I Know Where I'm Going
Aziraphale's Edinburgh Journey: Part 5
Episode 3 of S2 is named after a black-and-white 1945 Powell and Pressburger film, which is in turn named after an old Scottish folk song. It's a delightful film, which I'll discuss further below the cut, that strides headlong into the theme of fate vs free will, among other things.
This is the last major piece we need to tie things together, after starting this journey with The Clue in Episode 2, which lead Aziraphale to make the journey to Edinburgh in the first place.
Fate vs Free Will
I Know Where I'm Going, both the film and S2E3, is about not ending up where you expected to be, so this how Aziraphale went expecting to find the answer to one question, but found the answer to an unexpected question instead. So part of the problem we have is that while we end up getting the answers to two questions, one expected and one unexpected, I feel people really aren't recognizing the questions that raise them in the first place.
Not making sense? Let me describe the film.
Joan is a confident young (25yo) lady on her way to the (fictitious) Ilse of Kiloran to marry a rich older industrialist. This involves a journey by train then several ferries to the ultimate destination. However she gets stuck on the Isle of Mull, the penultimate stop, as the weather turns, and has to stay the night, then several days, as a bad gale blows.
She meets a fellow traveller, Torquill McNeil, a naval officer home on leave, who invites her up to one of the local mansions. Joan meets some of the delightful and slightly eccentric locals (the pack of goofy, soft wolf hounds of the Lady of the house, Catriona Potts, are a highlight of the film, imo) including a retired colonel who's into falconry who keeps going on about a lost golden eagle that he's training. (The eagle is a metaphor for Torquill, it turns out.)
We find out Torquill is actually the Laird of Kiloran, and he is renting out Kiloran to Joan's husband-to-be for money while he's off in the navy seeing the world. Torquill knows all the locals, and the locals know him, and they are all kind of bound together as one big happy family, in a way.
The next morning Torquill takes Joan to the hotel in another village to talk to her fiance via radio, as they still can't get to the other island. The fiance (who we never see) recommends visiting another house nearby. She does, and we find out they are also rich from new money, and care nothing about the locals and the local environment. And this is where we start learning there is a bit of divide between the old and the new, the rural out door life that is connected to the land, and the new wealth that cuts itself off from its surroundings and other people. And Joan is going to be a part of that - in her dream on the train, the same dream that gives us the tartan clad hills, she marries a corporation, not a person - so impersonal!
Joan is desperate to get across to Kiloran (she knows where she's going! She thinks...) After repeatedly bumping into Torquill over the next couple of days and it becoming evident there are feelings growing between them, she bribes a young local boatman to take her across to her fiance and expected marriage on Kiloran to escape this, even though the gale is still blowing strong. Torquill finds out at the last minute, and jumps into the boat with them. They get caught in a squall, and the motor cuts out. The tide drags them towards the infamous local whirlpool, and they only just escape due to Torquill's expertise.
Joan is chastened when they return to safety. That was the point of not risking the crossing in the gale in the first place, explains Torquill. They could have sent a rescue boat out if they got into trouble, but it puts more than just the rescuers at risk, it puts their families at risk, and then that extends to the whole island. Doesn't she see how the whole island is interconnected? She finally realizes how selfish she has been.
The next day dawns brightly, and the gale has finally blown out - the sea is a calm and a ferry crossing will be no trouble today. The colonel finally catches up with his golden eagle, and brings it home to roost.
Joan and Torquill say their farewells on the road, and there's a Great Big Kiss before they part and go their separate ways.
Torquill walks past the ruined castle that he is fated to be cursed if he enters as Laird of Kiloran. But he decides to risk it, and he goes in and explores the ruins, and we hear the whole story of the curse and finds that it isn't such a bad curse after all - in a metaphorical way! The next thing he hears is bagpipes - it's Joan returning up the road with the pipers that were supposed to be at her wedding. She has decided she wasn't going where she thought she was going after all and has come back to be with Torquill, her new love.
