This post contains major spoilers for Good Omens 3. If you’re an omnipotent deity, that doesn’t matter, but everyone who wants to avoid them can check out our pre-finale coverage instead.
Good Omens‘ season two finale featured a kiss six thousand years in the making. Only, that celestial smooch didn’t result in Aziraphale and Crowley being together. The affable angel instead accepted Heaven’s offer to execute its Great Plan. A disappointed and frustrated Crowley stayed behind on Earth, but as he drove away, we knew something he didn’t: their story wasn’t over just yet. So, how did their relationship end in the series finale, Good Omens 3? The angel Aziraphale and the demon Crowley technically didn’t end up together. They got an even happier ending.
Despite Aziraphale’s best efforts and very detailed plans, the Second Coming was a disaster. Heaven lost Jesus after someone stole the Book of Life and erased the Metatron. He was only the first high-ranking angel wiped from existence, as it turned out the Archangel Michael was sabotaging all of existence. By the time Crowley and Aziraphale found Michael burning everything that ever existed, page by page, with the Eternal Flame, it was too late. Crowley only managed to save the sheet for the A. Z. FELL & Co. bookshop on Whickber Street in London’s Soho.
For a brief moment, it seemed as though they—and they alone—got their happy ending. It just came at the expense of literally everyone else. That bookshop and the two celestial beings in it were seemingly the entirety of existence and would be forever. With everyone, everything, and every part of the universe gone as though none of it had ever existed, Crowley and Aziraphale seemed poised to be truly together. Not bad…until the angel realized his beloved books were all empty since no writers had ever existed to write them.
Then things got even weirder: Satan (played by the always great Toby Jones!) showed up. It wasn’t clear how or why Satan had survived Michael’s universal destruction. There was only one explanation, which Crowley and Aziraphale realized when they started writing their own, new Book of Existence. That’s when God showed up.
After some intense back and forth about existence, free will, why God created people and then punished them for being people, how this was the end of the “story,” and some frustrating answers to major questions, God gave Crowley and Aziraphale a chance to make a massive decision. They could decide to bring back the universe or to let God end the story. After talking it over, they told Her what they really wanted: a chance for people to have true free will. They wanted God to make a new universe, but this time without angels, demons, the Devil, or even God. They wanted a universe without a Heaven or Hell.
That would mean a universe without them. Worse, really. It would mean a universe where they had never existed. All their adventures, efforts, and that kiss would have never happened. But the best and second best angels to ever exist made that sacrifice anyway. They had spent six thousand years protecting people when no one else would. They would end their story the same way. Once the Lord accepted their decision, the two vanished into nothingness. God began a new Godless universe with another Big Bang. Humans were now entirely on their own, free of both interference, influence, and cruel indifference from any supernatural creature.
They weren’t entirely free of the two angels who gave them that gift, though. In the Godless universe, we saw that, 13.8 billion years later, Aziraphale, Crowley, Jesus, Muriel, Dagon, and every other celestial being still got a chance to exist. Only this time they were all entirely human. In that universe, book store employee Asa Fell and astrophysics author and professor Anthony Crowley met, fell in love, got married, and lived happily ever after under the stars.
Unlike their angel and demon counterparts, their lives were imperceptible blips. They had a definitive start and finish amid a cosmos that would one day end like all stories do. And it was everything Aziraphale and Crowley ever wanted or needed because they, finally, got to exist not for God or Satan or anyone else. They got to live with and for each other.
Mikey Walsh is a staff writer at Nerdist. He did not support the destruction of the universe by his fellow Michael on Good Omens 3….but he understood it. You can follow him on Bluesky at @burgermike. And also anywhere someone is ranking the Targaryen kings.