The second season of Good Omens dropped all at once on Amazon Prime Video at the end of July, and fans are still talking about it. We weren’t even sure we’d ever get this. After all, the first season adapted the whole of the original Good Omens book by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. This sequel season is all original material, extending the story of celestial life partners Aziraphale and Crowley, an angel and demon who form an ineffable bond over the course of millennia.
We still don’t know if Aziraphale and Crowley will be back for a third season on Amazon Prime Video. While we wait and hope, let’s go over all six episodes from season 2 and rank them from worst to best, with the understanding that they were all pretty solid:
It’s fine: Episode 203, “I Know Where I’m Going”
The first season of Good Omens gave us a conflict where several different forces were trying to either bring about or prevent the Biblical apocalypse, with Aziarphale and Crowley doing all they can to keep up. Amazon needed every minute of those six episodes to get us acquainted with the characters, their relationships, and their stakes in the cessation of life on Earth.
Season 2 is a much milder affair. Mostly it’s about Aziraphale and Crowley realizing that they love each other. There aren’t nearly as much moving parts. If this season just included the things we needed to know for the story to move forward, it would probably be over in a few episodes.
To fill that time, Good Omens dives into the past, showing us how Aziraphale and Crowley’s relationship has evolved over the past several million years. Some of these flashbacks are pretty charming. In Episode 3, we see the angel and demon sparring over the morality of a poor girl in the 19th century who digs up and sells corpses to support herself and her beloved. It’s nice, the acting’s nice, the sets are nice, the costumes are nice…but it doesn’t really tell us anything about these characters we didn’t already know.
Meanwhile, in the present, the angel Muriel pretends to be a real human police officer and spies on Crowley and the amnesiac Gabriel as they hide out in Aziraphale’s bookshop. It’s a cute bit, and Quelin Sepulveda is charming as Muriel.
It’s fine+: Episode 204, “The Hitchhiker”
Once again, we get barely any movement of the main plot. In the present, the demon Shax (played with clueless venom by Miranda Richardson) figures out that the archangel Gabriel is hiding out in Aziraphale’s bookshop and plans to storm the place. That’s it.
The main action takes place in the past, where Aziarphale gets the opportunity to perform magic for visiting GIs in London during the Blitz. What elevates this episode is how unspeakably good a time actor Michael Sheen is having playing Aziraphale. You’d think that in an angel-demon buddy comedy, the demon would be the one causing all the trouble and the angel the one following him around trying to clean up his mess, but no; time and again, Aziraphale’s enthusiasm for pretty much everything gets him into sticky situations, and his buddy Crowley has to help him out.
In this case, Aziraphale wants to perform a magic show — a show-stopping magic show, if possible — despite the fact that he has next to no idea what he’s doing. He pulls it off with Crowley’s help, literally by the skin of his teeth.
Sheen is just really entertaining as he goes from incurably cheery to desperately panicked, although he constantly tries to fails to keep his fluttering emotions to himself. David Tennant is great as the hard-bitten Crowley, but to me, Sheen steals this show as Aziraphale.