I think the bandstand breakup conversation is the direct cause of Aziraphale defecting from heaven’s army. Crowley howls about the horror of the Plan, and Aziraphale recoils like Crowley’s blasphemed God. He actually says “May you be forgiven,” and Crowley says he’s “unforgivable.” I don’t think that’s self-condemnation. I think Crowley means he’s unforgivable because he won’t repent for it. He’s six steps ahead of Aziraphale here: the Plan isn’t holy. The Plan is absurd. Even their terrible plan to rewire the child Antichrist, failed and fallible as it was, was a better plan than heaven’s, because it was kinder. When Crowley shows up again at the bookshop and keeps begging Aziraphale to leave and calls him a clever idiot for not understanding that heaven’s never going to save the world, Aziraphale tries to offer him forgiveness for his sin in saying that, again. And Crowley gets offended. Rightfully. Because Aziraphale is missing the point.
Aziraphale thinks blaspheming the Plan is offending God because the two concepts have been synonymous in heaven for millennia, to the point where no one up there has noticed that they haven’t heard from God in years. No one’s realized not even the Metatron has a direct line to Her. Nobody’s ever thought to question Gabriel’s right to run the show like it’s his personal Broadway revue, because he’s following the Plan. They don’t worship God, they worship the Plan. Somewhere between Crowley making one last appeal to God Herself not to go through with it, alone in his flat, and showing up at the bookshop shouting at Aziraphale about his stupidity, Crowley’s gotten his confirmation that God’s not even involved with this, and nothing’s going to stop it unless they do.
Which is good, because for all Aziraphale’s trying to pardon Crowley’s insubordination, he is having the same realization: the Plan must be stopped. It’s wrong, it’s cruel, it’s unforgivable. He goes to the angels about it, and when they refuse to see that, and threaten Crowley to boot, he takes another step out of line and shouts at them for being bad angels, with the first real fury we’ve ever seen from him. He’s beginning to own his agency–we’re seeing Aziraphale discover the duty of choice, which is so essentially sacred it makes the Plan look profane. I don’t think this would have happened if he hadn’t had six thousand years of friendship with Crowley topped by ten years’ working with him to prove that there were kinder ways to live than heaven’s. Propaganda is pretty hard to work through. Crowley couldn’t just shout at him about a choice: he had to show him how to make it.
But he has been shown how. And now he’s upset. The power of discovering anger and the sudden momentum of making a choice to yell at angels gives him the hubris to go right on to the Metatron about calling off the Plan–and the Metatron has nothing worth saying about it either. Certainly nothing divine. Whether God has any answers for him or not depends, I think, completely on whether Aziraphale’s urgent need to do something is from Her, because when the room stays silent Aziraphale turns to the only person who’s ever actually told him how to choose love, like heaven says God wants him to: he picks up the phone to call Crowley. The bandstand conversation has taken over all his other motivations; the shock of the blasphemy has shaken him out of his certainties and into better ones. He has to stop the Plan.
So when he’s accidentally sucked back up to Heaven he already knows he doesn’t belong there; he’s made the leap from “you bad angels” to the terrifying conclusion–they’re all bad angels. They don’t love the world. They don’t understand what it means to have a duty to love stronger than the duty to heaven. There’s no such thing as a good angel, any more, which is why he says quite calmly, “I’m not a very good angel,” as he turns his back on them to make the leap back to earth. When he confronts everyone he’s ever followed or feared at Armageddon with the question: how do we know that the Plan is good? How do we know that the Plan is God’s? How do we know what’s meant to happen next?–Crowley taught him that. The Plan doesn’t have to be worshipped. The Plan can be blasphemed. The Plan isn’t God. It’s all up to them.
You make a lot of very good points, but I want to point at one of them in particular. The moment when Aziraphale says he’s not a very good angel, followed by him choosing to fall back to Earth to possess a human body (a thing expressly stated on screen as a demonic thing to do) in order to resist Heaven’s Plan.
Crowley didn’t have a choice when he Fell.
Aziraphale, on screen, did a swan dive with both middle fingers up.
And importantly, his choice was not met by damnation from the Almighty. Because the Plan he is resisting was never Hers.
She has always wanted them to love humans more than anything else
“Crowley means he’s unforgivable because he won’t repent for it. He’s six steps ahead of Aziraphale here: the Plan isn’t holy.”
“They don’t worship God, they worship the Plan.”
“they’re all bad angels. They don’t love the world. They don’t understand what it means to have a duty to love stronger than the duty to heaven.”
“his choice was not met by damnation from the Almighty. Because the Plan he is resisting was never Hers.”
so anyway this show is very much about the intersection of being queer and american christianity
I love this meta, but I also have one small but important nitpick: Crowley believed God was tied to the Plan, too. He didn’t show Aziraphale that was incorrect before Aziraphale rebelled; Aziraphale reached that conclusion ON HIS OWN. In fact, it’s the most radical thing he did, and the one thing he is ahead of Crowley on realizing. Aziraphale blows Crowley’s mind wide open with that realization…and we see it at the Tadfield airbase. And I think it’s vitally important for both Crowley’s and Aziraphale’s arcs that this be acknowledged!
