WiC Watches: Good Omens

Episode 4: “Saturday Morning Funtime”

It’s hard to beat an episode where Aziraphale exclaims “Oh, fuck!” before getting zapped up to heaven, isn’t it?

So I’ve said multiple times how David Tennant and Michael Sheen are holding this show together with their performances, and they are, but really, it’s Sheen who’s impressing me most. His Aziraphale is quietly, delightfully glad to be alive, and it’s infectious. I find myself cracking up whenever he breaks out that sunny smile of his, whether he’s trying to appease Gabriel in the middle of a run (of course the smug Gabriel tries to keep himself fit; he enjoys the pleasures of the human body even if he thinks himself above them) or dancing the gavotte in flashback.

Tennant is terrific as Crowley — the sequence where he kills one demon with holy water and traps another in his old-ass answering machine is a lot of fun — but I feel like I’ve seen his take on the hard-bitten-sarcastic-type-with-a-heart-gold before. Sheen is stealing the show.

“Saturday Morning Funtime” is a…fun time, although it does mostly take a step back from the Crowley-Aziraphale of it all to focus on other characters, which means it’s not quite as good as “Hard Times.” Sam Taylor Buck is creepy as Adam the young Antichrist, and I like his gang of precocious supporting characters, but he’s gone from doe-eyed moppet to Bringer of Destruction pretty quickly. Is he just evil by nature? Did Anathema’s alternative literature drive him to it? It doesn’t really matter. He’s setting the plot into motion, and how.

Speaking of Anathema, her plotline feels kinda weightless. While the Antichrist tears Tadfield to pieces with tornados, she and a terrified Newton Pulsifer have sex because life is short and precious and ending in a few minutes and all that. It’s cute, I guess, and it’s framed in a funny way — we cut between the sex and Shadwell worrying that he’s sent the poor boy to his doom — but I don’t really know what she’s getting out of it, because I don’t really know her, or Newton. I’m getting the idea that these two may be more fleshed out in the books. They kind of seem like hangers-on here.

But plot isn’t the only thing Good Omens has to offer. Now that the Antichrist is coming into his powers, it can serve up some delightfully bizarre imagery, like a whaling ship on top of the head of a kraken, which reminded me of an incredibly memorable panel from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. Is there any network out there ballsy enough to adapt that? I’m waiting.