#is Good Omens perfect? no. Do I love it with my whole heart forever? absofuckinglutely

[sitzfleischh]

Okay inspired by this post by @irispurpurea and this post by @ouidamforeman (both of which are excellent, please read) I wanted to add some thoughts about the structural weirdness of season 2.

The reason season 2 feels so structurally WEIRD is that it's the second beat what is now a three act story, but that wasn't written as one in the first place.

Season 1 was a complete, self-contained story arc with completed character development, based on a complete, self-contained novel. The story of Good Omens is about an angel and a demon going from opposite sides to their own side, aligned with earth and its humans. And at the end of season one this story has been told! It's done!

If you want to keep the story going, then, you have two options -- either you find a completely new story to tell with these characters, or you do what Neil Gaiman et al have chosen to do and you complicate and unresolve the conclusion from the first story in order to tell the same story but in an even bigger and more nuanced way.

The challenge of season two, then, is to reframe the events of season one not as a completed story but as the first act of a three-act arc.

And genuinely I think this is just not the way that most TV shows tasked with writing their second season go about doing it. Not that this is a bad choice! But the reason it feels weird on first glance is because it's taking its structure from like... half of the sequel to a novel, not a TV show that gets a second season.

This is the point of all of the historical flashbacks in season 2-- to make us understand that Crowley and Aziraphale are not on the same page and haven't been for 6000 years, despite appearing to be by the end of the first season.

The other thing I think season 2 does is make the whole story about Crowley and Aziraphale's relationship in a way it just wasn't in season 1. Taken on its own, season one's A-plot is the apocalypse, and the B-plot is relationship between this angel and demon.

What season two does then is literally FLIP the importance of those two things structurally. Season one's apocalypse and various side characters now occupy the same place as the Gabriel mystery in season 2. Which is also why it feels so weird to be like "wait this thing that felt like The Big Important Thing before is now suddenly the background of something else."

All this to say, this season is SO structurally interesting because it's just straight up not like other TV shows in structure, and because of the way everything now has to be marketed and framed in trailers as one, more typical kind of story, AND because the first season was a complete story that has now been reframed as an incomplete story, Good Omens season two feels very weird but imo much less weird upon rewatching, and will again feel less weird once we have season 3 and the story gets to complete its arc.

#good omens meta #good omens #good omens analysis #good omens s2 #anyway I have been THINKING THOUGHTS lately lmao #and the state of television right now is so fucked but also so interesting to me #if they told the exact same story but as a 12-episode second series instead of two 6-episode series #I think people would feel completely different about it -- myself included! #is Good Omens perfect? no. Do I love it with my whole heart forever? absofuckinglutely #my good omens meta #sitzfleischh.meta