15.5.2026 ~ Good Omens 3 Review [SPOILERS]
First things first, fuck Neil Gaiman. I say that in full awareness that the clip of me and my friends reacting to his show is my most popular video by far… partially due to Neil personally endorsing it over on Mastodon (which I delighted in at the time but feel uncomfortable about now). The case against him was only shut down on a geographical technicality; that does not disprove the allegations (also ACAB includes Kiwi cops, by the way). I watched the sole feature-length episode of S3 for the sake of the cast, crew and the late Sir Terry Pratchett and his family. This show has held a fond place in my heart since early 2020 so I wanted to get closure, especially after that heartbreaking Season 2 finale.
Needless to say, the production of Season 3 was complicated by the controversies surrounding Neil, which is definitely apparent in the final product. There are many narrative loose ends, missed opportunities and glaringly absent characters (especially most of the humans) that weren’t able to be resolved in the limited runtime. The CGI and editing are less polished, and the rushed pacing makes the overall episode feel anticlimactic and underwhelming. I don’t blame the cast or crew for doing their best with what little time and resources they were given; I wish they didn’t have to “Owl House” it, but at least we did get a final season and I can’t thank them enough for the tremendous effort.
The first 20 minutes or so felt a bit slow and weak, with the comedy not quite landing for me and the immediate, unceremonious disappearance of the Metatron feeling so random and bathetic, especially after Season 2 set him up to be a bigger player in the finale. This episode suffers from not having such a strong antagonist running the show. It’s pretty clear that Azi is using his new job to distract himself from what happened between him and Crowley last season, but I do wish we got more time for that to manifest externally, to see him get increasingly overwhelmed by his suppressed, conflicted feelings and be subjected to manipulation and coercion from Michael, the Metatron and/or God herself.
He and Crowley always read to me as an analogy of two people at different stages of living in a cult or other abusive situation. Crowley is the black sheep who has already experienced the painful journey of escaping the abuse and having to redefine himself apart from it. Conversely, Azi is only just starting to realise the true extent of the abuse and is afraid to leave it, finding comfort in the familiarity and naively believing it can be fixed from within. It’s a shame that while Crowley’s recovery from the “cult” of Heaven and Hell got so much screentime and development, Azi isn’t really given the chance to fully accept the abuse he’s been subjected to, or unlearn the angelic conditioning he’s internalised, or to take meaningful steps to true freedom. The scenes of Crowley wallowing in the depths of drunken heartbreak were a slog to get through. Again, the comedy felt very forced and I couldn’t find it funny if I tried. In fact, I believe the gambling scenes should’ve been cut - they take precious time away from more important character and plot developments, they could’ve just had Hell confiscate the Bentley like they did his powers.
Of course, once the pair reunite the plot starts rolling and the episode finds its footing. From Crowley showing fascination in Azi’s crossword skills to Azi still referring to the Bentley as “our car”, all while their interactions remain awkward and standoffish, David Tennant and Michael Sheen so effectively convey that while there’s still unresolved conflict from the fallout of last season, Crowley and Azi simply can’t help loving each other as they always have. The walls of reservation slowly crumble away as the duo fall back into their usual shenanigans throughout the episode. I wish we’d had more time for them to directly confront the root of their tension, and to acknowledge the kiss. Jumping forward for a moment, I’m not as upset as other fans about Crowley and Azi not directly kissing again. Azi always felt asexual to me, so their sweet little finger kiss during the ending was fine to me. In saying that, in retrospect I do wish their one onscreen kiss hadn’t been a non-consensual act done out of sheer desperation on Crowley’s part. There is a different kind of missed opportunity regarding physical intimacy that I’ll discuss later.
Jesus is nice, and the moment between him and the transfem character from Season 2 was sweet and somewhat cathartic as a queer person who grew up around a lot of anti-queer Christian rhetorics. His bonding with Harry the Fish was pretty wholesome too. Unfortunately, he’s very under-utilised due to his intended role in the Second Coming being superseded by other conflicts. His character ends up feeling obligatory and ultimately superfluous, again taking up time that could’ve been better spent elsewhere. Speaking of the Second Coming, it basically amounted to empty hype with little-to-no payoff. The other angels just begrudgingly accept Azi’s authority and peaceful modifications to the plan, except Michael who has a mental breakdown after millennia of unappreciated work and somehow manages to steal the Book of Life (seriously, I don’t think it’s even explained HOW they did it…?) and uses it to erase the entire universe.
Michael’s role as this episode’s twist villain annoyed me so much. Why did Michael have to steal the Book of Life in order to get the apocalyptic ending they wanted? Almost none of the angels like or respect Azi and his pacifistic ways, why not have Michael conspire with the others to attempt mutiny so they can herald in the Second Coming themselves? I understand that production constraints probably meant the crew didn’t have the means to deliver on an all-out cosmic war, but they could’ve had the protagonists find a way to avert it so that they could avoid that issue (I’ll be talking about God in a second). The addition of new, less developed sources of tension and conflict at the last minute robs the finale of narrative focus, clarity, pacing, and cohesion with the rest of the series.
This episode suffers from not delivering on what the series has been setting up. The Metatron as an imposing antagonist with an insidious motivation behind coaxing Azi away from Crowley? He’s killed off within 10 minutes. The Second Coming? Azi immediately nerfs it with little-to-no pushback from the brutal, deeply-entrenched system of blood and power-hungry entities. Crowley potentially having been a higher-ranking angel than he lets on? Nothing about his backstory is elaborated on other than one more flashback emphasising him and Azi’s forbidden friendship. Hell, not even Satan’s cameo offers any further insights into Crowley’s descent.
