Welcome back to Armageddon! Or, rather, welcome back to the handful of days leading up to armageddon. We’re not quite there yet, but it’s fast approaching. This week, we’re introduced to the rest of the strange people who will play starring roles in the final act of the show (and possibly the world).
1. Burn the witch
Good Omens may be the title of the show but the full subtitle of the original book is, “The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch.” Agnes Nutter, played with gleeful venom by Josie Lawrence in the TV and radio adaptations, is the only witch in England to have been burned alive for the crime of predicting the future and actually being a witch. Since she knows it’s going to happen, she takes the village along with her, blowing them sky high by tucking gunpowder in her skirts.
Over the course of Agnes’s demise, she gets some of the best jokes (or corniest depending on your sense of humor). She says that being pricked with a needle cured her arthritis instead of diagnosing her as a witch. (Needle-pricking was a real thing done to witches and one of the more surprising Google results for searching the word “pricking.”) Clearly, she must be evil since she’s a jogging enthusiast and recommends a high fiber diet hundreds of years before Pinterest fads or Goop.
Though Agnes dies in 1656, her prophetic words live on in the form of a book of prophecies no one bought because they were true. She predicts the events of the days leading to the apocalypse and leaves it to her descendants to figure out how to stop the world from ending.
2. #Cottagecore
Agnes’s said descendent is Anathema, a bookish but extremely pretty young woman played by Adria Arjona. Anathema has been groomed by her mother to be, well, a witch. Thanks to a prophecy involving Apple stock, the family was able to buy a house in Malibu that looks like Tony Stark’s vacation home. Anathema gives up an Instagram-perfect life in California for an Instagram-perfect cottage in Tadfield, England, and goes about searching for the antichrist. All the tools of witchcraft can’t seem to point to the antichrist though, because he’s living his best life as the curly-haired kid next door.
3. Worst Geek Squad employee ever
Since Good Omens is about pairs of opposites finding the middle ground between them (spoiler alert: angels and demons aren’t that different after all), Anathema’s counterpart is a man of science named Newt. Trouble is, he’s terrible with technology, seeming to magically break everything he touches.
Newt is played by Jack Whitehall, who is a staple on English game shows and known for showing his cantankerous father around the globe on Netflix’s dime. Here, he’d best be described as “adorkable.” He finds himself unemployed after frying the computer system of a hilariously generic company and then meets a strange man on the street who offers him a chance to … burn witches. At least he didn’t discover the alt-right? Or Q-Anon?
(The fake company is named “United Holdings (Holdings),” and while this isn’t even really a joke, it’s so on the nose I can’t help but love it. This kind of earnest, silly, corny humor is Good Omens in a nutshell.)
4. Is this offensive? I can’t tell
Newt joins the Witchfinder Army, an organization made up of one very strange, very off-putting man. This man, Sargent Shadwell, is played by Michael McKean, an actor who has played so many strange and wonderful characters that he’s one of those people where you’ll know him as “oh, that guy” from half a dozen shows or movies. (Although I’m a big fan of Better Call Saul, for me, he is forever the guy who swapped bodies with Agent Mulder in one of the funniest two-part episodes of The X-Files.)
Sergeant Shadwell is a bumbling fool who spouts bigoted nonsense left and right but somehow manages to convince his psychic-slash-sex worker neighbor to bring him tea and Newt to join him in his witch persecution. It’s baffling to me but then again, pitting people with rigid definitions of right and wrong against the people they consider anathema to their code is sort of the whole point of this show. And if you just figured out why Anathema, the witch, is named Anathema, congrats. As director Douglas McKinnon is fond of saying, “Everything is meant.”
Continued below5. Top 10 signs your child might be the antichrist
As we end the second episode of Good Omens, Adam the pint-sized antichrist is hearing voices, playing at torturing witches, and tricking his parents into letting him keep his dog in bed. One of those seems not terribly normal. Or maybe two? I acted out Monty Python scenes when I was a kid, so maybe playing “The Spanish Inquisition” isn’t really that far off.
Aziraphale and Crowley have spent this episode investigating the whereabouts of the boy mainly by arguing over the relative merits of guns and free will while flirting in what used to be a convent and bickering like a married couple over pie. But a chance encounter with Anathema leaves Agnes’s book of prophecies in the hands of Aziraphale, an angel who loves a good puzzle along with his cocoa. Aziraphale figures out the identity of the antichrist and instead of doing something about it, hangs up the phone.
In episode two we also get introduced to Adam’s gaggle of friends, get to see David Tennant menace a pothos plant, and meet War, the first of the horsepersons of the apocalypse. It’s shaping up to be a busy end of days indeed!
