Welcome back to Armageddon! This week on Good Omens, we have the not-so-lost city of Atlantis, some climate change hand-wringing from 1990 that’s depressingly relevant today, a misguided exorcism, and a trio of very bad angels.
1. The Postman Always Rings Twice
In the last episode, we met Famine, the second horseperson of the apocalypse. He is responsible for the fancy restaurants you go to and pay a small fortune for a big empty plate with a small blob of food on it. (Is he also responsible for so-called “street tacos” that cost ten bucks and are about the size of a quarter? Because I’d like a word.) The International Express man ventured all the way to Des Moines to find him in a diner, pitching foodless food to unsuspecting patrons. (I’d be remiss if I didn’t also point out the cook, who looks suspiciously like one Elvis Presley in what’s only the first of two Elvis sightings in Good Omens.)
In “Saturday Morning Funtime,” we get a glimpse of the deliveryman’s private life as he makes his rounds, reluctantly leaving his wife Maude to deliver a crown to Pollution, who took over when Pestilence retired. (And this is where I say, as someone who has read the book, that the joke about Pestilence retiring when penicillin was developed was better in the book even though I know it’s seriously annoying when people do that. The challenge with Good Omens is that the book is packed with so many jokes per page that it rivals your Douglas Adams classics or a Monty Python sketch. The show can’t possibly fit all of them in six hours so it picks and chooses which jokes to include, and sometimes the choices work and sometimes I’m left scratching my head.) Pollution takes their crown and that leaves the deliveryman with just one more stop.
The last stop for the deliveryman is the last stop for all of us one day, death. In his black robe and with the deep Scottish brogue of character actor Brian Cox, he shouts with glee when he receives the go-ahead from poor Leslie the deliveryman to ride out and kick off the end of the world.
2. Close Encounters of the Sexy Kind
When we last left our hapless Witchfinder, Newt, he was en route to Tadfield to look for witches. Even Newt seems skeptical that he’ll find a witch, but he gamely goes along with the strange orders from the strange Sergeant Shadwell for lack of anything better to do with his time. Unbeknownst to him, Adam’s dreams have been turning up in our reality, which means Newt is waylaid by some very helpful and disappointed-in-us aliens, and barely avoids crashing into confused Tibetans digging tunnels under the road.
Unlike Newt, Anathema knows exactly what’s going on at any given time, but can’t seem to find the action she knows is happening. It all seems very frustrating for Type A Anathema and her ever-organized card catalog of prophecies. When Newt crashes near her cottage, Anathema is prepared to receive him with open arms. And, um, well. Anathema explains that her ancestors were burned at the stake by his ancestors, which doesn’t seem like the greatest pickup line but after a freak tornado forces them both inside her bedroom while dripping wet and frantic, one thing leads to another. Sargent Shadwell may regret sending Newt to find his witch, but Newt himself gets more than he bargained for. (And I must say that I deleted more than one double entendre about nipples in writing this review. You’re welcome. The witches-have-lots-of-nipples running gag is one that never landed with me and yet it’s a persistent one.)
4. Are you there God? It’s me, Aziraphale.
Aziraphale, having essentially dumped Crowley in the last episode, does a sad Charlie Brown walk back to his bookshop. There’s so much going on in Good Omens at any given time that I’ve written all these words about it and haven’t even mentioned the bookshop yet. Aziraphale’s home away from heaven is a cluttered, dark, beautiful, strange bookshop that doesn’t actually sell many books. It’s not explored in the show beyond a few easter eggs but in the book, it’s made clear that Aziraphale does anything he can to avoid actually selling the books he keeps in his shop, preferring to hoard first editions and Bible misprints like a dragon sitting on a very dusty treasure. Aziraphale’s domain looks like he does: fussy, old-fashioned, and comfy. (Crowley’s flat, meanwhile, is a minimalist-meets-brutalist place where the floorplan makes very little sense and the only signs of life are his beautiful but terrified plants.)
Continued belowAfter being dumped in the last episode, Crowley does what any self-respecting demon would do: go see a Saturday morning cartoon in an empty movie theatre. Sure, why not. But Hell has been tipped off to his rendezvous with Aziraphale and they’re sending their worst representatives after him. (Worst in both the evil sense and in the incompetence sense.) Crowley makes one last-ditch dramatic effort to get Aziraphale to run off with him and is, again, rejected. (Ouch.) Crowley makes a dramatic plea to God not to destroy humanity, despite his doubt that She’s even listening and his mockery of Aziraphale for doing the same. When Hastur and Ligur come to get Crowley, he dispatches Ligur, the chameleon demon with color-changing eyes, using the holy water he requested from Aziraphale in 1862. Crowley then races through his landline using his ability to break himself into teeny tiny pieces, trapping Hastur in an old tape-recording ansaphone.
The tape in question is a voicemail from Aziraphale, who finally phones home. Or, tries to, anyway. As it turns out, God doesn’t answer house calls from wayward angels. After opening a portal to heaven and speaking to the Metatron, who in this show does not have a flying chair, he loses what little faith he still had left in the Great Plan. Aziraphale finally tries to tell Crowley the truth, but it’s too late, and he’s accidentally tractor-beamed to heaven by the accidental exorcist, Sargent Shadwell.
5. Children of the Corn
We end episode four of Good Omens with Adam and his gang of three friends plus Dog, the faithful Hellhound. Adam’s behavior is increasingly erratic, though, and the kids decide they’ve had enough and would like to go home, thank you very much. Unfortunately for them, Adam is coming into his full powers and is starting to believe that maybe he should end the world. Adam, with a child’s understanding of complicated issues, knows that the climate is bad, the whales are dying, and things are getting worse. (He’s not wrong there.)
Adam has caused all sorts of interesting things to happen due to his newfound knowledge of world issues, like causing Atlantis to rise and the Kraken to taking revenge for all the whaling going on. There are many benefits to being a marine biologist in the Good Omens universe, even if the TV adaptation doesn’t include fish raining from the sky, which is one of my all-time favorite gags from the book. It’s not an easy task to computer generate a wall of fish, I suppose, even for Amazon.
So will Adam end the world? What will happen to Aziraphale in heaven, with his bookshop accidentally gone up in flames by the careless actions of Sargent Shadwell? Will Hastur be stuck in voicemail hell until the world ends? Stay tuned! We’ve only got about an hour left until the world ends. (But about two hours left of the show, because with this many characters to juggle, there are lots of loose ends to tie up!)
