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fuckyeahgoodomens · 2 months

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Peter Anderson: Hi, my name is Peter Anderson. I'm from Peter Anderson Studio and we created the title sequence to Good Omens Season Two. So this scene is quite literally a continuation from Season One.

An interesting detail with this scene is the fly. The fly is significant because it stores Gabriel's memory.

Gabriel is hidden in every scene. This is the first time we see it.

This goat is half bird, half goat, representing a mistake in a moment of transformation.

In the pickled herring barrel, we have literally red herrings sticking out.

A lot of the gravestones have hidden engravings, easter eggs, all written by Neil.

[This one says: HERE LIES THE FORMER SHELL OF BEELZEBUB referncing Beelzebub having a new face in S2 :), another ones are: EVERYDAY, JANE AUSTEN, Here lies ADAM (the Adam from Adam and Eve is meant)]

Another hidden Gabriel.

Our same character that was trying to escape Hell in Season One titles is also trying to escape here, moving in the opposite direction to the rest of the procession. Except this time he's apprehended and dragged back into the procession.

Our Hell spider from episode four makes a little appearance in the background here.

Can you tell where the bus is going? Director Douglas McKinnon selected Powell and Pressburger's Stairway to Heaven to put on the billboard.

Another thing to note here is the type is all handmade specifically for Good Omens. The Alphabet only exists within the show.

The big floating turnip is a nod to Azirafel's magic tricks.

The Ladies of Camelot poster we pulled from the show.

We added plaques to the back of the chairs and Neil chose who to honour.

[There are: A TALE OF TWO CITIES by CHARLES DICKENS, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE by JANE AUSTEN, THE CROW ROAD by IAIN BANKS (twice!) and GOOD OMENS by TERRY PRATCHETT (Neil missing for some reason :) <3)]

Saraqael made an appearance from Heaven.

Our Space is back from Season One. Aziraphale and Crowley are having a little dance here. A moment of flirtation. There's a tiny planet in the middle that comes into existence at this moment.

Our Scottish tartan hills make an appearance here.

The aeroplane and the airline is a little bit of a clue here.

[THY KINGDOM AIRWAYS 👀]

It's raining love hearts in reference to Aziraphale's attempt at making Maggie and Nina fall in love.

Here are elevators to Heaven and Hell. A wee thing to spot. Here is Gabriel in the lift arriving from Heaven.

We've updated our flags to reference some of the plotlines in Season Two. For example, The Second Coming.

The movie poster artwork changes every week, representing the episode plotlines and the minisodes. We made the posters to look like the time period and in this case we've got a Good Omens version of Buddy Holly.

[The posters are:]

In the snack bar some of our popcorn is actually communion wafers.

There are specific characters from Season One in the boxes watching the movie as the procession goes by. This includes some of our original concept art from Season One.

The duck playing the accordion is from a newspaper headline that someone is reading in The Dirty Donkey from one of the episodes.

[this is also from the Good Omens book :): "Daily Mail. 'Letter From America.' Um, August the third," said Newt. "Just after the story about the woman in Worms, Nebraska, who taught her duck to play the accordion."]

Each episode is showing a new movie on the screen, each one selected by Douglas, and has clues about what's to come.

The season one phone box tumbles in the background.

The big mountain is made of all the ingredients from Season Two and a couple of remnants from Season One. We are heading towards the biggest Easter Egg, which is the lift. We're heading towards the Second Coming..

#good omens #perer anderson #peter anderson studio #bts #opening title #s2 opening title #fun fact #second coming #kingdom thy airways #duck playing accordion #videos #bts videos #easter eggs

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inhonoredglory · 7 months

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Good Omens Season 3: Heaven and Hell dividing humanity; humanity as Leviathan; and Aziraphale locking the doors of Heaven and throwing away the key [A Meta]

(This meta is long, but I swear there's some good stuff in here. It took me 2 months to get it together for these two longsuffering Anons. Thank you so much for asking me these very important questions.)

In preparation for answering two Asks above (and to aid my own predictions of Good Omens 3), I read and reviewed the Book of Revelation, W.B. Yeat’s iconic poem “The Second Coming,” Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods, Neil Gaiman’s deleted scene from American Gods (Shadow meeting Jesus in America), and Doctor Who showrunner Russell T Davies’ 2003 miniseries The Second Coming (starring Christopher Eccleston!). The first two are definitely going to be referenced in season 3, Davies’ show is one of the few stories dealing head-on with the coming of Christ, and Terry and Neil’s bibliographies are probably the biggest resources for how Season 3 will shake out thematically.

