Who Needs Omens when Things Always Turn Out Okay Anyway?

I realised last week the new season of Good Omens wasn't streaming week to week, as I thought, but had in fact premiered in entirety on the first day. So I worked my way through the rest of the six episodes over the past four days. It wasn't as hard as I dreaded, it does become a bit less saccharine after the first episode. I enjoyed the episode with Mark Gatiss as part of a trio of Nazi zombies and it was exciting to see Peter Davison as Job. Still, the show was overburdened with sweetness and light.

I went back and read my review for season one and was reminded how different Crowley and Aziraphale were back then. In season two, you get the impression that the demon Crowley had never intentionally done a bad thing and that Aziraphale is just plain dumb.

Crowley couldn't even bring himself to kill Job's goats. I'm not really sure what Gaiman and Finnemore were trying to say with their satire of the Book of Job. Either they're saying God worked through Aziraphale and Crowley to make Job's troubles less horrific, or they're criticising the bible for being cruel and wicked. Neither possibility is as satisfying as the complexity and emotion of the original work, which addresses the very real circumstance of a good person who suffers terribly.

But Good Omens 2 shows us a softer, kinder world where the virtuous are always found out and rewarded, and no-one truly dies.

Well, there's some permanent death in an episode that seems inspired by the Burke and Hare murders. Incidentally, one of David Tennant's first roles on Doctor Who, before he was cast as the Doctor, was playing a minor character in an audio play about the murders in 2004.

Like most stories about Burke and Hare, Aziraphale and Crowley's encounter with, in this case, a young woman who sells corpses to a surgeon highlights the moral ambiguities inherent in the tale. It's wrong to dig up corpses and sell them, yet medical science needed cadavers to save the living and the poor needed the money to be had by digging up corpses. When it came to murder, was it because the system pushed the criminal gradually and inexorably into that crime?

Aziraphale is bewildered at every turn, as though this is the first time in millions of years he's come across any difficult moral problem. But I guess that's the central joke of Good Omens, that all these characters, always and forever, act as though they were born yesterday. Except Crowley for some reason, who seems really bored this season.

The way he's always lounging around, half asleep, it's like you've invited your world travelling, adventuresome uncle to a 12 hour birthday party at Chuck E Cheese.

Good Omens 2 is available on Amazon Prime.