That's the basics of the story, but if you would like to watch it, I would recommend you do, as there is a lot more in it than that.
(I did watch "A Matter of Life and Death/Stairway to Heaven" before finishing this post, seeing as the book that features in it also appears in S2xE3, which is the main episode around the trip to Edinburgh, but more in relation to Gabriel's situation I think. It also deals with a character trying to escape their intended fate, but they do so by attending a formal trial and pleading their case. Other ops have reviewed the film here and here if you want to find out a bit more. I wasn't as impressed with that film, sorry to say, but I will probably watch it again to reflect on certain features and points in it relevant to GO, there is a lot. And to work out which minor character a very young Sir Richard Attenborough was playing!)
Lunatic Behaviour and Lethal Traps
Some ops have pointed out that Elspeth and Wee Morag act as parallel characters to Crowley and Aziraphale. While some would argue there are various ways to interpret this, the music indicates that Elspeth aligns with Crowley and Wee Morag with Aziraphale.
Elspeth is the one trying hard to engineer the pair's escape from the poverty trap they are in, even if it is by nefarious means. Wee Morag is the one scandalised by Elspeth's illicit actions, and concerned about doing right by Heaven. Crowley takes up Elspeth's side of the argument against Aziraphale, that its not as easy to escape poverty as one thinks (i.e. just working hard will fix things) but he also tries to warn Wee Morag that things don't work the way she thinks they do in the afterlife either.
So what's the price one pays for going down the path of body snatching as an escape from poverty? You have to get past the lethal traps of the grave guns that have been set, by not tripping the wires. And again, its the wealthy privileged ones that have the advantage.
Acting in haste was a disaster. They got split up, never to see one another again. One more body may have got them out of short term trouble, but what about the long term?
Escape is a nice dream, but a harsh reality.
Elspeth was going to use the laudanum as another form of easy escape, until Crowley prevented it, then acted as a daemonium ex machina to assist her in escaping properly good, using Aziraphale's money, as that was really the only way she was going to escape for good.*
Joan tried to escape Torquill in I Know Where I'm Going, but only cast herself and her companions into danger. If she had been more patient and less selfish, she might have had everything she wanted without suffering on the way. But that wouldn't have made as good a story then, would it? And she wouldn't have gotten to know Torquill and fallen for him, either.
If Aziraphale ran away to Alpha Centauri with Crowley, like Crowley had been urging in the present, would they be free? The inference is its unlikely, that they wouldn't be able to escape their own "poverty trap," the alarms would be raised, and the trouble they caused would be too deep to pull themselves out of. Luck hasn't been on their side so far.
The View from Above
By now we should be alert to characters trying to avoid their fate, or perhaps ending up in places they weren't intending to. Fate has a weird way of biting you on the backside, as the trope goes.
Giant Crowley did end up somewhere he wasn't intending to be, and perhaps accidentally ended up playing God and deciding Elspeth's fate. There are mentions of angels as tall as mountains, or tall as the sky in the Bible, so him ordering Aziraphale to give all his money to Elspeth while looking down at them shouldn't really be out of place for those familiar with the book. Crowley also took Elspeth's fate into his own hands when he snatched the laudanum away from her and drank it down, an action akin to absolving her of her sins.
Aziraphale also tried to change Elspeth's and Wee Morag's fate, by changing his mind about the morality of the body snatching. That didn't end up the way he hoped or expected, either.
Mr Dalrymple was of aware of two fates he could meet, he just didn't know which one it would be at the time he was s talking to Aziraphale and Crowley.
DALRYMPLE: I either end up with a knighthood or condemned as a resurrectionist and hanging from a rope.
Sadly, we find out through Aziraphale reading the pamphlet he picked up outside the pub that it was along the lines of the second one - he might not have been actually condemned for a crime, but he condemned his own conscience and then his soul.
