#can't wait til the first episode of s3 airs and im proven completely wrong

[staybackhuwuman]

Allow me to briefly (it's not brief) go insane here,, but i rewatched both seasons because I could have sworn that Aziraphale was consuming alcohol before the 21st century back in season one, but suddenly he wasn't drinking all the way up into the 1800s in season 2, and what was up with that? Anyway, here’s some notes on the experience.

First, the alcohol problem. So, having gone back through both seasons, Aziraphale's drinking in the modern day in both of them. The flashback scene I thought he was drinking in was the meeting with Crowley in Rome s1e3, as Aziraphale otherwise doesn't drink in any of the flashbacks.

The Rome scene is pretty darn ambiguous though. Crowley orders "whatever's drinkable" and receives a jug of house brown. He's shown drinking from a clay cup, then Aziraphale walks up, and there's a cut to Crowley's response, and then a cut back to Aziraphale, and in the time between those cuts, Zira has somehow also acquired a clay cup and is drinking from it but I have no idea what's in it. Was that poured from Crowley's jug?? I would have assumed so, but I also would have assumed that "house brown" was alcohol, so. Did Aziraphale pour himself something else?? Is it not alcohol after all?

So the conclusion of the alcohol investigation is that it's ambiguous, but it's technically possible that Zira's not drinking alcohol in Rome, so this is plausibly not a continuity error.

Now onto some unrelated, but potentially interesting observations.

First, I think there's pretty obviously some things that are going to be resolved in season 3, just on the basis of "that's how narratives and foreshadowing work". The Book of Life. Jim/Gabriel's prophecy that the dead will walk the earth. The 25 Lazarii miracle that apparently results from Aziraphale and Crowley working together, just to name the big ones.

Given how much time was spent on all the magic show stuff, and the new s2 emphasis on Aziraphale not liking alcohol in the past (which wasn't mentioned in any s1 flashbacks), I think it's probable that those things will tie into s3 as well, but I don't know if that will be in more of a thematic way or a directly plot-relevant one.

Second, there's a big Resurrectionist theming to the s2 flashbacks. I feel like this was probably pretty obvious to people smarter than me the first time around, but I didn't catch it until my re-watch, so here you go. Besides the whole pub stuff in the modern day, each of the big 3 flashbacks in this season (Job, Scotland, Blitz) is centered around resurrection.

Job's children were "resurrected" by Crowley in a, let's say, less than literal sense after he less-than-literally killed them, but that's still a resurrection as good as any magic trick, even though we the audience got to see how it was performed.

The second resurrection is in Scotland, and I fully admit, it's the weak link of this pattern. I'm mainly accepting it because rule of three, and because it's the one that's actually connected to the term "Resurrectionist" within the show itself. Interestingly, this is also the one flashback where we don't get the title card with date/location format. Instead we see the date written in Aziraphale's diary, and hear the location from his narration. (This is also the only setting where we even get narration in s2, and I don't pretend to know what that means but it's... interesting).

What I'm counting as the "resurrection" here is a messy combo of the resurrectionists digging up bodies + Crowley and Aziraphale preventing a suicide and giving Elspeth a chance at a (metaphorical) new life with the money. Like I said, it's the weakest link.

It's also interesting that the writing had the obvious set-up to do a clearer resurrection with Wee Morag being shot and Aziraphale wanting to heal her, but then had her die permanently anyway.

The third resurrection is, of course, the Nazi zombies.

In my opinion, this Resurrectionist theming is a nod to the plot of s3 where we (presumably) will have some sort of Jesus running around for the Second Coming, but it also seems reasonable that this could foreshadow something more specific as well? I don't really know my Christian mythos so if there's a significant connection to anything beyond the obvious 3 days and then the Resurrection, I'm definitely missing it. But it's a fun setup.

Finally, we come to Maggie. Maggie is...kind of a weird character to me? She 's awkward in a way that feels different to how the other human characters are portrayed. In fact, on the second watch through, I figured out that she reminds me of Muriel. Something about her dialogue and how it's delivered.

I'm not sure that Maggie is even non-human - I'm prepared to be totally wrong about this - but rewatching with that idea in mind, there were two moments that stuck out to me.

When the shopkeepers are leaving the bookshop during the demon attack, Aziraphale's miracles don't seem to work on Maggie at all. Possibly they aren't working on Nina as well, but Maggie is standing half in front of her in this scene, and Aziraphale is directing his attention mainly towards Maggie, who is the one protesting that she wants to stay. No explanation is given for why Zira's miracles don't work in this scene. Maggie just shakes them off like they're nothing.

Maggie also says something when the demons are taunting her just before she accidentally lets them in. When she's talking about how she's not scared, she says she "had brothers" which is kind of a weird detail to drop so obviously into the dialogue when we haven't seen any sign of her family in s2, and there's absolutely no relevance of these brothers to anything going on at all.

Of course, this season mentions a few other things without them having much relevance to what's going on. There's the threatened mind wipes which are never actually executed and the beings Crowley keeps forgetting he knows from the rebellion. Memory was important to this season's plot with Gabriel, but these unresolved threads probably mean there's more to come in that same vein. And of course there's the allusions to Lucifer with the whole "institutional problem" scene. (Is Lucifer the same as Satan in the GO world or not? Word of God points to yes, as far as I can tell, but sticking just with what we've actually seen on-screen -- what if they're two different entities?)

I have a couple different theories about what Maggie might be if she isn't actually fully human, but I'll just sign off on this question:

If God is a woman in the GO universe, why not Lucifer too?

the wine though???