Something that’s been very interesting to me, in this new wave of post-miniseries Good Omens fandom, is the apparent fannish consensus that Crowley is, in fact, bad at his job. That he’s actually quite nice. That he’s been skating by hiding his general goodness from hell by taking credit for human evil and doling out a smattering of tiny benign inconveniences that he calls bad.
I get the urge towards that headcanon, and I do think the Crowley in the miniseries comes off as nicer than the one in the book. (I think miniseries Crowley and Aziraphale are both a little nicer, a little more toothless, than the versions of themselves in the book.) But maybe it’s because I was a book fan first, or maybe it’s because I just find him infinitely more interesting this way–I think Crowley, even show!Crowley, has the capacity to be very good at his job of sowing evil. And I think that matters to the story as a whole.
A demon’s job on Earth, and specifically Crowley’s job on Earth, isn’t to make people suffer. It’s to make people sin. And the handful of ‘evil’ things we see Crowley do over the course of the series are effective at that, even if the show itself doesn’t explore them a lot.
Take the cell phone network thing, for instance. This gets a paragraph in the book that’s largely brushed off in the conversation with Hastur and Ligur, and I think it’s really telling:
What could he tell them? That twenty thousand people got bloody furious? That you could hear the arteries clanging shut all across the city? And that then they went back and took it out on their secretaries or traffic wardens or whatever, and they took it out on other people? In all kinds of vindictive little ways which, and here was the good bit, they thought up themselves. For the rest of the day. The pass-along effects were incalculable. Thousands and thousands of souls all got a faint patina of tarnish, and you hardly had to lift a finger.
In essence, without any great expenditure of effort (look, I’d never say Crowley isn’t slothful, but that just makes him efficient), he’s managed to put half of London in a mental and emotional state that Crowley knows will make them more inclined to sin. He’s given twenty thousand or a hundred thousand or half a million people a Bad Day. Which, okay, it’s just a bad day–but bad days are exhausting. Bad days make you snap, make you fail at things, make you feel guiltier and more stressed out in the aftermath when you wake up the next day, makes everything a little worse. Bad days matter.
Maybe it’s because I’m a believer in the ripple effect of small kindnesses, and that means I have to believe in its opposite. Maybe it’s just that I, personally, have had enough days that were bad enough that a downed cell network (or an angry coworker because of a downed cell network) would honestly have mattered. But somebody who deliberately moves through the world doing their best to make everyone’s lives harder, with the aim of encouraging everybody around them to be just a little crueler, just a little angrier, just a little less empathetic–you know what, yes. I do call that successful evil.
It’s subtle, is the thing. That’s why Hastur and Ligur don’t get it, don’t approve of it. Not because Crowley isn’t good at his job, but because we’ve seen from the beginning that Hastur and Ligur are extremely out of touch with humanity and the modern world and just plain aren’t smart enough to get it. It’s a strategy that relies on understanding how humans work, what our buttons are and how to press them. It’s also a strategy that’s remarkably advanced in terms of free will. Hastur and Ligur deliberately tempt and coerce and entrap individuals into sinning, but Crowley never even gets close. We never see him say to a single person, ‘hey, I’ve got an idea for you, why don’t you go do this bad thing?’ He sets up conditions to encourage humans to actually do the bad things they’re already thinking of themselves. He creates a situation and opens it up to the results of free choice. Every single thing a person does after Crowley’s messed with them is their own decision, without any demonic coercion to blame for any of it.
You see it again in the paintball match. “They wanted real guns, I gave them what they wanted.” In this case, Crowley didn’t need to irritate anybody into wanting to do evil–the desire to shoot and hurt and maybe even kill their own coworkers was already present in every combatant on that paintball field. Crowley just so happened to be there at exactly the right time to give them the opportunity to turn that fleeting, kind-of-bad-but-never-acted-upon desire into real, concrete, attempted murder. Sure, nobody died–where would be the fun in a pile of corpses? But now forty-odd people who may never have committed a real act of violence in their entire lives, caught in a moment of weakness with real live weapons in their hands, will get to spend the rest of their lives knowing that given the opportunity and the tiniest smidgen of plausible deniability, they are absolutely the sort of people who could and would kill another human being they see every single day over a string of petty annoyances.
Crowley understands the path between bad thought andevil action. He knows it gets shorter when somebody is upset or irritated, and that it gets shorter when people practice turning one into the other. He understands that sometimes, removing a couple of practical obstacles is the only nudge a person needs–no demonic pressure or circumvention of free will required.
