#i did not have an exorcism to suffer through bad Bible fanfic like this

[thesweetestclementine]

They Should Have Killed the Kids

Superheaven this and coffee theory that. The part of GOs2 that made me angriest was the Job minisode. I’m seeing people say that this was the strongest of the three, and I am here to strongly disagree with them. The writers missed the point of the entire book, and they turned what could have been an incredible study on the human condition into, like, a Doctor Who episode with Bible Flavor™. Buckle up. This got very long. 

Forewarned is forearmed: I’m coming at this from the perspective of a lapsed Calvinist Protestant. Come shout at me in my DMs if you have also been traumatized by conservative Christianity :D

Part 1: In the Beginning

The first order of business is to understand the text they are adapting. A Companion to Owls is the only minisode that’s pulling material directly from another source, so it’s easier to scrutinize by merit of there being something you can compare the adaptational differences to. For me, being able to go back and forth between the minisode and Job made the issues with Companion much easier to spot, whereas I had a harder time pinpointing exactly where the other two went wrong. Point being, I re-read Book of Job for the first time since high school, and I’m here to report back with my findings.

The Book of Job is a 42-chapter poetic cycle that covers the worst week of Job’s life. It is a beautiful reflection on the cruelty of existence and the capriciousness of God. There are several, several moving passages that get really existential and take a pretty interesting stance on God’s mercy that you don’t really see in the rest of the Bible. I’d recommend reading it - it’s not super long, and there are some passages in it that people reference constantly.

Here’s what happens in Job as Good Omens tells it: Job is the most blameless man on Earth. Because, or maybe in spite, of his righteousness, he’s absolutely loaded. God and Satan make a bet that Satan can/can’t cause Job to sin by dragging him by his hair through the desert (metaphorically. Maybe). Satan holds up his end of the bet. Job, sheep-less, camel-less, child-less, and covered in sores and ash, fails to forsake God. God talks to him and tells him that he knows jack about all, and that it is not his place to question the Lord. Job passes with flying colors. He gets his stuff back even better than before. The end.

The moral of this story is that God lets bad things happen even to the most righteous, and there’s not a whole lot you can do about it. 

Oh, wait. What’s that? My analysis is incomplete? You’re telling me I’m missing an entire thirty-five chapters of this 42-chapter book? 

Part 2: Where are Job’s friends???

If you’ve never had to sit through multiple, multiple sermons about Job, you might not be familiar with Job’s friends: Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite. Job calls them ‘miserable comforters,’ and a lot of Christian sources give them a pretty bad rap, but they are genuinely Job’s friends and want the best for him. They hang out with him after he’s lost everything and try to get him to fess up to whatever he did wrong so that he can get God’s forgiveness. They leap to God’s defense, which you’d think for the time and place is the right thing to do. But in their desire to see Job restored to his previous position, they don’t hear Job’s protests that he has remained blameless. They argue with him about this, over and over. In fact, the argument Job has with his friends is most of the Book of Job. It’s the heart of Job. To cut his friends out of an adaptation is a fool’s errand, because it means you’ve misunderstood the point of Job.

When you add the friends back in, Job’s story then becomes a discussion (a literal discussion, because of the arguing) about how God’s will for the righteous includes hardship, and your loved ones, well-meaning as they might be, will be unable to truly grasp your suffering and cannot possibly interpret God’s will for you. Job was bang on the money when he said he hadn’t done anything wrong, and yet his friends talk over him in an attempt to help him. Being offered useless or even harmful help when you’re in serious pain is an incredibly relatable, human experience. 

I don’t know why they cut the friends. Maybe it was too expensive to hire the three actors needed. Maybe the minisode was too short to flesh out a good friends plot. Maybe COVID restrictions fucked it up, I don’t know. Any way you slice it, Companion would have been a hell of a lot stronger had they taken time to actually include them, instead of making a stupid joke about shoemaking. If Good Omens is really a story about humanity, there is no more human experience than having your friends talk over you.

If you’re adapting Job, then, and you’re not going to talk about his friends, what is left in the story to focus on?

Part 3: Job’s Kids: Hotter, Blesseder, Faster, Stronger

So the writers of Companion decide to focus on the morality of God okaying the destruction of Job’s kids. This is such a weird decision. I understand why you’d want to adapt this; harming children should prompt a strong, visceral, horrified reaction from your audience, and it also asks some thorny questions about God’s divine will. It’s a great story for showcasing the callousness of God without having to do a lot of heavy lifting.

