IT'S STABBING TIME

IT'S STABBING TIME 🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️

IT'S HERE IT'S HERE AAAAAAH IT'S HERE

who is this silly little critter

44% beetle, 75% free will, 65% compulsion, 69% gender, 137% luck, 50% tee, 60% hee, 45% she, 77% they, 44% chance of rain

Alright, not to be too predictable, but I wanna talk about space and color as it's used in the intro to season 1 for a minute. And you know, show some gorgeous space shots.

So we open in the dark. There's distant lights and the occasional flare from them moving through space but for the most part we get the angel that would eventually become Crowley alone in enough darkness that he himself isn't even giving off particularly significant amounts of light.

But then, enter Aziraphale. He arrives in a big ball of blue light shining above him that really emphasizes Crowley's red hair. They get tied to the colors we most often see them attached to, especially in promotional materials.

From here the entire scene gets slightly brighter, even once Aziraphale's light dims down. They're both lit up once they're together, even it the middle of literal nothingness.

They start the universe next, using Crowley's hand crank, which gives off a magic that's a combination of their two colors - purple.

A very similar color to this shows up in heaven as a signal flare for their accidentally too powerful half a miracle. It's a color tied to a miracle so big it could've revived someone 25 times and also a miracle that got the engine of the universe running.

And then. Creation starts. Our first image is a very Heavenly aesthetic. It's a blueish light cutting through the clouds much like Az just cut through the dark.

And what explodes from that is the thing that set me down this little rabbit hole in the first place: it's purple scattered through with red and blue lights.

As the initial burst fades, the blue and the red separate, the color fading except for this tiny blue dot and this growing red zone on the right.

The blue then fades, leaving us with an extremely Crowley coded palette here and a very orangeish red. There's shades of gray, a little bit of light, but not nearly as much color. As the sequence moves the darkness grows but does start slowly filling with small points of light.

We then end up with shades of gray both light and dark. There's balance here, even if it's not particularly colorful.

And then all at once a pinkish red bursts forth with these intense clawing tendrils. At the core of it, from the heart of it, is a bright blue ball of light.

It fades into a blue heart surrounded by darkness with whisps of white resembling a certain someone's hair. Or, as some friends pointed out two people embracing.

As the nebula settles a few other colors set in but the primary scheme is still red and blue. An almost violent plume of red emerges on the left side of the image.

And from this moment on most shots of the two of them back them with their respective color schemes.

They chat and Aziraphale gets anxious. He looks for a distraction and is immediately drawn to the space where the colors mix.

And as we fade out the other colors in the picture fade. We get the most balanced blue and red uet. And on the far corners fairly clear dark and light.

So what does this mean? The purple speaks to them being very powerful together. And, the rest is arguably just representative of the plot. We have Aziraphale as a beacon in the dark - a signal flare we know Crowley has throughout history been aware of and drawn to. We have them brightening each other. We have Az's color breaking out of heaven to mix with Crowley's to create something new and wonderful and powerful. Aziraphale's color fades, leaving Crowley alone. We then get a burst of a red closer to Crowley's current hair, with Aziraphale's blue in the core of it that eventually becomes a blue heart surrounded by darkness. That too fades, replaced by the pillars becoming their familiar hand shape and slightly more colors seeping in. As they talk together and move closer together their own colors settle back in and come to balance.

So I was going through the season taking some screen caps for a different piece of meta when I stumbled on something interesting: the record Aziraphale listens to.

So in 1934, Shostakovich wrote an opera called Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. It was popular but after Stalin himself deemed the work corrupt he wound up banned by the Soviet Union. This had a huge impact of Shostakovich's life and was a very dangerous thing to have happen to you. There are even stories of him sleeping in stairwells to avoid arrest. So by 1937 he released the Symphony No. 5 in D minor. It is a piece written to get him back into the good grace of the authorities and as such it is informally called A Soviet Artist’s Practical and Creative Response to Just Criticism. This worked. Which on the surface makes sense but I urge you to go listen to this song. It starts out very angry. Then retracts itself into a very hesitant sonata. And then the music cuts into a harsh pattern of notes. It's cuts are jarring and there's something just slightly off in nearly all the melodies. Notably, most symphonies shift to a major key by the end. This one, despite spending a great deal of time leading up to the shift into one, refuses to. It's all false triumph. It's all about pretending to folk under the authority's pressure without actually making something that would glorify it. And it worked. Stalin approved of him again.

This was what Az was listening to. Az who is about to make a series of not quite right choices that to the right eyes look like him bowing back again under authority's pressure. He's listening to a song built to deceive those with power over the composer into letting him back into the fold. Whatever Metatron did to him and whether Aziraphale was magically and/or mundanely manipulated (I suspect and) I don't think it entirely took hold.

no spoilers (just my reaction), but neil gaiman, david tennant, micheal sheen, and the rest of cast and crew have ripped out my heart, put it in a blender, and it is spinning round and round becoming a very delicious smoothie. Or perhaps a milkshake. idc my brain is shutting down why does everything I love hurt me (amazing work)