I love this interpretation, because I love the idea that Crowley, who’s been living on Earth for six thousand years, actually gets people in a way no other demon can. I love the idea that Crowley, the very first tempter, who was there when free will was invented, understands how it works and how to use it better than maybe anyone else. And I really love the idea that Crowley our hero, who loves Aziraphale and saves the world, isn’t necessarily a good guy.
There’s a narrative fandom’s been telling that, at its core, is centered around the idea that Crowley is good, and loves and cares and is nice, and always has been. Heaven and its rigid ideas of Right and Wrong is itself the bad thing. Crowley is too good for Heaven, and was punished for it, but under all the angst and pain and feelings of hurt and betrayal, he’s the best of all of them after all.
That’s a compelling story. There’s a reason we keep telling it. The conflict between kindness and Moral Authority, the idea that maybe the people in charge are the ones who’re wrong and the people they’ve rejected are both victim and hero all at once–yeah. There’s a lot there to connect with, and I wouldn’t want to take it away from anyone. But the compelling story I want, for me, is different.
I look at Crowley and I want a story about someone who absolutely has the capacity for cruelty and disseminating evil into the world. Somebody who’s actually really skilled at it, even if all he does is create opportunities, and humans themselves just keep living down to and even surpassing his expectations. Somebody who enjoys it, even. Maybe he was unfairly labeled and tossed out of heaven to begin with, but he’s embraced what he was given. He’s thrived. He is, legitimately, a bad person.
And he tries to save the world anyway.
He loves Aziraphale. He helps save the entire world. Scared and desperate and determined and devoted, he drives through a wall of fire for the sake of something other than himself. He likes humans, their cleverness, their complexities, the talent they have for doing the same sort of evil he does himself, the talent they have for doing the exact opposite. He cares.
It’s not a story about someone who was always secretly good even though they tried to convince the whole world and themself that they weren’t. It’s a story about someone who, despite being legitimately bad in so many ways, still has the capacity to be good anyway. It’s not about redemption, or about what Heaven thinks or judges or wants. It’s about free will. However terrible you are or were or have the ability to be, you can still choose to do a good thing. You can still love. You can still be loved in return.
And I think that matters.
It’s also worth noting that when Crowley gives people means and opportunities to make a bad choice, that doesn’t take away from them the ability to make a good choiceinstead.
If people were only offered one possibility to act, it would make their sin less meaningful, it would make Crowley’s work less meaningful. But for those who actually decide to not go and yell at their secretary because the phone network being down has been rougn on their nerves, it’s also an effort that becomes meaningful in the right way.
So, yeah, I really agree on all of this, especially the part about free will. That’s what is essential in both Crowley and Aziraphale’s characterizations, and it’s at the very core of the story.
You know what? This makes me want to see a story where Aziraphale and Crowley are actually incredibly good at their jobs. They’ve been on Earth all this time and they really are the most effective field agents Heaven and Hell have - never mind if that effectiveness is cancelled out by the arrangement.
When Crowley and Aziraphale go rogue, someone has to fill in for them. After all, there’s still a job to be done, even if no one anticipated having to do it. However, whoever the new agents are - whether they’re a new principality and a new demon of equivalent rank or a small team of Angels and arch-angels against a little squad of imps - have nowhere near the level of “success” that the previous two did. They don’t understand Earth, humans, or free will, and they’re about four thousand years away from being at the same place the Ineffable Husbands were when they made the arrangement.
I want to see Heaven and Hell, who laughed and sneered at their earthly agents, come to realize just how valuable they were. I want the sweet satisfaction of the two sides missing Crowley and Aziraphale as a jealous ex misses you after you’ve long since moved on.
Aha yes, the reaction of Heaven and Hell alone would be priceless !
I agree with the OP 110%. Crowley is notbad at his job, he’s fucking brilliant at it. But he doesn’t do this 1-on-1 crap like in the old days. He’s become a Logistical Nightmare of Efficency in the most nightmarish of hellish sense. He sows discontent and malaise through thousandsof souls at a time, not just a handful who happen to be near by.
If anything, if you really didn’t want to classify Crowley as “evil”, he’s a Trickster God. He’d hang out with Loki and Papa Legba.
He just sets up the pieces and lets Humainty choose how they want them to tumble. He gives you the choice to do right, but is right there to point out how much worse/fun being bad will be. All for the the low, low price of your soul. And yes, maybe he sort of pads his success by picking people already leaning into their darker inclinations (again, see the Paint Ball into Live Ammunition), but it’s also why he always seems so disapointed when they come up with things before he can even suggest them (see the “animals” in the Bastille, see the “stupid Nazi spies” in WWII). An argument could be made he’s disapointed they got there before he could. But it’s cool, because he’ll take the credit anyway.
