Nice Explanation ! I Wanted To Add Something Else To Your Thought.Another Crime From The Metatron Is

Nice explanation ! I wanted to add something else to your thought. Another crime from the Metatron is to show Azi how much Crowley hates Heaven, and by metaphor again, showing how much he hates angels from there. But Azi is an angel, so he's maybe just hearing "I hate Heaven and angels ! I hate YOUR nature ! I hate EVERYTHING about YOU !", because Azi always refers himself as an angel through the whole series. If Crowley refuses to work with him, Aziraphale wouldn't have another answer about why Crowley do that : since Before the Beggining, they were working together several times without this to be a barricade between them. But now, Metatron give him the offer to become Supreme Archangel and a leader of the next biggest decisions. If Crowley doesn't like him because of being Supreme Archangel, it means he has never liked Aziraphale at all because he is an angel who obbeys Heaven, and by extension, he never really liked Aziraphale. The scene where he's saying "I think you don't understand what I'm offering you" sounds condescending, but maybe it means "If you liked what we did before by saving the world, why would you want to stop me when I will be able to change everything for good with you on my side ?" Crowley's answer is insulting and not complete at all. And then, the kiss. Aziraphale was already confused by Crowley's refusal, and the kiss added a lot of confusion. At first, Aziraphale is surprised, but the second he understand what's happening physically, we can see he's hesitating between pushing himself against Crowley or pushing Crowley away from him. As the battle inside his head ends, he makes up his mind : Crowley's trying to make him stay on Earth, to make him stay here at the lowest as possible by risking Aziraphale's safety, while he could fall just by wanting to stay with Crowley. Crowley seems selfish by doing that, while Aziraphale wanted to work to make things better. This is not the first time Crowley show selfishness. In the book, (SPOILER TIME !!!!!!) when Adam defeated the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Satan is coming. Instead of staying there, Crowley runs to a Jeep around there, with the aim of fleeing elsewhere before trouble comes. Aziraphale comes to him and explains that there is nowhere to go, nothing to lose by facing Satan, and Crowley finally agrees and stays. In the series, Crowley ask Aziraphale to leave Earth with him a lot of times before the Appocalypse, and then at the end of Season 2. There is one time Crowley tries to face his problems : this is when Hastur and Ligur comes to him to kill him, and then he succeeds to kill Ligur and to flee Hastur. He did that because Aziraphale gave him Holy Water. When Aziraphale is here, Crowley usually doesn't feel the need to go away. When Aziraphel is not with him or do not agree with him, Crowley alone is a coward or a runaway. And the only thing that could lead Aziraphale to abandon him to his doom was brought by Metatron. Aziraphale finally leaves Crowley on Earth, alone so not able to fight anything without his angel, and Aziraphale has the taste of bitterness because of Crowley's way to want him not go back to Heaven in a selfish way, wanting Aziraphale with himself only and not on the Up Side, where Aziraphale thinks he'll be capable of anything to make the Universe better.

Metatron is a masterpiece at manipulation, at understanding how people works, at knowing the weakness of each one. Metatron is the biggest ennemy since Season 1, and he succeeds at tearing appart the "us" Azi and Crowley had just for some years only. Being able to read the Book of Life (even without being able to interact with it) is a big help for Metatron to do that, as he seems to be the narrator when we can see all the flashbacks. And as always, I recall that those are only my thoughts about a story I love.

Aziraphale doesn't drink coffee

My friends, it feels obvious now, but I finally managed to put my fingers on what was bothering me about this specific exchange of lines:

If you think about it, this exchange doesn't make sense. Aziraphale says:

"But I… I don't want to go back to Heaven. Where would I get my coffee?"

and the Metatron answers:

"You know, as Supreme Archangel, you would be able to decide who to work with."

What does being able to decide who to work with have anything to do with coffee?

At first, like many of us, I had interpreted the scene as Aziraphale using the coffee as a metaphor for expressing his love for Earth and earthly pleasures, and the Metatron slyly throwing the Crowley's restored angelic status card on the table to force him to change his mind, as if Crowley was the one important thing that could make Aziraphale forget all other things on Earth.

But here's the thing - and I don't know why I never noticed it before: as far as we know, Aziraphale doesn't drink coffee.

If I am not mistaken, there are only three explicit coffee references in the two seasons: the "six shots of espresso," the espresso cup that sits in front of Crowley on the table at the Ritz in s1ep1, and the two mugs in s1ep2 when Aziraphale and Crowley stops at a sort of dining place to discuss how to find the lost Antichrist. Now, unlike with the expresso cup at the Ritz, where we have an above shot that clearly shows traces of coffee, we don't see what's inside the two mugs here. But I don't think Aziraphale's one contains coffe: he's not even aware that caffeine is definitely does not "calm people down," it's very clearly not his thing.

Furthermore, we do know what his things are: little restaurants, sushi, classical music, old bookshops, tea, crepes, French wine… not coffee.

When the Metatron asks him to become Supreme Archangel, he could say "where would I get my sushi?" or "where would I get my books" or "where would I get my records" which is an actual line that he pronounced earlier while talking to Maggie.

Instead he says "coffee."

And then it struck me: Aziraphale is never associated with coffee. But Crowley is.

That's what he's saying, probably unconsciously: when he says "where would I get my coffee?" he's not expressing his love for Earth, he's expressing his love for Crowley.

He could even be doing this without realizing it, as a form of involuntary codification (codification like in Freud's or Matte Blanco's theories of unconscious mind: where something seated deep inside you hooks onto some minor detail outside and starts speaking through your words as if on its own accord). After all, this particular morning, after the emotional strain of the ball, the demonic attack during the night, and the unexpected revelation of Gabriel and Beelzebub relationship, seems to me like the sort of moment in which some amount of brain fog is to be expected, even for an angel.

But the Metatron sees straight through him, possibly even more clearly than he sees through himself, and gives an answer that ignores the superficial codification and address directly the deep meaning. He doesn't say: "as Supreme Archangel you would be able to pop down here whenever you want and have as much coffee as you like." He immediately sees that "where would I get my coffee?" means "how could I be together with Crowley?" and makes his dirty move of dangling the idea of restoring Crowley to his former angelic status in front of Aziraphale's face because he knows that this is the one and only point.

And now I really, really, really hope that in s3 we will see Supreme Archangel Aziraphale sending someone on Earth to get him some coffee - maybe a big cup with six shots of espresso in it and nothing else - and then grabbing the paper cup with a pain, strenght, and desperation that nobody else would understand.

[Attention]

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#The way they probably erased Crowley's memory of heaven. Also the way Crowley offered a hot chocolate to Gabriel just after even though he still hated him because he knew how it feels to remember nothing (insp from this post by @perpetualcontrolleddrowning)

Azi ☁️💙✨

March 16th, 2017 marks the 14th year anniversary to Rachel Corrie’s death where she was killed by an Israeli bulldozer that ran her over while she was trying to stop it from demolishing a home of a Palestinian family in Gaza. 

Rest in Peace Rachel. 

Rumination n. 7 - The Stain

I am about to say something outrageous, but this scene is haunting me and I need to take it out of my obsessive brain.

We all have been thinking about the (not so) slightly maniacal, sphinx-like smile that appears on Aziraphale's face at the very end of e6 end credits, and how it seems to suggest that something is brewing inside the angel's head.

But this is not the scene that is haunting me. It's this one:

Now, like many of us, I've been toying with possible scenarios involving the Metatron and the threat of the Book of Life, and I want to take a moment to say something up top: I have mixed feelings about the Book of Life as a thing. Not just because we don't know anything about how it actually works and, if we want to be punctilous, we don't even have undisputable confirmation that it exists and it's not in fact a myth that the Heaven-regime has spread in order to keep everyone in check (that Heaven has regime-like strategies for controlling its ranks, possibly even before the Fall, it's clear by the appalling callousness of the Metatron saying "For one Prince of Heaven to be cast into the outer darkness makes a good story", meaning a story that works as an effective cautionary tale). But most of all because this all-encompassing Book of Life seems to me like the kind of overpowered magic-object-ex-machina plot device that can really break a narrative, and I am willing to accept it only because I trust Neil Gaiman entirely. Also, I have a feeling that, on a metaphorical level, the prospect of being "erased from the Book of Life" has already happened, in a way (but that's matter for a different rumination).

