Ineffable Partners - Tumblr Posts - Page 2

Can’t stop thinking about how all of S2, Aziraphale is throwing himself at Crowley physically (the hand on his chest in the bar, the dance, the hand on his shoulder when Gabe and Beez say being together is more important than sides) waiting for Crowley to make the next move, while Crowley is throwing himself at Aziraphale emotionally (trying to make the humans fall in love by engineering a rainstorm, letting Aziraphale drive his car, recommending Alpha Centauri as a place for Gabe and Beez to go). And how in the final 15, they finally get closer to giving the other what they have been asking for all season, but it’s twisted and miscommunicated: “come with me” Aziraphale says and all Crowley hears is “to heaven”; “I need you” Aziraphale says, and all Crowley hears is “to change for me”; Crowley grabs Aziraphale and kisses him the way Aziraphale has wanted all season and Aziraphale, thinking it’s a temptation away from Heaven, forgives him instead of kissing him back.

The Magic Trick You Didn’t See: Being An Analysis of Good Omens Season 2

(or: Neil Gaiman, Your Brain is Gorgeous But I Have Cracked Your Sneaky Little Code And Have You Dead To Rights*) (*Maybe)

***

Soooooo I just spent the last 48 hours having a BREATHTAKING GALAXY BRAIN EPIPHANY about Good Omens Season 2 and feverishly writing a fuckin16,000 word essay about the incredible magic trick that @neil-gaiman pulled off. 

Yes, it’s long, but I PROMISE your brains will explode. Do you want to know how magic works? Do you want to know what Metatron’s deal is (I’m like 99% sure of this and it’s EXTREMELY FUCKING GOOD)? Do you want to know about the Mystery of the Vanishing Eccles Cakes and the big fat beautiful clue I found in the opening credits? Do you go through the whole inventory of Chekov’s Firearm & Heavy Artillery Discount Warehouse? 

Here is the essay, go read it: https://docs.google.com/document/d/193IXS11XN46lziHRb6eUpM17yK0BQkRqke1Wh64A_e0/ When ur done u can tell me I’m an insane crackpot, and u know what, i won’t even be offended

In case you don’t know whether you want to bother reading the whole enormous thing on google docs, I’ve put the first couple sections of it under the cut. JUST TRUST ME OKAY, HEAR ME OUT, THIS IS VERY EXTREMELY COOL, NEIL IS GOOD AT HIS JOB–

Keep reading

So, what is the deal with the world’s most conspicuously uneaten Eccles cakes? (A meta)

Well, I wouldn’t say it’s bad writing, not even the on-purpose-as-a-secret-message kind. I agree there is a visual ‘loose thread’ here that the creators wanted us to notice, but I don’t think the meaning has anything to do with Metatron or the eventual plan for S3. I think the eccles cakes are all about what’s going on in this episode with Crowley and Aziraphale, and they’re unsettling in exactly the way they’re meant to be, even if we might not register the full implications consciously on first watch.

On the most straightforward level, this shot is the punchline to a joke set up by Aziraphale and Nina in the coffee shop. Crowley orders six shots of espresso, bound to get him all worked up and stressy. Aziraphale, who desperately wants Crowley to be thinking clearly when he learns about the Gabriel situation, says to Nina: ‘What do you sell that calms people down?’ And she replies: ‘Eccles cakes.’ From this moment on the cakes are a visual symbol of what Aziraphale needs from Crowley right now.

That’s why they get so much screentime as we cross the road and go into the shop. Aziraphale won't leave those eccles cakes behind because he’s still hoping that Crowley will respond to the request they represent: Please stay calm, please be patient and listen to me with empathy.

But Crowley never does respond, and as he storms out we get that close-focus shot of the abandoned plate to make sure the subtext hits home. The cakes are framed sitting in front of the horse statue, brilliantly dressed up in Crowley's sunglasses, to remind us that they were brought there for him and he's dismissing them. (Crowley is the frantic horse who can't be managed!)

There’s another level to it, though, which doesn’t fully become clear until episode 6. The episode 1 meeting in Nina’s café is the first time that Aziraphale and Crowley share a scene in the present-day in S2, which means that the last time we saw them together was when they were dining at the Ritz. As viewers, we quickly recognise the visual language of their partnership: a table for two, a drink, a dessert. It feels familiar. But the food gets delivered and then nobody eats it. On that level, it is a set-up without a pay-off and it really niggles as you watch. S1 closed out their relationship with a happy toast after a resplendent dinner; S2 opens it with a snack that gets ignored. The dynamics of who offers food to whom are also off, atypical. It’s a sign of how things are going to go later on, hinting at the fact their dynamic is dysfunctional right now, even though it might seem OK on the surface.

Which brings me, finally, on to the other thing I’ve wanted to point out…

The punchline is that Crowley doesn’t eat the eccles cakes, but the really subconsciously disconcerting thing is that Aziraphale doesn’t. That he seemingly never planned to, and never orders anything for himself. In fact, we don’t see Aziraphale eat anything substantial in any of the present-day scenes in S2. The only things he consumes onscreen are sherry, tea, and a travel sweet. (Oh, and Manipulation Coffee, which is definitely a callback to Crowley’s disastrous sextuple-espresso.) We see him with food, yes, but primarily he wants to give it to other people.

For me this little detail of S2 – not something you even fully notice until you think about it – is a very telling understated cue in terms of Aziraphale’s post-Heaven state of mind. It's about what amuseoffyre puts so well in another meta: 'the whole series looks like he’s having so much fun doing silly human things, but there’s this brittleness to it.' At first glance, we see Aziraphale interacting with food and assume he is now living the happy Earthly life we wanted for him, but on closer inspection he's not engaging much in the pleasure of eating for his own sake. He gets a quick sweet pick-me-up on his way somewhere else in the Bentley - all alone - and that's it. He's too anxious, too busy, he doesn't have time. Crowley doesn't have time to invite him for lunch.

I find it fascinating that Gabriel gets a squillion cups of cocoa in this season, waxing all lyrical about them, and Aziraphale gets none. Aziraphale's mug becomes Jim's mug, even. And he mostly makes the tea to show Muriel how to blend in. In short, S2 Aziraphale is terribly preoccupied with looking after/managing others, and not taking the time to look after himself. Like the Maggie and Nina match-making, all that kindly treat-offering is displacement, displacement, displacement.

No wonder it all goes wrong.

Up until the almost-end-of-the-world, the way Aziraphale and Crowley maintained their relationship was through a collection of well-established and repeated patterns (dances, you might say). These little rituals were what they used to communicate affection, intimacy and trust when they couldn’t say the things they wanted to say out loud. I like spending time with you. You make me happy, and I like making you happy. We’re in this together. I’ll always be there for you, even when your own side is not.

In season 1, as the stress of the impending apocalypse puts more and more pressure on their relationship, we see their patterns start to break down, and it’s very distressing for them. They’ve been communicating like this for so long that they don’t know what to do when one of them doesn’t follow the dance steps.

When we first see them in season 2, they seem in some ways to be closer than ever. They touch each other more easily, Aziraphale in particular. Crowley is comfortable enough in the bookshop that he has a Spot for putting his sunglasses when he takes them off by the door. They’re more open about acknowledging how much time they spend together and how many things in their lives are shared.

And I think, also, we expect them to be happy. They won, didn’t they? So it takes a while for the cracks to start to show.

It wasn’t until this post pointed out that the whole season, we never see them sit down and share a meal together in the present day (no, Crowley doesn’t eat; yes, it still counts) that it started coming together for me. The closer you look, the more you realize the old patterns they’re used to relying on are broken.

Three times, we see them sit down to their usual table for two (at the coffee shop, the bar, and the French restaurant) and then almost immediately get up again. This post also points out that we don’t see present-day Aziraphale eat anything on screen, other than one of the little candies in the Bentley. This in the same season we learn that Crowley is the one who introduced him to food! It’s one of their oldest rituals!

Even one of their most visually recognizable patterns starts to go wonky this season. In season 1, when the blocking allows it, Crowley’s always on Aziraphale’s left. When they’re standing or walking side by side, and most of the time when they’re sitting side by side together (there are some exceptions due to camera angles)…Crowley’s always on Aziraphale’s left (screen right if they’re facing us, screen left if we’re behind them). It’s one of the clues about the body swap that is easy to see when you know what to look for—in Berkeley Square they are each initially sitting on the “wrong” side of the bench. It’s so reliable that Aziraphale hears a little miracle bling in the sushi restaurant in s1 ep1 and turns to his left—because that’s where Crowley would appear—only to be startled by Gabriel on his right.

Go look at the scene where we find out Gabriel and Beez are a couple. You know the one.

And of course, many people have noted that in the end credits, we’d expect their positions on screen to be switched. They’re on the wrong sides. And it’s such a long shot that I think it has to be intentional.

Some people have speculated that this means they swapped bodies again. I don’t really buy that. Rather I think it is supposed to indicate what becomes extremely clear on a second viewing, that things are Off and Wrong. They are not okay.

