Good Omens’ Season 2 Cliffhanger Will Haunt You Everyday
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The post Good Omens’ Season 2 Cliffhanger Will Haunt You Everyday appeared first on Consequence.
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers through the Season 2 finale of Good Omens, “Every Day.”]
Songs get stuck in our heads for different reasons. Sometimes it’s an infectious rhythm that lodges its way into the subconscious on a loop. Sometimes it’s a particularly well-crafted lyric that keeps springing to mind. Or sometimes, as has been the case for me ever since I finished watching Good Omens Season 2, a song gets stuck in your head as a representation of vast and complicated emotions — especially unresolved ones.
The specific song that Good Omens has jammed into my brainpan is “Everyday” by Buddy Holly and the Crickets, released in 1957 as a “Peggy Sue” B-side. That’s information learned directly from the show’s second season, which makes the delicate little ditty a cornerstone of a secret romance, an aural reminder that love isn’t necessarily impossible, even between an angel and a demon.
Good Omens getting a second season was a bit unexpected, as the first season brought the Earth to the edge of Armageddon and back again, as originally depicted in Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s beloved 1990 novel. Pratchett passed away in 2015, and when the possibility of a series adaptation emerged, Gaiman took on the role of showrunner to fulfill Pratchett’s dying wishes.
In the first season, the angel Aziraphale (Michael Sheen) and the demon Crowley (David Tennant), having been low-key collaborators for centuries while still officially working for their respective metaphysical teams, managed to prevent the aforementioned apocalypse. They also escaped their death sentences for doing so, and with Heaven and Hell agreeing to leave them alone for the foreseeable future, they’re able to continue enjoying their lives on Earth — until the angel Gabriel (Jon Hamm), memoryless and naked, arrives on Aziraphale’s doorstep.
That’s the kickoff for the bulk of the present-day storyline, which is haunted by the song “Everyday” — it isn’t just featured in the trailers for the season, but is heard constantly throughout the six episodes; there’s even a tavern jukebox where every record magically becomes the Buddy Holly B-side after a certain point.
In the lead up to the season, the presence of “Everyday” felt very ominous, as it’s become a common trope to take cheerful pop songs and add some dark undertones in trailers. Plus, the lyrics “Every day, it’s a-getting closer…” sound vaguely threat-like, especially in the context of a show that’s already threatened to bring about the End Times once.
However, in the season finale, actually entitled “Every Day” (damn it, now it’s in my head again), the song’s actual significance is revealed: It’s the love song that brought together Gabriel and the demonic Beelzebub (Shelley Conn) over the course of an unexpected courtship. After negotiating a truce with Heaven and Hell to leave this plane for a new one where they can be together, it’s the song they sing to each other as they fade away to elsewhere.
It’s not Crowley and Aziraphale’s love song, but Gabriel and Beelzebub’s story inspires Crowley to think that maybe, just maybe, he and the angel could find a similar happy ending. Because the present-day storyline is relatively brief, Gaiman drew upon “mini-sodes” written by John Finnemore, Cat Clarke, and Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman to fill out the six episodes, which essentially serve as Crowley and Aziraphale backstory.
And one overriding undercurrent of those stories is how much they both care about each other; Crowley’s dedication to Aziraphale in particular becomes clear, which all builds up to the finale’s climatic moment: Crowley grabbing and kissing Aziraphale in an effort to convince him that instead of running off to Heaven on a new assignment from The Metatron (Derek Jacobi), the two of them could just go… be together.
And then, Aziraphale says “I forgive you” and fucks off to Heaven, and Crowley drives away alone, and that’s the end of Season 2 of Good Omens — a show that has not yet been given a third season.
Good Omens (Prime Video)
On a personal level, Good Omens is one of my all-time flat-out favorite books, something my mother read out loud to me as a kid before I eventually stole our family’s paperback and reread it into tatters. While I never thought of Aziraphale and Crowley as a romantic pairing prior to the show, the show’s version of the characters did lend itself to that interpretation early on; I certainly understood it a lot better after seeing countless photos of queer women pairing up for Aziraphale/Crowley cosplay, often shared by Gaiman himself on social media.
For decades now, fandom has celebrated potentially queer romances without the benefit of the movie/show/book series actually delivering on it canonically. Real talk, though, this is primarily a TV-related issue: From Kirk and Spock to Rizzoli and Isles, fans have been resigned to the fact that what they see between these characters isn’t perhaps what the actual creators see, even when there’s a textual basis for the possibility of romance.
It’s thus still a pretty stunning thing to see a show like Good Omens get to this rare and beautiful point of canonical romance between two characters — who are fundamentally genderless, but are played by two men. (Maybe it’s less exciting for younger people whose adolescent hearts weren’t trampled on by even heterosexual Will They/Won’t They pairings like Mulder and Scully. Alas, I wouldn’t know.) It’s a very deliberate tease, too, a cliffhanger designed to break hearts without proper resolution in the form of a third season.
As of right now, though, Amazon has yet to commission that third season, because in case you didn’t know, there’s a writers strike going on right now and even if the company did want to give Neil Gaiman a greenlight, he couldn’t agree to it until after the strike ends. Gaiman has made comments on social media to that effect, as seen below:
Neil Gaiman on July 28, 2023 (screenshot via Bluesky)
It does sound like Gaiman has a plan in place for that mythical third season, but it’s still very nebulous at this time — after all, no one at this point knows when the strikes might end, and that alone could have massive repercussions on the business of everyone involved. Also, from the cheap seats outside Amazon HQ, there’s absolutely no way of knowing what kind of metrics Good Omens Season 2 would need to deliver, in order for the algorithm to approve a third season.
So instead, we’re left with an Empire Strikes Back ending with no guarantee of Return of the Jedi coming out in a few years, and Buddy Holly may end up stuck in my head… forever. I keep singing the opening lines of the song to myself when I’m alone, a song that’s come to symbolize both dazzling potential and crushing heartbreak thanks to its inclusion in this show. Sometimes, “Every day, it’s a-getting closer” feels like a wish. Other times, it feels like a prayer.
Good Omens Season 2 is streaming now on Prime Video.
Good Omens’ Season 2 Cliffhanger Will Haunt You Everyday
Liz Shannon Miller
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