Greetings from Heaven and Hell

I had a very nice Friday that started with chores, but then Daniel (whose team has the last Friday of every month off) came over for lunch -- Lebanese food from Tanoor, I had cheese fatayer, hummus, and lebneh -- and we Skyped my parents, after which he went to walk his dogs and we went to the post office and Safeway.

Then we came home for the remaining four hours of the second season of Good Omens. There were many things I liked about it and a few things I did not like, but overall -- and I wrote this in my notes at the end of the fourth episode, so not affected by the ending -- I never adored it the way I adored the first season. 

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It started well -- let's be honest, naked Jon Hamm is always a good way to start a TV show -- and there were many laugh-out-loud moments for me. Feeding ducks frozen peas! "There are only three reasons you call me: You're bored, you need to tell someone about something clever you did before you pop, or something's wrong"! Jane Austen, Master Spy!

And most of the flashbacks worked for me, but -- okay, unpopular opinion -- I missed God! God in the first season seemed, well, wryly ineffable; sure, atrocious things happened last season that God either triggered or did nothing to stop, but we were led to believe that none of us really understood the Ineffable Plan, so there was lots of room for forgiveness.

This season I kept noting, "wow, Gaiman really hates God and the Bible"! There wasn't underlying love and forgiveness, and the hostility was all targeted at Heaven; Hell is a bunch of ill-behaved children doing the kind of stuff they do in Faust. All the real evil this season comes from Heaven. Aziraphale keeps working for them after Job?!

And my alarms went off a little upon discovering that people in Hell think Richard Curtis movies characterize human love. I dislike most of his romances and absolutely loathe Love, Actually -- warning, more unpopular opinions! I was never invested in Nina/Maggie the way I had been in Anathema/Pulsifer nor even Shadwell/Madame Tracy.

Bottom line, the Ineffable doesn't seem like it could possibly have an overarching good reason for anything this season; it's just mean and petty. So I was disappointed even before the Disappointing Thing. Though I enjoyed the Doctor Who references and snappy dialogue, there were fewer characters in whom I was emotionally invested -- I missed the children!

Of course I loved seeing Sheen and Tennant, who have better chemistry than just about any two performers I can think of (Hepburn and Tracy, Cooper and Gaga, Jackman and Reynolds), and they were glorious. There are screencaps from this that I will treasure. But getting to see their characters as angels together shows all the problems with rooting for an angel.

And because of all that, Aziraphale's decision in the end did not seem out of character to me. He's self-hating when he strays from what he thinks is right, and because the attachment between him and Crowley is what usually makes him think he's straying, it feels like that romance is being judged as worse than Gabriel running off with the Lord of the Flies.

It may not BE heterosexual vs homosexual, since they're angelic and demonic beings who may not even have genitalia, but visually it LOOKS heterosexual vs homosexual. All the main gay characters are single at the end of the season, while all the straight couples over both seasons appear to be living happily ever after. For me it really left a bad taste.

Here are some photos from the waterfront last weekend when we were hanging out before the concert, including some boats, some beach, the Seattle Wheel, some flowers, some jellyfish, and the spectacular weather we had that entire day: