Instead of making a full season, Good Omens ends with a lacklustre 90-minute season finale. The third series of the Amazon Prime show was restructured after misconduct allegations against the writer Neil Gaiman surfaced in 2024. So, the originally planned full-length series was redesigned to quickly wrap up Aziraphale and Crowley’s story. And unfortunately, you can tell.
Gaiman, co-author of the Good Omens book alongside Terry Pratchett and a writer for the TV series, exited the show after being accused of sexual assault. The author has strongly denied the allegations, and while he contributed to writing this finale, he did not work on production, and his production company, Blank Corporation, was not involved.
The final chapter of Good Omens picks up following the star-crossed lovers’ sad separation at the end of season two, with Aziraphale (Michael Sheen) heading to heaven to work as a Supreme Archangel and Crowley (David Tennant) staying on Earth. We meet Aziraphale working in heaven in this new role, tasked with overseeing the Second Coming while also bickering with the other angels. Meanwhile, Crowley is at rock bottom, gambling and drinking his way through Soho.
Heaven has the grand idea of resurrecting Jesus (Bilal Hasna) and sending him back to Earth with the goal of spreading universal happiness. Before he can properly give the second coming of the Messiah his task, heaven starts to fall apart. Aziraphale loses Jesus, the Book of Life and Metatron. So, he turns to the only person he can trust… Crowley.
Returning alongside Sheen and Tennant is Derek Jacobi as the absent Metatron, Doon Mackihan as Archangel Michael, Gloria Obianyo as Uriel, Liz Carr as Saraqael and Quelin Sepulveda as Muriel. The joy of Good Omens is that they have collected a cast full of some of the most reliable names in British acting, who deliver even when the writing can’t quite manage.
A Finale Full of Missed Opportunities
There are a lot of good ideas in this rushed finale, but it’s very obvious that the writers have had to cram six to eight episodes of content into 90 minutes. The extended episode speeds through plots, characters and concepts, clearly forced to edit out multiple ideas and characters from the finale results. Blink, and you’ll miss an entire narrative.
Fans looking for some resolution from season 2’s ending will be especially annoyed with the choices made here. Like everything else here, the show simply can’t balance Crowley and Aziraphale’s relationship alongside all the other possibly world-ending plots. Luckily, Michael Sheen and David Tennant’s on-screen chemistry fills in the gaps the writers don’t have time to explore. You can only hope these two will find another project in the future, because it would be sad to end their joyous partnership on such a damp note.
The plot, which sees Jesus resurrected into the body of a young man and lands in modern-day London, is full of potential. The writing is sharp and witty, with the perfect number of biblical references as well as nods to pop culture. It’s a tragedy the show didn’t get the opportunity to fully explore how the messiah would handle modern-day London and 21st-century society as a whole. This plot, which clearly should have played a larger role in the proceedings, could have had so much to say about society because the scene in which he meets his first human is a joy.
Considering the tightened schedule, it seems odd that the writers decided to keep some of the more eccentric plot points while skimming over some of the more meaningful. For example, the ending is wrapped up infuriatingly quickly, while time is spent watching Aziraphale challenge someone to a crossword completing competition. Whether it’s because of the behind-the-scenes drama or the change of episode format, it appears that no care was put into the finale of Good Omens.
So, this leaves a confusing feature-length episode that jumps around, trying to resolve the new plot points as quickly as possible and wrap up some existing ones. Some stories are resolved within minutes, making it hard to care that they ever happened, while others hang in the open without ever being wrapped up. The choices made for the ending are utterly bizarre and feel like they are doing fans a disservice by trying to execute fan service.
It’s not all bad; there are some great one-liners that throw carefully put-together digs at religion and modern society, and the cast is as excellent as ever. It’s not entirely unwatchable, but it feels like a pointless exercise that nowhere near lives up to what this should have been.
Should Good Omens Have Ended With Part 2?
Ultimately, you’ll likely walk away from this finale series feeling like you’ve eaten a sandwich full of air. It has a lot of potential and clearly there was great intentions to the writing, but the finish result feels a pointless waste of time.
The end result of these many behind-the-scenes dramas and changes is a confusing and shallow imitation of the show many people loved. Perhaps the show should have ended after the second series, and as frustrating as the cliffhanger finale would have been, it would have been more satisfying than the one on offer here.
Good Omens 3 will be available to stream on Prime Video from 13 May
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