WiC Watches: Good Omens

Episode 2: “The Book”

Good Omens cruises along with its setup, introducing a few new characters who will surely play into the action when the apocalypse hits the fan.

One thing I learned today: Gaiman and Pratchett (probably more Pratchett, if I had to guess) really like pun names. Adultery Pulsifer, medieval witch hunter witchfinder; Anathema Device, the latest in a long line of women to have access to a stone-cold accurate book of prophecy (her ancestor is Virtue Device, which is even better), and so on. Would anyone actually name their kids these things? Probably not, but it fits right into the whole Monty Python vibe the show is going for. We are here for the wacky.

For example, the episode kicks off with Agnes Nutter (Josie Lawrence), the witch who wrote that stone-cold accurate book of prophecy, being burned at the stake, but only after she stuffed her skirt full of gunpowder so she can take a few of the judgmental townsfolk and witchfinders wither her. That was my favorite sequence of the episode — Lawrence sells the gravity of Nutter’s peril even amidst the absurdist comedy. Also welcome is Miranda Richardson as Madame Tracy, the next-door neighbor to current witchfinder

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sergeant Shadwell (Michael McKean doing a kinda Scottish accent). It never hurts to have her in your movie.

The whole thing is still held together by Michael Sheen and David Tennant’s performances as Aziraphale and Crowley, an angel with material attachments and a demon who isn’t necessarily bad; he just “fell in with the wrong people.” Also he’s abusive to his houseplants, which is weird. A lot of this episode was spent getting to know other characters — including budding Antichrist Adam (Sam Taylor Buck), newly minted witchfinder Newton Pulsifer (Jack Whitehall), and War, one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Mireille Enos) — but the show works best when it focuses on these two trying to prevent armageddon, their conflicting ideas about responsibility and good and evil bouncing off each other all the while.

So “The Book” is moving things into place. The show still seems kind of made of spare parts, with weird touches that seem to exist for no other reason than to be delightfully quirky (e.g. Newton Pulsifer being so bad with computers he shuts an office down with the stroke of a keyboard, which strikes me as an idea that worked better in 1990), but there’s something charming about Good Omens’ ambling eagerness to please. I’m ready for these characters to meet up and for the fireworks to start going off.