Heaven and Hell are absolutely going to notice both Crowley and Aziraphale’s absenses, eventually, though maybe in a human generation or two. Not right away, they’re slow to catch up. And that’s what’ll make Our Side victorious.
It makes me a bit nuts when either A or C are considered incompetent. If they actually sucked at their jobs, either one would have been replaced ages ago, because in addition to taking credit for human things, someone is doing the blessings and temptations each side asks for.
But Crowley is that bit better because he takes initiative. He invents ways to get people to sin. And he’s willing to put in hard work if necessary, as when he went out at night to move markers for the M25.
Not only are they very good at their jobs, they’re very good at each other’s job! That’s the whole point of the Arrangement, that both are capable of pulling off blessings and temptations.
You know at some point Crowley was out there giving Aziraphale lessons in How to Tempt Humans, mostly for his own amusement, and probably waaaay before the Arrangement crossed his mind, because he’d never suggest it if he didn’t already believe Aziraphale capable of matching his skills. And Crowley must have done enough good miracles on his own for Aziraphale to be confident he could pretend to be an angel without giving in to his chaotic/trolling tendencies or else he’d never have agreed to it.
Celebrating 32 years of Good Omens with these two lovely gentlemen - David Tennant and Michael Sheen promoting Good Omens at New York Comic Con in 2018
for Tennant Tuesday (or whatever day this post finds you)
Excerpt from The Nice and Accurate Good Omens TV Companion:
Eleven years later, on his return to the scene of the diabolical switcheroo, this time with Aziraphale in tow, Crowley finds himself in a very different setting. Gone are the Satanic Nuns of the Chattering Order of St. Beryl’s and their movements in the shadows. Now, with St. Beryl’s never having risen from the ashes, they find the building transformed. Instead, the demon and his angelic associate walk into Tadfield Manor, which has been converted into a venue for office teambuilding away days. Across the manor grounds, an interdepartmental paintball skirmish is in full swing. Naturally, in the presence of such entities, the exercise becomes something altogether more dangerous and deadly.
“Michael Ralph [production designer] did a fantastic job of transforming the forecourt outside the building by dressing it as a battle zone,” says [first assistant director] Cesco Reidy. “We had military vehicles, camouflage nets and an obstacle course. It really was fit for purpose as an adventure playground for grown-ups with guns.”
In order to make the most of the conflict and the chaos that ensues, Douglas Mackinnon and the director of photography, Gavin Finney, called in the high-speed Phantom camera.
“You see it used on football replays, shooting a ridiculous number of frames per second,” explains script supervisor Jemima Thomas. “We wanted to see the paintballs flying as Crowley and Aziraphale walk through in super slow mo, and we staged and choreographed it carefully so they didn’t get splattered.”
While the pair depart without a mark on them, leaving bedlam in their wake, there’s no escaping the enormity of the task they face. For the Antichrist is missing, and Armageddon a matter of days away.
Many, many years ago (it was Hallowe'en 1989, for the curious, the year before Good Omens was published) Terry Pratchett and I were sharing a room at the World Fantasy Convention in Seattle, to keep the costs down, because we were both young authors, and taking ourselves to America and conventions were expensive. It was a wonderful convention. I remember a huge Seattle second-hand bookstore in which I found a dozen or so green-bound Storisende Edition James Branch Cabell books, each signed so neatly by the author that the bookshop people assured me that the signatures were printed, and really ten dollars a book was the correct price.
I could afford books. Good Omens had just been sold to UK publishers and then to US publishers for more money than Terry or I had ever received for anything. (Terry had been incredibly worried about this, certain that receiving a healthy advance would mean the end of his career. When his career didn’t end, Terry suggested to his agent that perhaps he ought to be getting that kind of advance for every book from now on, and his life changed, and he stopped having to share a hotel room to save money. But I digress.) Advance reading copies of Good Omens had not yet gone out, but a few editors had read it (ones who had bid for it but failed to buy it) and they all seemed very excited about it, and thrilled for us.
On the Saturday evening Terry left the bar quite early and headed off to bed. I stayed up talking to people and having a marvelous time, hung in there until the small hours of the morning when they closed the hotel bar and all the people went away, and then headed up to the hotel room room.
I opened the door as quietly as I could and tiptoed in the dark across the room to where my bed was located.
I’d just reached the bed when, from the far side of the room, a voice said, “What time of the night do you call this then? Your mother and I have been worried sick about you.”
Terry was wide awake. Jet lag had taken its toll.