If you would like a contrast to this, come back to S1xE2, where we approach a young Newton Pulsifer in his bedroom, about to short out the electrical works for his whole neighbourhood yet again. God is narrating at this point, and the camera view pans down from the sky...and bumps with a visible jolt and audible noise into the window frame of his bedroom. (I wasn't able to find a GIF for this.)
Newt is a Crowley-parallel, they are both on the side of free will and choosing one's destiny. This is not a place for God, the decider of Fate, to trespass. There will be no crossing of this threshold, Frances!
I would just like to take a step back here to Part 4: Judgement Day, if I may, and reconsider this view of the missing cross in the statue of Gabriel's arms:
This is the only point of view that we don't see the cross from. It's still seen from between Gabriel's and Beelzebub's shoulders, and Crowley stills see it in 1826, so it's not invisible to demons.
So I would like to ask, could the missing cross view be God's point of view?
The viewpoint is similar to the one in the Job minisode, as seen from where Aziraphale and Crowley are witnessing Job listen to the Almighty speak to him.
So, perhaps if God isn't seeing the cross, they aren't the one who has so-called Ineffable Plans for the Second Coming in mind.
Yeah, so there's the Great Plan, and the Ineffable Plan, but are they the same plan...and who is pushing so hard for the Great Plan to come to completion, then? Not Gabriel or Beelzebub, that's for sure.
66 Goat Gate
Just before we attempt to wrap things up, we should have a look at the address on the Clue, but it doesn't really tell us anything we don't already know.
We know the address of the pub in Edinburgh appears in two places, once on the record single Maggie gives to Aziraphale and once on the matchbox that held the fly. There is a difference in the way they are written, with an comma on the record, and also Goat Gate written as two words, whereas it is one word on the matchbox.
Gate was old name for a road, so one interpretation could be that it was hinting at a demon road, or an underground road (demons live in Hell, which is underground, and demons are also associated with goats) and that ties in with the resurrection and Judgement Day theme we have going on, and perhaps should alert us to the presence of at least one demon being involved with Gabriel. On the other side, a goatgate is a relatively modern term for someone who talks a load of shite, so to speak. If we use Strong's Concordance to add the 66 to it, it becomes a wild or fierce mouth. Which kind of suits the Leviathan referenced in the verse from the Book of Job. The first version then looks like a wild underground road to Hell on the way to the Second Coming (the Harrowing of Hell in the Passion, anyone?) Don't forget the number 6 is associated with Hell as well.
Piecing the Elephant Together
There is a famous parable about a group of blind men meeting an elephant for the first time. They each go up and touch a different part of the huge beast, and subsequently give a different description for each part of it, but collectively they can't describe it properly as a whole.
That's kind of how we tend to look at Good Omens - its such a huge, complicated beast of a story, with each of us picking out one strand to analyze that might be our specialty, but we don't necessarily have all the other pieces nearby to aid our understanding as to why it was placed there or what it is doing and how that aids the purpose of the story.
To sum things up:
Aziraphale's trip to Edinburgh in the Bentley is a parallel to Crowley and Muriel going to Heaven together to find out about Gabriel, but Aziraphale is actually going to Edinburgh to find out about Beelzebub (he just doesn't realize it.)
Gabriel was there in the pub, and met with a "Mason" in a regular black-coloured suit that the barman was used to seeing Masons dressed in, because he noted that Gabriel's light grey suit was different.
We are shown many clues to the looming Second Coming
We see parallel scenes to S1, which at the same time sets upparallels for S3, which are about starting Armageddon. Again.
We also gain a lot of interlinked information for other parts of S2, and parts that link up with S1 and maybe S3, such as:
Aziraphale's main parallel in S2 is Beelzebub, with Maggie a parallel blend of the two of them.
Mr Dalrymple shows us that something needs to be cut out to save the innocent, but we also need to learn what it is before we can do that.
