#anticaptialist themes my beloved

[goodgomens]

I get that the ending of GO2 hurts worse than sticking your unmentionables in a blender, but those of you saying it doesn't make sense or is OOC, or god forbid, PROPOSING AZIRAPHALE WAS MIND CONTROLLED, do not seem to understand how good characterization works.

Firstly, if Aziraphale was drugged/mind controlled into accepting the offer in the finale, that makes everything he said and did afterwards meaningless. Neil Gaiman is a very successful writer. I really believe he would not, under any sane circumstances, undo such a pivotal moment for a character with "LOL JK he was drugged 😂," because good writers don't write in a fundamental character flaw only to nuke it later with a twist that destroys all of their previous characterization. Aziraphale's crippling dependence on/devotion to heaven as a "force for good" has been there (practically screaming at the audience) since S1, and WAS NEVER RESOLVED, despite him being barred from heaven throughout S2. The only thing that he realized in S1 was that GABRIEL and the ARCHANGELS were flawed, and that they were orchestrating Armageddon without divine input. The S2 finale very clearly shows that Aziraphale did not pin that on the system of heaven and hell itself, as Crowley has.

I am going to attempt to explain why I believe that.

This season had a lot less emphasis on "Crowley's got a good side, Aziraphale's a bit of a bastard," than S1. In fact, there was almost none of that going on here, at least not explicitly. Instead, it focused on showing that Crowley and Aziraphale 1) both fundamentally didn't align with their head offices' MOs pre-armageddon and 2) that this was because they were both too good/kind to assimilate fully. Go watch the arc with Job again. Crowley can't bring himself to kill goats, let alone kids, and neither can Aziraphale, despite the fact that he knows it's good in theory because God and heaven want it. And yet, he doesn't go along with killing Job's kids because he knows it's wrong, and goes so far as to lie to his superiors (again) and, in his mind, damn himself for the sake of those kids. In the end though, Crowley helps him come to the conclusion that he is "an angel who goes along with heaven as far as he can," just as Crowley is "a demon who goes along with hell as far as he can," which apparently lets Aziraphale cope with the dissonance between his morals and heaven's orders.

So, if they have functionally the same mindset on paper, why don't they agree on what to do in the finale?

I think a lot of it is because they're both good, but that goodness is received very differently in their different roles and circumstances. Crowley is a demon who is crafty and mischievous, but ultimately, harm in the name of mischief is all that he's ever willing and able to do. He can't stoop to killing livestock, much less people. In S1 his goodness is set up to support his and Aziraphale's unique and ironic dynamic, with the plausible excuse that humans can do evil more creatively than he can, so he doesn't have to be genuinely evil. However, this season shows us another, much more relevant aspect of this goodness: it's just who he is. He was good in heaven, absorbed in making the universe beautiful and ensuring it would grow and develop nicely as it aged, and aside from questioning heaven's plans, he seemed like a model angel. Even when he is explicitly ordered to kill by hell, he doesn't kill people. In contrast, we see Hastur literally eat like 20 telemarketers for no other reason than because he felt like it in S1.

The reason Crowley sees through heaven is because he has been fully rejected by it, and he thus has experience not fitting in as both an angel and a demon. He was thrown out of heaven, the supposed embodiment of goodness as an organization, for asking to preserve the beauty and life of the universe: not just for asking questions, but for asking to do something objectively GOOD. Once he's kicked out of the "good" place for trying to do good and prevent needless destruction, then it's easy for him to realize that heaven is not actually a force for good, it just says it is. He falls for asking questions as an angel, and refusing to go along with doing true evil, which he continues to do in hell. After he spends a lot of time in hell, which is transparently evil, he finds out that they frequently AGREE with heaven on issues like Armageddon and torturing Job, and sees firsthand that the system itself, and the idea of heaven and hell, is rigged and contrived. If heaven and hell were opposites and were each truly good and evil, then they could never agree with each other on anything by design, yet they both want to end the world more than seemingly anything else. He has seen angels act just as violently and vindictively as demons (at levels of malice he, a demon, has never and would never sink to himself) so he also knows that, of course, the whole "angels good, demons bad" thing is bullshit, especially because he himself is GOOD, as Aziraphale and other characters reminded him all the time in S2.

