Good Omens 3 Amazon Prime, spoilers

[PartyQuestion30th]

Not sure anyone else still watching this but Good Omens 3, well that was confused, lacking in plot, rushed, but rather sweet. But after all the controversy I’m glad they finished it.

Omg - thought this had been cancelled!! Thanks for the tip off!!

Liked the first 2 series . But didn’t love them . Do like the David Tennant / Michael Sheen pairing . Will give it a go and see what I think . Thanks for the heads up . I do miss a lot of the series coming out, as so much on the various platforms . Have been known to start something , fall asleep and forget the next day / later in the week what I was watching !

I loved it! Lots of ends tied off and I cried buckets at the end.

I mildly enjoyed S1 and S2 but thought this one was great.
I liked the nod to TP towards the end.

The nod to Terry was great.

My daughter was so disappointed by the ending that she had to have a good old cry and some ice cream (hormonal, stressed and mid exams, so I don't think it was just about the ending...)

Have watched it now . Was good but not brillant . Got a bit confused by episode 1 - as expected more episodes . But it did tie things off and was a 90 minute episode .

A lot of people seem disappointed by the ending, I thought it was a good choice of how to end it. It may not have been an angel and a devil settling down, but it looked happy, and a bit of happiness is rather wonderful.

DD and I hated it, thought it had been cut so viciously it barely hung together. What was all the find the lady stuff about? Jesus had no real function in the plot. Really loathed the fact they made Crowley and Aziraphale human and wiped their memories. I kind of didn't see the point of compressing it anyway, they should have cancelled or done the full six episodes, Gaiman still got his name on it this way.

Have just watched it. I didn't know that it was only one episode.
But I thought it was really good!

I dint know what happens in the books so I didn't come into the show with an idea of the plot. Agree bits seems slightly disjointed because of the cutting.

Jesus gave Az a reason to have to come down to earth and reconnect with C otherwise how would they have come back together.

I found it a satisfying ending in the circumstances.

I enjoyed the (un-named) Monopoly and cryptic crosswords. That was very Pratchett.

I liked that Crowley had been protecting the shop all that time and Aziraphale's little speech about him to God at the end.

Jesus and his disciple were very well cast. Wasn't the function of Jesus (as well as being a MacGuffin to get everyone back to Soho) to make a point about free will so the discussion at the end has some kind of context?

I liked that DT spoke in his own accent in the final scenes and the camera lingering on his wedding ring.

I mean yes it was a bit (a lot) fan fic-y but that's what sells these days.

I would have liked to have seen some Glyndebourne tickets lying around in the house, but that is not what sells these days!

And Jesus doesn't do what he is told (none of them do, in fact).

I also liked the running joke that no-one has time to listen to rambling stories (parables), in a long running, rather rambling story.

They could have cut the Jesus character entirely though.

Aziraphale's big crisis could easily have been "The Book Of Life has been stolen and someone's using it to destroy the world" with a side order of "Someone's bumping off angels and I think I'm next in line". Either of those would have been enough to draw Crowley in, and would have served the same purpose of reuniting the characters.

Jesus managed to be completely and utterly extraneous. Even though the plot was meant to be about the Second Coming. I'm pretty sure he was supposed to be pitted against the Anti-Christ as part of all that, but Adam Young doesn't appear and isn't even mentioned. The plot just has Jesus wandering about learning card games, before poofing out of existence in the middle of a good vibes pizza party. It goes nowhere and accomplishes nothing.

But it surely should have been him and Adam working together to avert an outcome neither of them wants? It feels like that would have been the plot of any Pratchett-written Good Omens book.

I didn't hate the ending, but as a fan of the book, I think you've inadvertently captured why I can't love these Good Omens "sequels" either.

I enjoy the Crowley and Aziraphale relationship, and I don't mind it being made canon. Tennant and Sheen have great chemistry (as much as I think Tennant is a tit off screen) and I could happily watch a whole show of them playing off each other. The drawback is that this show is supposed to be Good Omens. And Good Omens wasn't Aziraphale and Crowley's story.

People think it was, because they're the POV characters for most of it, and they're on the cover. But if you actually read the book, they're more like side characters who have accidentally stumbled into something much bigger than them, and are just trying to keep afloat. They're not the heroes of the story. The heroes are Adam and Anathema. The point of the book isn't "An angel and a demon fall in love", it's "Human beings matter, actually, and it's wrong to treat them as chess pieces in some great cosmic game".

The show sort of nods at this idea, when Crowley makes his sacrifice for humanity, but it falls a bit flat, because the show itself treats humans as unimportant. The humans don't drive the plot, they don't advocate for themselves - they don't even accidentally complicate anything or save the day.

Compare it with Good Omens the novel, and it's night and day. In the novel, you've got Newt accidentally breaking everything electrical he touches, which ultimately shuts down nuclear armageddon. You've got Anathema and her prophecies - she knows what's coming and she's determined to stop it. You've got Sergeant Shadwell, who accidentally gets Newt where he needs to be, and Agnes Nutter who's pulling people's strings from hundreds of years beyond the grave, and you've got the nun who accidentally switched the babies and gave Adam to the wrong family, resulting in him growing up as a normal child. And Pepper and The Them, who ask Adam which bit of the world would be his after Armageddon, and prompt his crisis of identity. Humans matter in the book. But in this tv finale, we don't.

As I said, it's not that I hated it. But it doesn't feel like Good Omens. The ship just completely and utterly took over, and even the discussion of whether or not it was a good sequel is now all about how the love story ended. And as a fan of the book, I just feel like something was lost in that.

I should add that I always felt Good Omens the book was mostly Pratchett-written, so I never understood the insistence on treating Neil Gaiman as if he was the gatekeeper of some secret lore, and the only person who could possibly be trusted to make a good adaptation of the novel.

The sequels have shown that's not true. Someone who really understood the book wouldn't have gutted the entire human cast like that. Nor do I think he and Terry had hashed out clear plans for a sequel, beyond "Second Coming and a cottage in the South Downs". Most of the stuff in the sequels honestly comes across as if Neil lifted it from other people's fanfiction. I wouldn't be surprised to find out he had.

They should have binned Neil off from the start, and hired someone else to write.

This - I've read fan fics that are remarkably similar!

I think you've put your finger on why it seemed so wrong to me, it is the humans' total lack of importance in the whole thing.

And I agree that it seems that Pratchett was the main author of the original book, certainly all the funny bits anyway!!

Upon reflection, I will keep series 1 as an example of perfect film making and pretend the rest never happened. If I can find a way to pretend Muriel was in season 1 I will, as she was brilliant.

Series 2 was billed with the song lyrics "every day it's a getting closer" and the failed to have a story of anything getting closer. Series 3 was massively rushed, with loads of loose threads. What happened to the coffee shop? What did The Metatron say to get Aziriphale back? What was the point of Jesus? Why is half of the plot about a card game? Even the meet cute of them reincarnated made no sense. Very disappointing all round.