The Magic Trick You Didn’t See: Being An Analysis of Good Omens Season 2

Fan Theory
Fan Theory:	The Magic Trick You Didn’t See: Being An Analysis of Good Omens Season 2
Synonyms:	Memory Theory, Metatron Has the Book of Life
Origin:	ariaste
Fandom(s):	Good Omens (TV)
Dates:	July 30, 2023 Tumblr post (condensed version); archive link goggle doc (Full version)
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

The Magic Trick You Didn’t See: Being An Analysis of Good Omens Season 2 is a meta analysis and fan theory in Good Omens fandom that speculates that the angel Metatron has the book of life and is using it to create false memories and manipulate Aziraphale into returning to Heaven.

Excerpts

Good Omens Season 2 feels so fucking odd because the setup-payoff cycles are incomplete—nearly all of them are, and the ones that do close the loop do so in really weird ways which, as a professional author, make me feel kind of, “Bwuh?????? But where’s my cookie? Excuse me??? Sir???? Neil????? My cookie, tho???”

When I realized this, when I finally put my finger on why the whole season was giving me some uncanny valley heebie-jeebies, a chill ran down my spine.

Baseline assumption #1: Neil Gaiman is extremely good at his job. He understands setup-payoff cycles like he understands breathing. I would feel reasonably confident in guessing that at this point in his career, his brain is so well trained in how stories work that it’s probably harder for him to avoid completing the setup-payoff cycle than it is for him to leave threads hanging. And there are threads hanging loose all over Season 2—conspicuous ones!

Then my friend, who had been digging through tumblr to see whether the fandom hive-mind had made sense of anything yet, linked me to this post.

Quote from the post: “So there's a lot to unpack here but I want to start by talking about the ending and specifically about the Metatron and the calculating moves made at the end of episode 6. Every single piece of what happened there was a manipulation technique being employed against Aziraphale to an almost brilliant degree and I'm honestly a little obsessed with what this says about the Metatron in particular.”

I read this post. I paused in amazement. I figuratively put another pushpin into my murderboard—

And the entire universe started cascading open in my head.

So. My grand hypothesis:

Metatron has access to the Book of Life and he was editing it the whole time.

I’ll give you a moment to sit with that and think about it.

See, we know from a few hints that were Conspicuously Dropped in the show that if you are erased from the Book of Life, it doesn’t just destroy you, it makes it so that you never existed. You just disappear and no one even notices you’re gone.

This explains everything weird in S2. I went back and watched the whole thing beginning to end after I had this epiphany, and I ended up with [checks notes] twenty-one fucking pages of notes and screenshots.

And then, with these three subtle little hints handed to us, we then hear Aziraphale’s report of the conversation he and Metatron had, wherein Metatron says: “I’ve been going back over a number of your previous exploits.” Without the three previous hints, this would not stand out to me as much. I would assume he was reading over reports or something. But “your previous exploits” sounds like stories, not an official report, and so one desperately wonders such questions as: Where, babe????? Where did you do that? In the Book of Life, maybe????? Did you have a red pen? What was the reason for going over those exploits? Were you just reading what the Book said, or did you revise things as you went? Little margin comment here and there? Where did this going-back-over-exploits thing happen?

So in conclusion: the S2 “first meeting” is almost the perfect inverse of the S1/Book first meeting. It’s a drawing-apart rather than drawing together, the philosophy is MUCH more black-and-white and framed entirely as Aziraphale being in the right. The S2 meeting is also a lot more dramatic and flashy and colorful and LOUD than the relatively low-key and understated S1/Book meeting. In conclusion: I don’t think that the S2 meeting is real. I think it’s Fiction By Metatron with the intent of starting a hairline crack in the relationship that he can dig into and exploit later.

So we start off with the hugely romantic church scene we all swooned and screeched over in S1. Great, no problems there.

But then they go to a theater, which is incredibly brightly lit outside. That same night? During the actual Blitzkrieg? When there were bombs going off and fire everywhere around Crowley’s car? This is an egregiously weird thing that stood out to me even on my first watch—if you are not familiar with the London blackouts during WWII, just go skim over the Wikipedia article real quick.

That’s a big signal to me that something fucky is going on with this memory after the church bit.

I hate to break it to you, but I don’t think Maggie is a “real person” the way Nina or Crowley or Aziraphale are. I think Maggie is a character that Metatron made up and wrote into the Book of Life. (From a Watsonian perspective, that is. From a Doylist perspective, she’s... double-fictional? Which is a very fun, neat trick.) There are so many weird little clues to support this theory, and they are so, so subtle because a lot of them are in the genre of Clumsy Apprentice-Writer Mistakes and we’re kind of... used to seeing them? They don’t strike us as unusual.

This thread also intersects with the line, “We can be together, as angels, doing good”— Because ok but like.... since when has Aziraphale’s primary motivation ever been “do good”? Aziraphale is here to VIBE and have a NICE TIME and be COMFY. He gave his flaming sword to Adam and Eve because, and I quote, “there are vicious animals, it’s going to be cold out there, and she’s expecting already”: He recognized that they were going to be Severely Uncomfy and that was viscerally horrifying to him and his empathy. (Also: I bet that sword was heavy and he was tired of holding it anyway, so other than the guilt about Heaven being mad at him, giving it away was kind of a win/win. We love and cherish one (1) lazy bitch.) He does good when he’s supposed to do good, because it’s his job to do good, but does he “do good” in his free time? No, his free time is spent going to lunch with Crowley, going to the theater with Crowley, and running a book“shop” where he works very hard to avoid selling people any books and gets very hostile when people insist on trying. His entire reason for stopping the end of the world in S1 was because it would personally inconvenience him and get in the way of his lavish lunch dates with his bestie. He and Crowley have regularly been lazy bitches together throughout their Arrangement—in S1E3, he immediately knows what Crowley is talking about with, “Bit of a waste of effort, both of us going all the way to Scotland...” and agrees that it is less work for one of them to take care of both tasks up there.

In short, he could have been playing politics and “doing good” if he had the interest—he does not have the interest. He wants to do less work, not more. He wants more time for his HOBBIES (book hoarding and hanging out with Crowley).

“I’ll run it and you can be my second-in-command” and “We can be together, as angels, doing good” are not the statements of a person with Aziraphale’s personal values. Those are Metatron’s values—or at least, the values that Metatron wants Aziraphale to have: A work ethic and black-and-white morality.

Over and over again, the show tells us to pay attention to memory while in the background Metatron is corrupting the files one by one, so subtly that we don’t see it happening—and neither does anyone else.

And then Metatron-via-Maggie gets into Crowley’s head and makes him insecure. She throws him off balance. A few minutes later Aziraphale walks in all a-flutter with something that throws Crowley even further off-balance, and then all those hairline cracks Metatron has been setting up in their relationship start paying off.

Crowley is insecure and scared and facing the loss of the thing he cares about most in the world. Just like Aziraphale in the demon attack, Crowley decides it’s worth taking... desperate measures.

And all those hairline cracks mean that the structure of the relationship fails under pressure and crumbles from solid stone into gravel, and we the audience are left reeling in shock and confusion as much as Crowley and Aziraphale are, because both we and they thought that structure was solid as hell and that this would never, ever happen.

Metatron’s chess game ends in a ruthless checkmate.