However, Aziraphale attributes the systemic issues in heaven to individual angels, rather than the structure of heaven and hell themselves, because he still believes in the system and is privileged within it compared to Crowley. He sees evils endorsed by heaven as exceptions to the rule rather than signs of a core, systemic problem with heaven itself, and he sees the evils and contradictions of hell as the natural order of things because hell is supposed to be bad. He sees Crowley as an exception to the rule of "demons bad" and sees the archangels as exceptions to the rule of "angels good," rather than realizing that these rules aren't really true to begin with. Unlike Crowley, he has never been explicitly victimized or punished by heaven as an institution, only really bullied and belittled by other angels. He attributes the problems in heaven to said angels being in power, rather than heaven itself, both because he is too afraid to question heaven and potentially face the same consequences as Crowley has, and because he doesn't have the same perspective or insight Crowley does as a demon. Aziraphale probably believes that he has remained an angel by doing good and being good like he assumes heaven wants, rather than recognizing the real reason: he hasn't tried to undermine or question the system of heaven itself, and constantly makes excuses for it. The finale of S1 seemingly assured him that the archangels, who he no longer trusted/believed in at that point, had taken armageddon into their own hands. This made it safe for him to conclude armageddon wasn't a problem with heaven as an institution, it was a problem with the archangels. He thinks heaven isn't fundamentally corrupt, and that it was just a few bad apples responsible for trying to end the world, especially because he didn't have any administrative power then. Heaven does presumably reward good humans in the afterlife, and his job assignments mostly consist of doing good on Earth in general, at least on paper, so in his mind, of course heaven is good. I also think Aziraphale believes that his own goodness isn't just innate to who he is, but is a result/requirement of him being an angel. His perception of himself aligns with his perception of heaven in large part, so he isn't motivated to question either of those things.

However, heaven clearly exists not to spread goodness, but to pursue its own interests, primarily the end of the world and ultimate power after their ideal victory over hell. Both heaven and hell want to start the apocalypse in hopes of gaining a monopoly over the universe after finally beating the other. Notice that the Mettatron talks about his big plans for the second coming with Aziraphale right after he accepts the job, rather than plans for spreading goodness as Aziraphale had assumed would be his job: now that he's in a position of power, heaven has dropped its mask because he is complicit as an authority figure, and they could easily unseat him if he becomes a problem, just like they did to Gabriel. Heaven's goodness is a facade, a means to an end, and ultimately, a PR strategy that serves to brainwash the angels/employees who aren't responsible for calling the shots so that they don't question the power structure. Under this paradigm, if angels question heaven, and heaven is the ultimate good, it must mean that the angel's question comes from some flaw in them rather than a legitimate problem with heaven, which is why none of the angels seem willing to do it.

Aziraphale was lured into believing he was being asked back into the system to finally do the kind of good he wanted to by what he thought was a legitimate sign of kindness within heaven, an apparently purely altruistic gift (the cup of coffee) from the Metatron. He viewed it as a sign that there was still good in heaven after all. Significantly, Aziraphale, unlike Crowley, did not see the videos in Heaven and does not have the full context for Gabriel's amnesia, and is missing some of that crucial evidence of heaven's goal to hasten the apocalypse. The reason there was such an emphasis on the coffee is not that it was drugged or miracled to force him to accept, but because it was a very overt manipulation tactic that builds on the core themes of the show. It was the Metatron pretending to do something out of goodness, just as heaven has done for all this time, even though its actual goal is to destroy the world. The coffee was a deliberate bait and switch by the Metatron, and it is a very potent symbol: a false promise of altruism made to lure good people into working for an evil/corrupt system. I think that Aziraphale, in the credits, is (aside from reeling from his fallout with Crowley) trying his best to rationalize his decision to try to change heaven from the inside, and chalking the Metatron's behavior up as one more bad apple/angel.

We'll see if he finally realizes that the system itself is unfixable in S3.

TLDR: the characterization that led to the finale has been there the whole time. It might be surprising or upsetting, but it is very much not out of character or unprecedented.