But the kids in the Book of Job aren’t even kids--they’re adults with their own households and land. While it is tragic that Job’s entire family dies, Satan is not going after helpless children, but instead markers of Job’s power and wealth. God probably would have told Satan to hold off on killing the kids if they were small, like She told him to hold off on attacking Job’s health initially (key word here is probably. God doesn’t have a good track record there. Hold that thought). This is a huge oversight on the writers’ part. Again, it makes me feel like they’ve missed the point of the book, almost substituting the original message for one they’ve created themselves.

If you wanted to retell a Bible story where you can just tear into the idea of God killing little kids to test someone’s righteousness, you have your pick. The story of Abraham and young Isaac is right there. Hell, the additional complexity of Abraham going along with it and not simply being taken along for the ride would have reflected the themes of Good Omens a lot better. There is no point in adapting Job for that reason.

Ooh, actually, adapting the story of Absalom would have been super cool. I’m getting off topic.

Job works best as a story showcasing the callousness of Man, rather than God. She is peripheral; She’s a side character; She only appears in the framing device and the divine smackdown. Her lack of concern serves as a mirror to the friends’s lack of concern: they are all trying to push their own agenda on Job, who is just trying to weather a cosmic pissing contest. It is not the focus of Job. The Book of Job does not care about the kids, and no adaptation worth its salt is going to care about the kids, either. It’s going to care about the friends.

Also, I couldn’t make this fact fit in cleanly, but the Bible goes out of its way to point out how hot Job’s new daughters are. Anyway.

Part 4: John Finnemore Giveth, and John Finnemore Taketh Away.

This is the part of the screed post where I veer into speculation and armchair screenwriting. If you’re locked in to an adaptation of Job and you want to focus on the kids, how do you make that more narratively satisfying?

You don’t resolve the main conflict by staging a goofy resurrection and returning everything to normal, for one.

When I say that Companion feels like Doctor Who, this is what I mean. A boiler-plate Doctor Who episode introduces a cool sci-fi concept & its complement ethical conflict and aims to resolve it in 45 minutes or fewer. Therefore, the concepts are interesting but not technical, and the conflicts are serious but not complicated. Despite its reputation, the resolution is usually hopeful and upbeat. The minisode has all the makings of a Doctor Who episode - it follows the same formula. Your concept - Job - is something a person who isn’t Biblepilled and Christocelled is probably vaguely familiar with, and, like, you can argue that killing small children for sport is not a conflict with a clear right and wrong, but you would be both incorrect and also a bad person.

To say that this makes me irrationally angry is to underestimate my rage. I realize I am not an average viewer, because I am Biblepilled and Christocelled against my will. BUT it makes me SO MAD that they treat Job like a black and white scifi adventure that they can neatly tie up in 25 minutes. At the end of the original story, Job’s original kids are gone. He may have gotten his health and wealth back, but there are ten people who were very dear to him that he will never see again. It ends in this weird, happy-ish gray space that the original Good Omens book also closes on - the conflict has just been kicked down the road, not fully resolved, and the story ends before we explore the consequences of that.

So, if I was the writer for this minisode, how would I suck the Doctor Who out of the episode? 

I think the thing they should have done was have the kids survive that thunderstorm, and then have the Archangels destroy them before Aziraphale and Crowley could do anything about it. 

Would it be tonally out of wack from the rest of the season? Absolutely. I still think they should have done it. Actually killing the kids gives Heaven teeth and makes the Apocalypse of last season seem like an actual threat. It would also force Aziraphale to have a different, more impactful crisis of faith than the one he had at the end of the minisode. Lying to your superiors is uncomfortable, but the thing that really rocks people’s faith in any system is seeing it fail unnecessarily and catastrophically.

I’m not expecting Paradise Lost, here. I just want something that hits at least half as hard as the original book. And saving the kids just doesn’t do it for me.

Part 5: Oh God, There’s More?

If you’ve read to this point, you are braver than any US Marine. I hope it made sense and that you are now as angry as I am about the Job minisode. I have issues with the other two minisodes (WHY WERE THERE LIGHTS ON DURING THE BLITZ?????) but they did not inspire a 2,000 word Tumblr post that was mostly written in a fugue state between the hours of 3 and 6 a.m. on a work night. A Companion to Owls, to me, missed the main points of both the Book of Job and the original Good Omens. 

Because what Good Omens is is a story about knowing humanity in all its multifaceted ugliness and choosing it anyway because the good and strange bits are good and strange enough to outweigh that ugliness. The Book of Job highlights a little part of the beauty and horror of humanity in a deeply relatable way, and instead of working with the themes of both works, Companion works against them.

Also...Job never had goats. He had sheep, camels, donkeys, oxen, and children, but not goats. Details, motherfuckers.