Good Omens 3 was obviously, and in many ways frustratingly, condensed. But while this abridged farewell had storylines and characters that felt entirely shortchanged, it still featured everything I have always loved about the show. The finale made me emotional the way the series always has. It was funny, heartfelt, intelligent, honest, poignant, and hopeful. Good Omens 3 didn’t answer all my prayers, but it was a fulfilling and satisfying conclusion. Or at least I thought it was initially, because while the ending itself was beautiful and fitting, how it got there has ultimately left me cold.
Good Omens might feature angels and demons, but it has always, fundamentally, been a human story about what it means to be alive. The series, like the book it’s based on, has always acknowledged that life is hard at best. At worst, it is grossly unfair and sad. Terrible things happen to people all the time, often because of forces beyond our control. We exist in a world that doesn’t make sense and never will, seemingly alone in a universe far too big for our fragile minds to comprehend. The one guarantee we have in life is that we’re all going to die.
Bleak. And yet, that’s also why I also think Good Omens has always, in its own weird way, been the most pro-faith show on television. Everything that happens on Good Omens happens because a maddening, unknowable, omnipotent supreme being. She’s responsible for everything, including all the bad stuff. But she also saw fit to create two wonderful, caring creatures to keep an eye on us. This wonderful pair looks after us when no one else will so that we can experience the same thing they love most—living.
On Good Omens, we know for a fact there’s a God (who suddenly became very cold and uncaring in the finale). We will never have that kind of certainty. You might believe in a supreme deity, but you can’t prove they exist. That’s why we have the word “faith.” On Good Omens, no angel, demon, or human ever fully understood the Great Plan of existence and its inherent contradictions and absurdities, either. However, unlike the existential frustration of being a conscious being aware of their own mortality, on the show we also knew someone cared. It told us the universe is unknowable, life is unpredictable and awful terrible, some day you’re going to do die, and it’s all bloody awful… but someone out there in the universe does care about us.
In this story, the very best angels among us (who were also the most human) were sent to Earth, without even knowing the real reason why, to look after mankind.
Aziraphale and Crowley’s presence, their millennia old story, wasn’t about assuring us there’s a Heaven and Hell. Good Omens was never about convincing us there’s a God. It was about a single wonderful idea about existing: the universe knows we’re here and we matter.
You don’t have to be religious or even spiritual to see why that’s beautiful and hopeful. How you feel about the existence of God or church or anything doesn’t change the fact that you exist. And since this one precious life we all have is all we know we’ll ever have, it’s nice to think they will have mattered because for no other reason than the fact they happened.
Good Omens final sequence was so fitting because it embraced that. A show that was always really about this life and not a possible next one ended with a universe without God or Heaven and Hell. It gave mankind a chance to live and die entirely on its own. Humanity’s failures and successes would be entirely its own and not just a part of some supernatural being’s Great Plan. True free will, both good and bad.
How could I love the show and not love that ending? Because to get to that godless universe the previous didn’t just end, it was made to have never existed. I know its ultimately metaphysical nonsense, but I can accept the horribly sad truth that because of the Archangel Michael (and what God allowed to happen) that Mrs. Sandwich never got to reunite with her sister. What I can’t accept is that the wonderful moment when she learned her sister still loved her never happened. That Mrs. Sandwich never happened. That no one we loved ever existed.
When we lose someone we carry them with us. We hope those that love us will do the same when we’re gone, and that this will continue right up until none of us are left. How’s that different than what Good Omens 3 did? How’s it different when our universe is doomed to the same fate as the one created in the series finale? Because our universe, our lives, will have still have happened. They will have always happened. Who we were, what we did, who we cared about, our heartbreaks and moments of joy, our triumphs and regrets, will float on forever even when the universe gets dark and cold. Even when no one is around to remember us our memories will still exist in some form. We will have always existed.
A universe where this one short life is all we’re guaranteed to get I can accept. Same for a universe destined to die. But one that never existed at all? One that means our lives didn’t matter because they never happened? No.
It can feel like a difference so insignificant it’s almost meaningless, but Good Omens always understood why it means everything. Its final, beautiful scene understood that, too. I just wish we got that ending without making it so all those lives never even happened.
Mikey Walsh is a staff writer at Nerdist. He thinks your life matters and always will. Unless you root for the Montreal Canadiens. You can follow him on Bluesky at @burgermike. And also anywhere someone is ranking the Targaryen kings.