There was supposed to be a lot of the late Terry Pratchett in Good Omens 3, the finale to Amazon’s successful apocalyptic series based on the 1990 novel Pratchett co-authored with Neil Gaiman. There’s not, though. And that’s part of the reason why it’s such a huge, unsatisfying mess.
First of all, some backstory.
There is, of course, only one source novel in the Good Omens canon. It was adapted in its entirety by Gaiman into the first season of the show, back in 2019, to considerable success. When a second season was announced we were told that Gaiman was adapting a plot he and Pratchett had come up with together back in 1989 but never got around to writing. Good Omens 2, which emerged in 2023, was written as a “bridging” season in order to manoeuvre the characters into place for the real sequel, a third and final season, which would tell the story of the second coming of Christ and see our heroes once again thwart the apocalypse. “Terry was clear on what he wanted from Good Omens on the telly,” wrote Gaiman on his blog. “He wanted the story told, and if that worked, he wanted the rest of the story told”.
Some fans have been sceptical, but the sequel idea was absolutely real. Both Pratchett and Gaiman gave hints about it over the years (provisionally, and probably jokingly, it was to be titled “668: The Neighbour of the Beast”) though both said it was unlikely they’d ever write it. The idea also contained a real ending, which would find the characters living together in a cottage on the South Downs.
By 2024, Good Omens 3 was ready to roll. Neil Gaiman wrote six hour-long episodes, ostensibly based on the story he and Pratchett had come up with together. Then the various allegations about Gaiman’s behaviour toward women appeared, of which you can read elsewhere, and everything fell apart. At one point the show was rumoured to have been scrapped as a result, but was rescued by some fancy footwork by co-producers BBC Studios with the cautious support of Narrativia, the in-house production wing of the Terry Pratchett Estate.
A compromise was reached: a feature-length finale made without Gaiman’s further involvement as either writer or producer, and on a significantly reduced budget that dramatically limited the scope for guest stars or locations. The scripts were handed off to Gaiman collaborators Peter Atkins (who has written numerous Hellraiser sequels) and author Michael Marshall Smith, who were given the unenviable task of boiling them down into a single, affordable, movie-length episode to satisfy fans and wrap the show up. Rachel Talalay (Doctor Who, Sherlock, Riverdale), a safe pair of hands if ever there was one, was brought in to direct.
That’s the story so far, and if you look carefully you’ll find all the seeds of the dog’s breakfast that the finale, released on May 13, became.
What the new team should have done is rip up Gaiman’s scripts and start again from scratch, working from the original plot synopsis, to build something that was paced and structured like a feature film, since that was effectively what they were making. The finished episode feels less like a television film designed from the ground up than a brutal compression of something much larger.
Maybe there wasn’t time. Maybe there wasn’t money. Instead they seem to have just highlighted key scenes from across the six scripts and scribbled out everything else, skipping huge amounts of necessary exposition and character development in order to gallop as fast as they can toward the finale.
What story is left is about someone ripping pages out of a “Book of Life” and erasing things from existence, leaving the universe full of unexplained holes and missing people. That’s incredibly appropriate because it’s exactly what’s happened to the show itself.
It’s a piece full of squandered talent and unresolved subplots. David Tennant and Michael Sheen are wonderful when the script gives them something to work with (Sheen’s turn as a clown faced demon is an absolute joy), but the finale doesn’t deserve them and there are scenes here (the opening) where you can see them visibly disengaged with the material. Sean Pertwee and Mark Addy turn up in tiny, thankless roles that set up themes and subplots that no-one follows up. Bilal Hasna is great as the resurrected and then misplaced Jesus in the story’s most frustratingly pruned branch, but it’s a barely-there gesture at a wider plot and it’s far more frustrating to have that glimpse and see what we could have won than to have not had it at all. We need to either accept Jesus into our lives or ignore him completely. Having him pop in just long enough for us to start to care and then vanish without resurrection doesn’t work.
Doon Mackichan’s Archangel Michael has it even worse, having to shoulder the story’s biggest reveal without being able to show any of the necessary character development needed to get her there.
The show’s great, get-out-of-jail-free card is essentially a Thanos snap in which pretty much everyone gets erased from creation without the need to wrap up their stories. It’s an absolute confession of defeat. We have characters we cannot afford to bring back and plot threads we cannot afford to resolve, so everyone gets deleted mid-scene to save the bother of writing them an ending. No writer, starting from scratch, would make that choice.