Elspeth and Wee Morag show us that running away is not as simple an option as it seems, its more a fatal trap than anything.
The Masonic symbols appearing in S2 remind us that life and death is a cycle, but also sometimes thoughts need to be turned around.
Aziraphale thought he knew where he was going, but he didn't really; fate gave him answers that he wasn't expecting. Did he ask the right questions?
There is not just a single purpose for Aziraphale to go to Edinburgh, there were several.
I also think Aziraphale didn't have enough time to stop and think about it, or talk it through with Crowley. They both had to leap from one thing to another until it was too late.
I was going to finish this off with that quote about history repeating itself until you learn from your mistakes or something, but then I found this one:
*Slaps this beast on the backside to move it along so it can go roam free in the wilderness.*
*This is actually something that is well researched but not well known, and is called the Success Paradox. You can watch a good explanation of it by one of my favourite science vloggers Veratisium here. Women are probably most aware of it intuitively, because of inherit sexism in our patriarchal society, but it also exists in the attitude "if you work hard you can make anything happen." What most people don't realize is how much luck factors into their success. Lucky they were born into a wealthy family. Lucky they met the right person on the right day. Lucky they were chosen over another etc. Before you argue otherwise, do stop and think about it.
The other posts in this series can be found here:
Part 1: Detective Aziraphale
Part 2: Aziraphale-Beelzebub Parallels
Part 3: Stocktaking in the Basement
Part 4: Judgement Day
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Owl House/Hellaverse (Hazbin Hotel & Helluva Boss) X-Over idea: The Titan Hela
I recently found the crossover fanfiction A Divine (Romantic) Comedy on AO3 which is a Lucifer x Camilla Noceda fic where Lucifer pretends to be a human and ends up dating Luz's mom, it is a fluffy fic but obviously, there is drama with this secret relationship, from everyone else and how they react to the situation, Hell being in the dark while Luz and co sense something is up with Camilla's new BF.
In one chapter, they link the two settings by saying that Bard Magic from the Owl House was taught to the Boiling Isles by someone from another Titan called "Hela", with the name "Amdusias" popping up (that being the name of an Ars Goetia that has a lot of musical stuff to him.
One idea that I had, and did comment on the fic about this, was if Lucifer were to be discovered, he could play off Hell as just another Titan as a way to bullshit his way out. After all, Eda said in Episode 1 of the Owl House that every human myth comes from a bit of the Demon Realm leaking into the human world, who's to say that Hell couldn't be the same?
Then I went even further in my idea, what if I actually DID come up with a Titan version of Hell in the Owl House-verse.
I made an image for the idea here:
Unlike the Boiling Isles Titan, this Titan (who could have multiple names depending on who you ask: Eve, Hela or Roo) would be completely buried underground, with only the head being above ground, but only the face peaks above the Boiling Sea (and even then the tides may obscure it when they are high).
Just like the Boiling Isles, the Titan is divided into regions based on the body parts, and like the Hellverse Hell, these regions are divided into regions based on the Seven Sins, like the Rings of Hell. Pride obviously is in the head, Wrath is in the upper torso by the Heart, Gluttony is in the middle with the Stomach, Greed is in the Abdomen, Lust is in the Pelvis (duh), Envy is in the upper legs, and Sloth in the lower legs.
The many black lines growing around the Titan are Roots of a cursed Tree, meant to reference the Forbidden Fruit of Knowledge Eve ate, and the HC/theory that she may have become Roo.
In the Owl House Setting I am sure that the hierarchy is pretty similar in this AU at the top (Lucifer > his Family > Seven Sins that rule the regions > the Goetia who act as the noble class), but once you get down to the Sinners that is where we get complicated. You have the Overlords/Sinners, then the Hellborn. I imagine in this setting the Sinners would be replaced with Witches as Demons are already a thing in TOH, but whether or not they are above Demons in the hierarchy would depend on how different this setting would be.
I might think of more ideas for this X-Over AU later
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