And I was wide awake too. So we lay in our respective beds and having nothing else to do, we plotted the sequel to Good Omens. It was a good one, too. We fully intended to write it, whenever we next had three or four months free. Only I went to live in America and Terry stayed in the UK, and after Good Omens was published Sandman became SANDMAN and Discworld became DISCWORLD™ and there wasn’t ever a good time.
But we never forgot it.
It’s been thirty-one years since Good Omens was published, which means it’s thirty-two years since Terry Pratchett and I lay in our respective beds in a Seattle hotel room at a World Fantasy Convention, and plotted the sequel. (I got to use bits of the sequel in the TV series version of Good Omens – that’s where our angels came from.)
Terry and I, in Cardiff in 2010, on the night we decided that Good Omens should become a television series.
Terry was clear on what he wanted from Good Omens on the telly. He wanted the story told, and if that worked, he wanted the rest of the story told.
So in September 2017 I sat down in St James’ Park, beside the director, Douglas Mackinnon, on a chair with my name on it, as Showrunner of Good Omens. The chair slowly and elegantly lowered itself to the ground underneath me and fell apart, and I thought, that’s not really a good omen. Fortunately, under Douglas’s leadership, that chair was the only thing that collapsed.
The crumbled chair.
So, once Good Omens the TV series had been released by Amazon and the BBC, to global acclaim, many awards and joy, Rob Wilkins (Terry’s representative on Earth) and I had the conversation with the BBC and Amazon about doing some more. And they got very excited. We talked to Michael Sheen and David Tennant about doing some more. They also got very excited. We told them a little about the plot. They got even more excited.
Rob Wilkins and David Tennant on the second day of shooting.
Me and Michael and Ash aged nearly 2.
What it was mostly like shooting Good Omens: peering into screens while something happened round the corner.
I’d been a fan of John Finnemore’s for years, and had had the joy of working with him on a radio show called With Great Pleasure, where I picked passages I loved, had amazing readers read them aloud and talked about them.
L to R: With Great Pleasure. John Finnemore, me all beardy, Nina Sosanya (Sister Mary in Good Omens) Peter Capaldi (he played Islington in the original BBC series of Neverwhere).
I asked John if he’d be willing to work with me on writing the next round of Good Omens, and was overjoyed when he said yes. We have some surprise guest collaborators too. And Douglas Mackinnon is returning to oversee the whole thing with me.
So that’s the plan. We’ve been keeping it secret for a long time (mostly because otherwise my mail and Twitter feeds would have turned into gushing torrents of What Can You Tell Us About It? long ago) but we are now at the point where sets are being built in Scotland (which is where we’re shooting, and more about filming things in Scotland soon), and we can’t really keep it secret any longer.
There are so many questions people have asked about what happened next (and also, what happened before) to our favourite Angel and Demon. Here are, perhaps, some of the answers you’ve been hoping for.
AsGood Omens continues, we will be back in Soho, and all through time and space, solving a mystery which starts with one of the angels wandering through a Soho street market with no memory of who they might be, on their way to Aziraphale’s bookshop.
(Although our story actually begins about five minutes before anyone had got around to saying “Let there be Light”.)
[ID: A digital drawing of Crowley and Aziraphale from Good Omens. Crowley is facing upwards reaching out towards Aziraphale with a desperate look on his face. Aziraphale is falling upside down and reaching out towards Crowley, looking determined. Crowley is holding the small metal piece of his Bentley, and Aziraphale is holding the flaming sword. END ID]
I couldn’t decide on the BG for this piece. Photoshop allows one to create such amazing effects, and I really liked both the fire and the rainbow versions I used for this, so I’m posting both.
ok listen! in the scene after the bookshop burns down where Crowley is getting drunk in a bar and then Aziraphale turns up without a body I’m about 90% sure Crowley didn’t think he was talking to actual Aziraphale. He was drunk, he had just lost his best friend. He probably thought Aziraphale was just a hallucination because of the alcohol. At least at first.
The pain in his voice when he says “I lost my best friend” is just so heartbreaking!
It’s been a long time since I posted anything. Just a piece of fan art for MarbleHeart’s Good Omens fic Flash Fire https://archiveofourown.org/users/MarbleHeart/pseuds/MarbleHeart Anyways the scene it’s from involved Crowley sitting around in a pair of pajama bottoms Aziraphale had bought for him as well as the Angel’s sweater. Also the throw pillows are actual throw pillows I’ve seen for sale so there’s that.
This was for one of my august polls on patreon. September’s are up now if you want to vote! (There’s also still a few spots left in the print tier and I have something extra special planned for that this month )