And the more you watch them you see that Aziraphale’s excitement during his little adventures is manic and brittle, and that he misses having a place and a purpose and a mission to do good. And Crowley is depressed, unhealthily codependent, even more hypervigilant and cagey and angry than he was before. They both have layers and layers of trauma, and no way to talk about it. They have the time and freedom now to talk about what they want to be to each other, now that they don’t have to hide and encode and maintain plausible deniability. But they have no way to talk about that either, because that’s never been an option before. They don’t know how, and they are both so, so afraid.

And in the fights they have in episode 1 and episode 6, you realize they haven’t resolved anything from season 1. They’re having the same fight they had at the bandstand. Crowley wants to run, keep the two of them safe and damn the rest, and Aziraphale wants to stay and help, believing he can make a difference even in an imperfect system, and neither of them really understands the other’s position. It’s the same damn fight. They haven’t been able to move past this impasse, and it’s the exact thing that breaks them in the end.

And it’s just. Fuck. It’s such a human thing to have happened to them. To make it through the fire (metaphorical and literal) and then have everything go to shit afterward because of unaddressed traumas and insecurities and things left unsaid until they fester.

I know this is not at all how I expected the season to go, and I think it took a little while for me to parse what was going with their relationship, because we are predisposed to want them to be happy and to want things to be easy for them now. But it makes so much sense that this is where they ended up at this point in the story.

I know they’ll make it back to each other. They both love each other too much to give up. They’ll fight their way back together, and I know they’ll figure it out in the end.

But goddamn.

Aziraphale lied Theory

First of all, this theory is not mine, its from @/doubleskk on Twitter and can be found HERE. Go show them some love! It's in Portuguese, so I'll do my best to translate it - blue texts are my personal additions!

This season, we have something very clear in Aziraphale's development arc: is his relationship with LIE. He lied to protect Job's children, and he lied he had performed a miracle to make Nina and Maggie fall in love. That's not counting other little lies, sprinkled throughout the season here and there.

We keep seeing Crowley say "I'm a demon, I lie", but in the big finale, we have Crowley saying the truth - the big truth, the one he has been avoiding for 6 thousand years.

All of this was to set the stage for the biggest lie of all: the lie he had to tell Crowley to fend him off and protect him.

When Metatron goes to buy the coffee, he asks Nina if people ask for death, as the name of her shop is "Give me a coffee, or give me death". What if that name is an allegory for the actual conversation between Metatron and Aziraphale?

Aziraphale may have been threatened. Either Azira goes back to heaven (coffee), or he and Crowley would have their existence erased from the Book of Life (death). So, to protect Crowley, Aziraphale had to invent a lie to make sure he got away. The Book of Life was namedropped a couple of times in the show, a Chekhov's gun that never went off - Neil is too good of a writer for that.

And Aziraphale knew that Crowley would be pissed if he agreed to go back to Heaven after everything that happened, and he knew that Crowley would never accept being an angel again. "But rescuing me makes him so happy" - Aziraphale had to make sure Crowley wouldn't realize he needed saving.

That's why he knew exactly what to say to mess with Crowley.

At 41:14 of episode 6, when Azira starts telling the (alleged) lie to Crowley, he becomes all flustered, moving his hands from side to side and stammering, SAME PATTERN as when he lies to the angels about having done the Nina and Maggie fall in love, in episode 2.

[This part really works better with 2 videos side by side, which you cannot do on tumblr, so if you want you can check them out here]

The sequence of him talking to Metatron at the table is nothing more than an enactment of his lie. The conversation didn't go like that, Aziraphale made everything up.

And when Crowley declares himself, Aziraphale starts shaking his head in despair: not now, don't tell me that now.

He also looks out the window as soon as the confession starts, as if he knows Metraton was watching him outside.

Then there's the kiss, Aziraphale falters for a moment, but he has to keep up with the lie and he knows he has to hurt Crowley on purpose. And after Crowley leaves, Aziraphale is MUST recover in seconds, because Metatron is coming back. Also notice that when Metatron comes back, he doesn't ask if Crowley agreed to go back to heaven or not. He just sends a "How did he take it?"

That is, there was never any choice, and for Metatron Aziraphale was only going to break the news that he was leaving. And Aziraphale had to invent a lie to the inmates to make sure Crowley stayed away from him.

Ooh yeah! I finally concluded this work. I just could not help but draw these buns))

My friends recently turned the conversation about Good Omens into a conversation about a Magnificent Century. They didn't yet know the consequences...

okay, hot take, but I thought the Bilad the Shuite outfit was good. Like in way does it compare to some of Crowley's better looks, but I liked it! It was good!!