reevaluate every word you have ever written about the medium. 

Did I get this wrong? (You ask yourself.) What is happening? (You wail.)  How is this possible? (You shout into a pillow) 

This is a lot to say that after five episodes of gentle, heartwarming, and downright romantic fluff, the angst hammer lands hard in the Good Omens Season 2 finale, an episode in which prim angel Aziraphale (Michael Sheen) accidentally starts a war with Hell, the Metraton (Derek Jacobi) offers him Gabriel’s (Jon Hamm) job, and Crowley (David Tennant) refuses an offer to return to the Heaven he was cast out of so long ago. The hour, most devastatingly, also sees our favorite co-dependent eternal life partners go their separate ways in the episode’s final moments. Aziraphale chooses to return to Heaven, and Crowley drives off in his Bentley alone. “Our side” is apparently no more and a desperate, long-awaited kiss turns into a painful farewell. The sense of perfect possibility that closed Season 1 is almost entirely absent, and basically everyone ends up in tears. 

Did this show just break my heart? (You wonder, staring into the void.)

Yes and no. Perhaps it’s the fact that this show has such an overtly religious premise that makes me want to analyze it in a framework that includes a metric ton of Bible quotes, but I’m in it now, so here goes. Before anyone—including me—loses their mind over the fact that the season concludes on what is undoubtedly a heartbreaking note: Be not afraid. My review of the first five episodes ended with that admonishment, and now having seen the finale, I still feel that way. Despite, and perhaps even more so because of, everything that’s in it. 

After all, Neil Gaiman wrote this, the same man who has spent the better part of the last thirty years repeatedly telling all and sundry that Good Omens is, above all things, a love story. A love story of many themes and parts, to be sure, but even if I weren’t a person of faith, I would have a hard time believing that God as Gaiman and his writing partner Terry Pratchett once envisioned Her signed off on an ending where the story’s main characters end up miserable and alone. It’d be a pretty crappy ineffable plan, not to mention it would also break every rule of romantic storytelling to boot. (And this is a show that loves its rom-com tropes.) 

True, the finale is a wild swerve from the soft domestic vibes that color the episodes before it, as Crowley finally (mostly!) confesses his feelings to his angel BFF—just in time for everything to fall apart in response and the pair to separate seemingly forever. But it does track with a Season 2 envisioned as something of a larger journey for Aziraphale, who fails to find the nerve to make the choice he so clearly wants to make—insert your own joke about “You go too fast for me, Crowley” here—and puts himself back in the very box he has spent the entire series to date proving no longer fits him. Sheen, potentially a literal angel in human form, manages to convey what feels like every possible human emotion on his face all at once as Aziraphale realizes what he both had and lost, and if there were any justice, some awards committee somewhere would get over their bias against fantasy programming and reward him for it. 

Granted, since a Season 3 hasn’t exactly been announced, you could choose to believe that this is a wild, out-of-left-field swing that will come back to bite everyone involved should disaster strike and the series end forever here. (We should really all be side-eying Prime Video for just not announcing a third season alongside this drop for the good of humanity’s blood pressure.) But it’s glaringly apparent that this story is unfinished, and this finale is meant to serve as a celestial pause rather than a final period. And we’re just going to have to take that on faith. 

Sort of.

Hebrews describes the concept of faith as the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen. Here, in what is ostensibly Aziraphale and Crowley’s darkest hour, faith is really a series of signposts, an unspoken promise that things will (eventually) come right in the end. (Though I doubt either of them would see it as such in the moment.) Beelzebub and Gabriel get their happy ending, proving an angel and a lord of Hell can find their way together. A post-breakup Nina realizes she isn’t in a fit state to act on anything romantic with Maggie, no matter how much she might like to, and hopes the other woman will still be there when she is. Nothing is impossible, but impossible things are not necessarily easy. And faith is a promise, but one that comes in God’s own time. 

After all, Scripture is full of struggle, of stories in which humanity falls, makes mistakes, and chooses the wrong path.  In which we are tested, again and again, no matter how good we might be or how hard we try to become so. (It’s not an accident that the big Biblical flashback of Good Omens Season 2 is about Job, God’s favorite who lost everything before being ultimately rewarded with divine revelation.) But we are never really alone, and we are never truly lost, and the darkest hour always comes just before the dawn.  After all, as the Psalm says, weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning. Have a little faith, kids. 

Good Omens Season 2 is now streaming on Prime Video.

Lacy Baugher Milas is the Books Editor at Paste Magazine, but loves nerding out about all sorts of pop culture. You can find her on Twitter @LacyMB.

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