That said, I am wondering if it's Aziraphale the one we should be worrying about. Mr "I would always know the stain was there", aka fixing something is not enough, the preferable solution is to make sure that the bad thing never happened in the first place, so its memory will not haunt you, its remaining smudge will not darken the perfect picture that you want your existence to be.

I am wondering if that creepy smile means that he is planning to steal the Book of Life, like several metas and fics imagined, but not to keep himself and Crowley safe: he could be planning to steal it in order to undo the Fall.

And sure, that would mean erasing the 6000 years of his and Crowley's history together, and nobody in his right mind would do that - but is Aziraphale in his right mind? When he steps into the elevator, he is as broken as Crowley is, and possibly more, because in addition to their relationship crumbling into dust, he also has to deal with the pull of his desire to bring into reality the idealized version of Heaven that he has always hoped for.

He is shattered. He has lost Crowley, has lost his bookshop, has lost Earth. He is involved against his will in the Second Coming plans. He's hyperventilating as the elevator goes up, shoulders and chest struggling to find air - is on the verge of a panick attack. He is in the mindset of someone who is feeling his entire existence slipping away under his feet at lightspeed, not knowing how or why, not a split second to realise what is happening.

It's not impossible, when you are in such a state, to shut down and cling to one and only one thought: how do I undo this?

It's not impossible, if you are in the middle of a traumatic response, to fixate on finding the single, cursed, wrong turn that sent you down the path that lead you in this place of devastating pain and fear, obsessing over the idea that if you can correct that one error, everything will be fine again. Because you just cannot process the idea that what happened is destined to stay "happened": it's just too big and too wrong and too unthinkable to become a part of your biography like all events before that - as per the definition of trauma by Judith Herman.

You cannot reconcile it with the rest of your life, you enter in a state of mind that denies reality and treats it like a a gamer would treat a mission that he messed up between to saving points: yes, it sucks, but nothing to worry about, you just go back in time and this time do things the right way. You just need to identify where you went wrong.

This is, I think, the place where Aziraphale's mind is in the final scene.

"What have I done wrong? Where did I do the wrong thing? When did I say the wrong word? What incident brought us here? How could this happen if I love you so much? Why would you shout and be angry at me if I love you so much? What evil force could prevent you from seeing that I love you so much? This is all a mistake. How can we not be together right now if I love you so much? How can the fact of us being separated exist in the same world where I love you so much? This must be a mistake. What is it that I need to undo to save us, our dream? To make the error and all this pain go away? If only I could find the mistake, the single bad thing that threw a monkey wrench into our happiness..."

But he cannot find one single moment in their long history together that stands out as "the" mistake to blame for what just happened, and he keeps going back and back and back, looking for "the" thing that ruined their plans.

If only we were not on opposite sides.

I think that, right now, in Aziraphale's head, the one original error that lead him to lose the love of his life is the Fall. It's the initial irreparable fracture that ripped in half the angelic population of the beginning and made impossible for the two parts to be together ever again.

Of course Crowley did and could not want to be "restored" to his former angelic status, he can see why, he's not blind. And probably he's more than ready to recognize that Crowley is right in refusing that offer. The proposal was wrong in the first place. The solution to all their problems isn't making Crowley not a demon anymore, it's making sure that there were no demons to begin with.

"If I'm in charge, I can make a difference."

I can make a different ending for this scene that just went horribly wrong. I can make a different reality where this horrible moment could never happen.

And if this is what is going through his head, his next task - and Crowley's mission - will be to accept that sometimes there is no undoing. You can either find a way to patch things up and find the right path again, or stay broken and astray. But either way you will have to come to terms with the fact that some mistakes cannot be undone, and the bad things that happened cannot be erased. You can only learn to live with them, accomodate their painful memory in your existence, accept the presence of a stain that will always be there, underneath.