Which brings us to the ending. Crowley and Azi manage to escape the erasure of the universe by saving Whickber Street’s page in the Book of Life and teleporting into the bookshop. There they encounter God and Satan, and before the former can destroy what remains of the universe, the duo confront her on why she punishes her creations (especially humans) for the way she chose to create them. Having a fondness for the pair, she offers to grant them one request. After some private discussion (with some very good acting), they choose for her to create another universe with no higher forces. Despite Satan’s bafflement, God agrees and the universe, including the four characters, disintegrates before being “reborn” with The Big Bang. 13.8 billion years later two men, who are seemingly human reincarnations of Crowley and Azi, meet in a bookshop and start a relationship. We see them dine in a pub surrounded by reincarnations of many of the other characters, before timeskipping to them, older and now married, stargazing while a nightingale sings.
After much consideration, I don’t think I like its ending at all. The overall episode didn’t leave any outstanding impressions on me, but I can be lenient about most of it because those feelings are largely due to the troubled production which obviously couldn’t be helped. What I can’t excuse is the encounter with God and its fateful outcome. Crowley and Azi seemingly don’t consider putting the universe back the way it was, even after God explicitly offered to do so. They have always been on the side of humanity. The whole show has been about how people brought them together and made them better beings throughout the millennia. Against all odds, they always fought to protect Earth and found ways to ensure its continued survival. So why would they suddenly decide to accept the arbitrary destruction of the current universe which they had vehemently resisted up to this point? Yes, humanity will live again in the new universe, but they had the power to ensure the resumed existence of their established friends and allies… and just didn’t? They were content to just take God’s word that the universe would be reborn after they all died, despite having every reason not to trust her?
The finale recognises what the series has said all along, that the divine system is fundamentally rigged and rotten, but decides to chuck the baby out with the (holy) bath water. Even after teasing the power to enact systemic changes the protagonists otherwise couldn’t, it fatalistically pretends like the destruction of the universe was inevitable, and has Crowley and Azi ultimately choose to uncharacteristically accept that fate. It doesn’t matter that they ensured renewed life in the distant future, they still accepted the avoidable loss of all life in the present. As far as their universe is concerned, they served the same purpose as God, Satan and Michael in the end. The character arcs of Adam from Season 1 and Gabriel and Beelzebub from Season 2, all about breaking away from divine conditioning to take control of their own lives and stick it to the system, are retroactively rendered exercises in futility. None of the characters were ever truly freed from the system. It’s an extremely bleak outcome that contradicts everything Good Omens stood for (ie holding onto hope, love and free will despite facing ineffable adversity).
Not to mention, the reborn universe opens up a whole can of worms when it comes to lore and worldbuilding - with no divine or supernatural forces at play, how did this version Earth evolve so similarly to the previous one? It just feels very uninspired and disinterested, and through showing no discernible changes in the wake of divinity’s non-existence, it unintentionally trivialises the existence of divine beings in the first place. As this rate, the distinction between restoring the current universe and making a whole new one seems negligible, and the writers may as well have not made it.
Why couldn’t Crowley and Azi just ask God to bring back the CURRENT universe but with no further divine intervention? Taking that idea further, maybe they could’ve stipulated that all divine enitities be turned into humans themselves, living on another habitable planet far away from Earth. That way, Crowley and Azi still make a noble sacrifice for the greater good while also dismantling the divine system that has oppressed them and the humans, saving Earth at the cost of never being able to return due to having to help their brethren adapt to life as mortals. Likewise, God and Satan as well as the angels and demons get to live with the consequences of their actions, being put in the position of the humans they exploited and being given the opportunty to finally learn and grow from their transgressions through their newfound empathy and appreciation of the mundanities of mortal life. It wouldn’t be a perfect transition and there would always be conflicts to manage, but at least in this scenario the plot doesn’t have the protagonists validate mass extinction on the whim of a burnt-out angel and a bored God.
As wholesome as the human reincarnations were, it felt like a really toothless way of giving this story a happy ending in spite of the contrived death of the characters we actually cared about. These humans aren’t the demon and angel we know and love. I have almost no investment in their romance other than their resemblance to the pair that did have development behind them. These facsimiles are only there as a consolation prize for the audience; it fails even at that, because despite being an explicitly romantic couple who get married and live a long, happy life together, they never kiss onscreen. This was such a missed opportunity to at least superficially balance out the dubious nature of Crowley and Azi’s Season 2 kiss, and show us healthy physical intimacy between two older male characters. The writers just wanted to have their cake and eat it too: force a sad, subversive outcome, but then immediately try to backpedal the impact by insinuating that some vague approximation of them got to be happy together in the end.
Crowley and Azi never got to love each other in peace, and these last few minutes can never pretend otherwise or make up for that. As a queer person, this ending fucking hurts. People like me saw ourselves in them, these two masc-presenting entities enduring the systemic vilification of their alternative lifestyle and relationship with each other. To end their story by having them resign themselves to the system and ultimately succumb to it sends an atrocious message, especially with the ongoing rise of anti-queerness and overall fascism in the last decade which threatens to lead us to environmental and societal collapse. Should we all just give up and die, and cross our fingers that the ones that doomed us will suddenly remember to honour their promises and magically make a better world on top of our corpses? This finale seems to think so, and retroactively Good Omens as a whole thinks so too.
As much as I appreciate the hard work of everyone involved in this show (except Neil, fuck him), I can’t recommend Season 3 to anyone who is deeply invested in this story and values its narrative integrity. Just watch Season 1, maybe some scene compilations from Season 2 and 3 as well as fanworks if you’re really craving more. And remember, doing what is necessary to avoid lining the pockets of cunts like Jeff Bezos and Neil Gaiman is always valid!