Crowley believes, from when he first questioned God as an angel all the way until that moment at the airbase, that the Plan and God are one. We know he believes it as far as his questioning God alone in his flat, certainly, but I don’t think we have any reason to believe that Crowley came to any conclusions with that. At most, he decided that if the Plan is bad, and God is determined to have the Plan go through, then God is bad too. I think that’s why he’s so angry and blasphemous at the bandstand; he’s not just angry at the Plan, he’s disillusioned with God Herself. If his pleas to God were a sign that he still clung to some vestiges of faith that She was good, that what she wanted for the world ought to be good and have a real and worthwhile point to it all, then the lack of answers he got from Her leads Crowley to believe that She either doesn’t care or isn’t actually good at all, and he’s hurt by that. He’s outraged. And why shouldn’t he be? He and the other demons were condemned for not being good enough by a deity who’s not even good by Crowley’s demonic standards! Who’s not good by just about any standards!
And then, at Tadfield, Aziraphale says, ‘are you quite sure the Great Plan is actually…the Ineffable Plan?’ to Gabriel and Beelzebub. (I’m paraphrasing, I don’t remember the exact wording.) And we watch Crowley’s brain explode.
He genuinely hadn’t considered that the Plan the angels and demons were following might not be from God. That it might not be what She wanted. He hadn’t considered that they’ve just been making shit up and pushing their own agendas to the point where whatever God actually wants might be totally lost, genuinely unknowable. Crowley realizes that maybe his faith, his hopes for God and Her benevolence, even just her making some kind of sense, may not have been totallymisplaced.
But no one can look at Crowley’s eyes going impossibly wide, at his breathing “…you don’t know” at Gabriel and Beelzebub, and tell me that Crowley knew all along that the Plan wasn’t Godly. That is pure revelation there. That was Aziraphale galaxy braining himself a few miles ahead of Crowley for the first time, and you can’t tell me Crowley didn’t fall even more in love with Aziraphale for that.
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@beeperbopper reply: The concept of choice is so central to Jewish theology that when I was watching the show I jumped to the Plan isn’t God’s Plan way ahead of being shown it on screen. It bares repeating that Neil Gaiman is Jewish (and Terry Pratchett Questioned Everything Always), and it struck me that the entire show felt like watching Christian theology through a Jewish lens. This is incredibly rare and odd, since most of the time I’m having to explain Jewish theology through a Christian lens (aka to my non-religious friends who nonetheless grew up in a Christian majority culture). The entire show felt like watching two characters who have been raised with a Christian concept of theology stumble their way into the Jewish concept of theology.
Because the thing about Judaism is that it REWARDS questions. Crowley falling for asking questions was so odd to me, so uncomfortable, that it left a niggling doubt in my mind throughout the entire plot. Judaism often ENCOURAGES yelling at God and questioning God. And yet - and yet - Jewish theology (often) maintains that God does have some type of plan, we just don’t always know what it is. (It’s ineffable. Lol.)
But keep in mind that Aziraphale spoke to God directly, early on in the show. Aziraphale was on speaking terms with God before God stopped talking to everyone - he’s surprised to talk to the Metatron and not God Herself, and he fully anticipates being patched through to God.
And yet, Aziraphale is never punished for giving away the flaming sword, and God basically ignores him after asking where it went. Aziraphale is never punished for befriending Crowley in the garden, even though God was still there and still talking to everyone at that point. Effectively, God encourages their friendship from the very beginning by putting Aziraphale on apple tree duty, ignoring the “lost” flaming sword, and ignoring all future “forbidden” friendship.
Aziraphale, at some level, has *got* to be wondering why he was never punished for any of those actions that surely, even if Heaven didn’t notice, God did. And then Crowley gives him the tools to figure it out. Crowley gives him the questions, gives him the anger, gives him the chutzpah to drive a wedge into the Assumed Authority of the Plan.
Because when Crowley is questioning God, “you’re testing them, you said you’d test them” he’s wrong about WHO God is testing. From what I can gather, Crowley assumes God is testing humans. But why would She do that? Who is there to be tested in the Apocalypse-that-didn’t? Is it that Adam can be turned from a Creature of Hell into a real human? That’s one test. Or is it that Heaven and Hell can work together to build a world that is better, a world that is human and has choice and love as the foundation, rather than good and evil vying for supremacy? And who better to prove that Heaven and Hell might be two sides of the coin but are the SAME COIN than Aziraphale and Crowley. That’s the other test.
And the show’s visuals amplify this concept. Heaven is the top of the skyscraper and Hell is the basement. Gabriel and Beezlebub know each other and are obviously frenemies. There are “back channels” of communication.
Maybe the test is whether angels and demons can be more like humans than whether humans can be more like angels and demons. Aziraphale and Crowley are being tested, not humanity.
But also! Another concept inherent in Judaism is that God will change Her plan if confronted by new evidence or convinced otherwise. I don’t actually see evidence for this in Good Omens, but I think it’s worth mentioning.