🕊 How Aziraphale Will Change Heaven

I think GO s3 is the season we see Aziraphale really come into his own, when we see him implement the moral vision he’s taken this long to coalesce, when all the pieces he and Crowley have put together are finally put on stage in a terrifying, beautiful display (all that righteous anger and conviction, merged with his kindness and empathy is going to be Something Else).

There’s an angel in the Book of Revelation who stands between the Earth and the Sea. This angel wears a rainbow halo and speaks with the voice of seven thunders, and yet John (the writer of Revelation) is told not to write down what this angel speaks. (Sounds like someone has hit on the Ineffable Plan?) If Neil and Terry were going to pick up an image from Revelation for Aziraphale, I really like this one, because it feels like an intermediary role (between two Sides), one that god dare not make public because it speaks an uncomfortable truth. And it’s about speaking and revealing knowledge, instead of fighting or destroying something.

Because even though we know Azi and Crowley will fight to stop the second End Times, fighting itself is not a theme Neil Gaiman or Terry Pratchett really champion. Instead of war, Aziraphale will oppose Heaven in all the little ways he and Crowley opposed it before: By enjoying human comforts (Azi will definitely bring food and trinkets to Heaven and send scrivener angels and seraphim alike to tour earth). By asking questions (Heaven’s new suggestion box). By telling stories about humanity and why it’s important to know who these humans are before anyone kills anybody (Azi was, after all, brought on board because of his human expertise).

Aziraphale will become what Crowley wanted to be before the Fall, but Azi’s got the benefit of thousands of years of knowledge, cunning, and intelligence about how both Heaven and humanity work. He knows Heaven’s weaknesses, he knows humanity’s strengths, he knows his own capabilities, and he knows where Heaven will turn a blind eye. He’s going to be such a bastard the likes of which we’ve never seen. And he’s going to drop truth bombs like there’s no tomorrow.

Season 2 brought back the book banter about “the lower you start, the more opportunities you have.”

Season 3 will bring back Aziraphale’s most badass book moment. This scene takes place after Azi possesses an American televangelist talking about the fire and brimstone of the End Times and the Rapture (the mass teleporting of all worthy believers to Heaven). Says Aziraphale,

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Aziraphale is fed up with Heaven’s hypocrisy and he's scathing in his condemnation of both Heaven and Hell. Everyone will die and become collateral damage, no matter which side is doing the killing.

Sound familiar?

That's the arc Aziraphale is heading towards: that blazing conviction of Crowley's, spoken out loud and fearless and in spite of his eons of trauma. And Season 3 will see Aziraphale get to that place, where he gets to tell off Heaven, but not just in the privacy of the bookshop or the bandstand, but to their faces in Heaven's hallowed halls.

The demons and angels in Season 2 were much less icky and ethereal (respectively) from their appearances in Season 1. Because it's working towards a further humanization of both sides in Season 3. Because one of the biggest themes in s3 will be Aziraphale humanizing Heaven in all the little quaint ways he loves humanity. All in preparation for the endgame of Heaven and Hell not existing at all.

(Season 3 deep dive continues under the cut...)

Because angels and demons won’t be fought, but changed. Maybe not by much, but just enough to break the loyalty they have to a Great Plan no one understands. This is how both Neil’s American Gods and Terry’s Small Gods conclude, with the build-up to an incredible battle, and then for the human hero to step in and talk down the gods and armies into seeing sense and reason.

I don’t think Aziraphale himself will be that person. It might be a very human Jesus. Or (more likely) a random human being caught up in this craziness (maybe someone in Tadfield, per the working title of the second GO book: 668: The Neighbor of the Beast). But Aziraphale will be fundamental in changing the atmosphere of Heaven in the little ways Earth changed him.

🗝 Season 3 Themes: Morality and God

In the Job minisode, Aziraphale casually but boldly assumed that god didn’t want the goats and children to be killed. Because Aziraphale has a firm and dogged idea about what god should be. It’s his own personal morality, but he calls it god’s because he doesn’t want to imagine the symbol of ultimate goodness being anything other than what he Aziraphale himself feels to be true.

