Good Omens Deserved Better Than a 90-Minute Goodbye

Rating: 8/10 ⭐️

You don't watch Good Omens for the plot. You never did. If you're honest with yourself, the story was always the least interesting thing about it.

What you watched it for was them.

I read the book before Season 1 came out. Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's novel is one of those rare things that feels like it was written by two people who were having fun, and the show captured that.

Season 1 was faithful, sharp, and when it needed to be, moving. I loved it.

Season 2 drifted. The story felt like connective tissue for scenes that didn't really need it. The Gabriel-and-Beelzebub subplot was charming but slight.

Even I, who will defend this show to strangers at parties, had to admit the story wasn't the point anymore.

But I kept watching because of Crowley and Aziraphale. Specifically, because of David Tennant and Michael Sheen. That, it turns out, was the right call.

Three years of not knowing

When the Gaiman allegations broke, I didn't think we'd get Season 3. The show was his. The characters were his and Pratchett's.

When Amazon announced a 90-minute finale, my first reaction wasn't disappointment about the runtime. It was relief that it was happening at all.

There's something strange about being a fan during that kind of behind-the-scenes chaos. You're grieving something that technically still exists. The show was still on Prime, the seasons were still there.

But the future felt cancelled. So when they announced May 13th, I was glad, and slightly braced for it to not be enough.

David Tennant is the reason

I should tell you something about my relationship with David Tennant. He's my Doctor.

Not in the abstract sense of "the Doctor I grew up with"; Ten regenerated before I even got into the show properly. But when I finally did, the Tenth Doctor was the one that got me.

There's a specific quality Tennant has: the ability to make you feel like the character actually means what he's saying. It's not acting in the mechanical sense. It's closer to sincerity, and you believe him completely.

Crowley is a demon who never really wanted to be one. He's been in love with an angel for six thousand years and spent most of it showing it only in the spaces between lines; that desperate Season 2 kiss was the exception, not the rule. Tennant plays that restraint better than almost anyone I've watched, and in the finale, when Crowley finally stops pretending, you can see every one of those years.

Michael Sheen, for his part, gives Aziraphale a fussiness that should be irritating and somehow never is. It's in the way he straightens his waistcoat while the world is ending, or the way he can't stop being polite even when he's terrified. You want to shake him and protect him at the same time.

Put them in a room and the scene works, every time. Chemistry like that is not in the script. You either have it or you don't, and these two have it.

Yes, You Can Feel the 90 Minutes

The first half is rushed. I'll say it plainly. The story tries to do six episodes of work in roughly 45 minutes, characters appear and disappear, and the cosmic stakes feel assembled rather than built.

The Guardian called it "a script from flaming TV hell." Ars Technica said it was "chaotically uneven." They're not wrong about the structure.

But Good Omens was never a show about its plot. It was a show about two characters who should not have been friends, should not have loved each other, and could not stay apart. The plot was always the excuse to put them in a room together.

Once the second half kicks in, and it's just them, the show remembers what it is. The stakes stop being cosmic and start being personal. That's when it gets good.

The ending they deserved

I won't pretend I wasn't holding my breath. The fandom had its meltdown about the Season 2 ending, and three years of speculation and increasing dread followed.

The reset ending, new human lives, a chance at ordinary happiness. It split people right down the middle.

It made me very happy.

Maybe that's because I came in from the book, where the story was always about small kindnesses in a universe that doesn't owe anyone anything. Maybe it's because after three years of not knowing if we'd get any ending at all, watching them choose each other, in whatever form that took, was enough.

I gave it 8/10. The story earned maybe a six, but Tennant and Sheen earned a ten. The math works out.

What we almost lost

The farewell scene is the one I keep coming back to. Aziraphale presses his fingers to his lips, then to Crowley's, and they hold hands as they fade into nothing.

No big speech. No dramatic last kiss. Just two people who finally stopped pretending they had more time.

What happened with Gaiman is complicated and painful, but the finale feels like everyone else pouring in what they had, trying to give the show a proper goodbye.

Good Omens deserved a full Season 3. Six episodes, proper breathing room, the story at the pace it was meant to go. What we got instead was a 90-minute sprint to the finish.

It was rushed, and parts of it were underdeveloped. I'd still tell you to watch it.

Because it was still them. And that was always the whole point.