2023-07-28 12:14:08
Film Serie „Good Omens 2“
And how the hell does good come into the world?
Status: 12:14 p.m. | Reading time: 3 minutes
Heaven and Hell: Michael Sheen (left) and David Tennant
Source: Mark Mainz/Prime
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Morally arrogant angels and evil-obsessed devils: The new season of “Good Omens”, the series based on the cult book by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, can easily be viewed as a contemporary commentary. And puts a central theological question from head to toe.
“Everything that happens is good,” asserted the smartass Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and where this is not immediately obvious, it is a “test”. See Job, the poor fellow from the Bible, see heartbreak, sickness and, finally, death, which everyone must die at some point – unless they were not created by God but by crazy fantasists. Behold Tolkien’s Elves living forever to watch their world fall. Behold the angel Erziraphael and the demon Crowley notoriously preventing such a downfall.
Erziraphael and Crowley were conceived in 1990, just in time for the good times, by Discworld inventor Terry Pratchett and the fantasy jack-of-all-trades Neil Gaiman; in “A Good Omen”, the novel of which they are the heroes, they put a stop to the antichrist. Gaiman filmed the story in 2019 in six such happy episodes that a second season was almost inevitable, even though it was not based on a book.
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Neil Gaiman on “Good Omens”
After all: “Good Omens 2”, the six new episodes of the BBC, which have just been released on Amazon Prime, go back to the plans of Gaiman and Pratchett, who died in 2015, and this time “something big is going on” in heaven. Unfortunately Archangel Gabriel (“Mad Men” star Jon Hamm) can’t remember what.
Too good to go down
One day, Gabriel turns up stark naked in front of Erziraphael’s London bookshop – with no memory of anything, but with a cardboard box that is either empty or a contemporary version of Pandora’s box, which, as we know, ultimately contains hope. For reasons that are currently unknown, Gabriel is being hunted by heaven and hell, which is why Erziraphael and Crowley hide the Archangel: plenty of opportunity for Michael Sheen (as Angel) and David Tennant (as Devil) to shine.
“Good Omens” has been their show from the start and in Season 2 they’re metaphorically growing wings too, and not just as they watch the wonderful exposition as the universe emerges and find it far too beautiful to be in a few billion years to go under again.
From archangel to assistant bookseller: Jon Hamm as Gabriel
Source: Mark Mainz/Prime Video
God’s will? For as long as they have existed, Erziraphael and Crowley have had an authority problem. In any case, the fact that everything that happens is good does not correspond to their life experience, which is their “test”, so to speak. They pass it by mingling with the story of Job or helping Scottish grave robbers in the interests of medical advances – and these are just two of the historical minisodes that Gaiman sprinkled like powdered sugar over the plot (the Nazi zombies are not mentioned here ).
Heaven and Hell, on the other hand, noticeably lacks such flexibility – you can’t shake the impression that “Good Omens 2” is a serious contemporary commentary despite all the fun of Freud. There are the angels who are so convinced of their moral beauty that they do not see the evil they are doing, and there are the demons who are so obsessed with evil that they fail to see the beauty in the world. How evil comes into the world would then be explained. The good, on the other hand – see Erziraphael and Crowley – seems to be a product of deviation.
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