And I don’t think that’s a theme that Good Omens will deny for Aziraphale. Because it’s not really about how evil or good god is. It doesn’t matter what god thinks or is. god doesn’t answer questions, doesn’t deliver messages we can understand, doesn’t show up when needed. god is inscrutable, shifty, absent, “a Dealer who won’t tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.”

What’s important is what humanity has done with god, what humanity has said about god, what they do in god’s name, what they interpret god to be. That’s the real danger.

And Aziraphale, in his profound goodness, will become the person he wants god to be. Because that’s the injunction we all have. To live up to the ideal we have made for ourselves: In many ways, that’s what god is.

Aziraphale is now in a privileged place that allows him to affect basically the entirety of Creation with that driving idealism. He will level the playing field in Heaven. I firmly believe Aziraphale will be the one to close the doors to the pearly gates and throw away the key.

So, like you asked Anon, will Aziraphale try to make Heaven better or stop the Second Coming? I think those are the same goal. Changing Heaven will fundamentally change how the Second Coming happens, because just like the End Times in Season 1, Heaven and Hell’s scheme will be turned on its head because the Chosen One refuses to follow the script.

The Second Coming will end, not with a bang, but a whimper, because everyone decides to turn in their guns and forget the whole thing.

⚔️ Heaven and Hell v. Humanity

But before that ending happens, I think there will be another threat the world has to face: the individuals who are so sure of their own righteousness that no amount of sense could stop them from destroying anyone who thinks differently. This is an important theme in both Neil and Terry’s works (see Vorbis, the Exquisitor in Small Gods, who tortured unbelievers for the Church), and I believe it will show up in the new season.

There's never been a true war that wasn't fought between two sets of people who were certain they were in the right. The really dangerous people believe they are doing whatever they are doing solely and only because it is without question the right thing to do. And that is what makes them dangerous. –Neil Gaiman, American Gods

Because it’s humanity who takes Faith and shapes it into Religion. We are the ones who created the Heaven we see in GO: cold, unfeeling, strict, judgmental. And I think Season 3 is going to address this fundamental belief of both Neil and Terry: that humans are just so damnably human (fundamentally innocent and stupid and wonderful) and yet there’s a few of us who will take things too far and think that Someone wants them to destroy everything in the Name of God. And in these changing contemporary political times (the passage of an old generation, still clinging to their old ways and growing more extreme by the minute *cough*Trump*cough*), the dangerous people become even more vocal and violent, like the frightening, monstrous creature in WB Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming,” a devastating scourge on the world born in the name of God:

Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. […] A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, […] And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? –WB Yeats, "The Second Coming"

That’s who I think the Metatron will team up with in the end, someone like Vorbis. Because we’ve already seen how petty and small Heaven and Hell is, especially in Season 2. Only the Metatron really carries some heft and foreboding. I believe he’ll team up with some extremist faction of humanity who wants to see the End of Days and divide the world into Yours and Mine, with Heaven taking a portion and Hell taking a third and calling it a day. Not a War, but a divvying out of souls. With no consent or permission on the part of humanity.

That’s what I think the zombie reference is all about. Like Gabriel said in 2x03:

Yes, we’re going to get zombies. And it’s going to be insane and funny and horrifying (and I think we’ll get to know one or two historical figures who pop back up to earth). But the thematic and fundamental metaphor of zombies is how they have no free will. They’re not alive, they have no souls, they have no choices. That’s what Heaven and Hell want humanity to be: To do away with the dance of choice and free will and divide humanity once and for all between both sides. That’s how Heaven and Hell team up against the human race.

🐳 Leviathan (Job 41:19) as Humanity

And that’s how I believe the Leviathan fits in, who is the subject of the quote from Muriel’s matchbox:

The Leviathan is a magnificent creature, and this passage goes on and on about how fearsome this being is:

Who can penetrate its double coat of armor? Who dares open the doors of its mouth, ringed about with fearsome teeth?… Nothing on earth is its equal—a creature without fear. It looks down on all that are haughty; it is king over all that are proud –Job 41:13b, 33-34

And yet why does god want to explain how amazing the Leviathan is? To show how god has control of it. God says,

Can you pull in Leviathan with a fishhook… Can you make a pet of it like a bird or put it on a leash for the young women in your house?… Can you fill its hide with harpoons… No one is fierce enough to rouse it. Who then is able to stand against me? –Job 41:1, 5, 7, 10

The reasoning is that because god created this dangerous and terrifying being, then god must be even more dangerous and terrifying. And if god can so easily abuse and humiliate this beautiful monster, then god must be worshipped and respected. (Yes, it’s as messed-up as it sounds.)

I can’t help but think of this Leviathan as a metaphor for humanity. A beautiful, ferocious being whose ownership and control is the focus of god’s attention and qualification for worship? Of the Leviathan, Job says: “Will traders barter for it? Will they divide it up among the merchants?” (Job 41:6). That’s how humanity is going to be treated in Season 3.

Because both God and Satan want to control humanity. They want to put their thumb on human souls and claim them for each side. But humanity doesn’t have to be so easily fooled, because we are more powerful than we realize. Our hearts and imaginations can forge a path of purpose and goodness without the entrapment of organized religion and fundamentalism. We, like Leviathan, are ferocious and angry and fed up with being treated like this. We can and will fight back.

🌟 Becoming Gods

Ultimately, we will shuffle off the need for Heaven and Hell (symbolized by the shutting down of both at the end of Season 3). We will lose the need to unquestionably defer to a Being who plays dice with our lives. I’m reminded of the opening passage to Terry’s Small Gods:

The lowly tortoise will learn to be the eagle; humanity will learn to be like god. Because we are as powerful as god, since we created god. Adam Young pointed out that having a god figure to solve all our problems doesn’t make humanity any more responsible for the evil things we’ve done. We need to learn that we are all we’ve got, and we have to answer for the shit we’ve done to each other and to the world.

I like how Russell T Davies put it in his show The Second Coming, where Jesus comes down again in the body of ordinary human Steven Baxter and tells humanity:

You are becoming gods. There's a new master of creation, and it's you! Unraveled DNA, and at the same time you're cultivating bacteria strong enough to kill every living thing! Do you think you are ready for that much power? You lot? You lot? Cheeky bastards. You're running around science like kids with guns, creating a new world, while the world you've got is stinking…. If you want the position of god then take the responsibility. –Russell T Davies, The Second Coming

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I legitimately think that’s how Jesus in Good Omens 3 will come down. In the body of a regular 30-something off-the-streets guy, who thinks the pomp and circumstance made about him is insane. And Aziraphale will be his minder, trying to tell him how the whole scheme is supposed to play out and giving him wise asides on how warped Heaven’s standards are and trying to tell him how to go about changing things for the better. (Jesus will be terribly confused, meanwhile; he just wants to go out for a pint and get on with his human life, none of this god business.)

🐍 Crowley’s Growth

There will be some big things at play in Season 3. I think Aziraphale will change how Heaven operates and close Heaven for good. I think Aziraphale will initially try to get Jesus on board with Azi’s own private mission of Goodness. I actually think Crowley will end up becoming Aziraphale’s “back channels” to Earth, and they’d exchange trite, bantering messages about the state of affairs from secret rendezvous points in America. (There was a whole thing about Jesus getting lost in Times Square, according to Neil Gaiman.)

I think Crowley will learn how to trust Aziraphale and learn that doing the right thing means being brave and selfless. He’ll realize that humanity is worth saving, even if it means dying. In fact, his depression at the start of Season 2 will probably only get worse after the loss of Aziraphale, and his altruism might get colored by the taint of suicidal recklessness, because he might as well go out for what he believes in, if what he wanted most in the world chose being selfless over being with him. (If Crowley’s character takes a suicidal turn like the Tenth Doctor after losing Rose, I’m gonna scream.)

This is how Aziraphale helps Crowley be brave in the finale of the Good Omens book. That’s what I think will happen in Good Omens 3:

Aziraphale here displays a gentleness and kindness that comes from a place of grounded knowledge and responsibility. He knows how much he and Crowley have in their own ways fucked up humanity too, and he knows that no matter what their own personal feelings, they each need to do something to defend the human species they've come to love so much.

Crowley is scared of risking everything to help save humanity, but with Aziraphale's encouragement and wisdom, he realizes that doing the right thing is the only option he can choose, no matter the risk to his own happiness and safety.

So I believe Crowley will learn to understand why Aziraphale chose to return to Heaven and fight in the trenches. Crowley will see it as a choice made to save, not just each other, but the world they love so much.

Ultimately, I think Crowley on earth will take on Aziraphale’s strongest qualities: being selfless and bold to protect humanity at costs, and connecting to humanity on a personal, individual level.

While Aziraphale in Heaven will become like Crowley: asking questions, sabotaging the System, and condemning Heaven with all the uncomfortable truths they need to hear.

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