Good Omens 3 is full of the sort of narrative compromises and gaping-hole storytelling that Terry Pratchett was incapable of writing. Which is probably why someone, quietly in the background, has made sure that his name is barely on it. The credits are unusually careful to separate Pratchett from a television story we were previously told was based on his ideas: This was supposed to be “Based on a story by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman”. Instead the credits tell us very carefully and very specifically, that what we have is a “Television story by Neil Gaiman”. Pratchett is only credited once, for the source novel, and never again. Gaiman, who was removed from the process lest the allegations against him overshadowed everything (pointlessly, as it turns out — they still do), still manages four separate creative credits. It’s pretty telling. Whatever this finale once was, the production seems keen not to oversell it as “Terry Pratchett’s planned sequel”.
Pratchett wrote stories that were always crowded, always full of small lives and side-jokes and minor characters with whole inner worlds glimpsed in a single line. Good Omens the novel, which he wrote somewhere in the region of 80% of, is one of the densest books he ever worked on; scenes have witchfinders, angelic beings, delivery men, nuns and usually some small but immaculately realised piece of working-class England wandering through the apocalypse with its own concerns, all functioning at once. Good Omens 3 has the opposite metabolism. It’s empty. It’s cold. It’s a show about an angel and a demon talking to each other in increasingly underpopulated rooms while the universe is briskly deleted around them by a character we don’t know.
And then, almost at the end, the pace slows right down and, just briefly, Terry Pratchett turns up. Literally, in fact, in the form of a portrait and several background easter eggs, but that’s not what I mean.
There is a scene set at the end of time, in the book shop, in which Tennant’s Crowley and Sheen’s Azirophale confront God (Tanya Moodie) and the Devil (Toby Jones. Obviously). Its register is entirely different to the rest of the show. It lets people have conversations and, more importantly, it has something to say. Crowley asks God why she made people and then punished them for behaving like people. “A person isn’t the worst thing they’ve ever done, and they’re not the best thing they’ve ever done. Why make them that way?” That is absolutely a Terry Pratchett philosophy. It’s the moral architecture of Small Gods. It’s Lord Vetinari in Unseen Academicals telling us “If there is any kind of supreme being it is up to all of us to become his moral superior”. It’s the question Pratchett kept asking in different forms for forty years: if the universe is rigged, what does it mean to do the right thing anyway? The framing of the scene is very Gaiman: the directness, the willingness to let characters argue theology out loud, the telling rather than showing, that’s all his territory. But the substance, the actual content of the moral argument, has been deliberately built out of Pratchett’s collected ethical thought. Someone in the writers’ room has read his books, properly, and absorbed how Terry put a question. The bones of this scene are his. Even if the voice isn’t.
The scene ends with our central duo convincing God to recreate the universe with no gods, devils, angels, heaven, hell or divine judgement. A godless universe in which people have free will. The one we live in, even though they cannot exist within it. It’s exactly the choice Adam Young made at the end of the original novel when he refused the cosmic role written for him, choosing his friends and his dog and his village and an ordinary life. Adam’s answer was “no thank you, I’d like to be a person.” Crowley’s answer is “no thank you, I’d like everyone else to be a person.” That escalation, from individual refusal to cosmic refusal, is the only thing in the finale that genuinely feels like the sequel Pratchett and Gaiman might have written. It’s the same moral move, played at higher stakes, with thirty-five years of evidence behind it that the universe really did need rebuilding from scratch.
There’s another ending, in which Tennant and Sheen’s characters meet on Earth with no memory of their former existence, fall in love and spend a happy, human lifetime together. I thought it was lovely, although there are those that might find it mawkish and overplayed. It almost certainly isn’t how the original story would have ended, but to me at least it feels right: pragmatic, humane, ending on an ordinary moment of two people happy together, with a suspicious snow globe in the background depicting Azirophale’s bookshop and implying that things might be more complicated than they seem. A clever touch.
So the verdict, I suppose, comes down to a split. For seventy minutes Good Omens 3 is a rushed, undercast, structurally compromised mess that fails almost every test you could set it. It deletes its supporting cast, wastes its best premise, throws its villain away, and shoots Soho like it’s been evacuated for a plague. It shouldn’t have been written like this. In a trouser leg of time where the feature-length format was baked in from the start, it almost certainly wouldn’t have been. Everyone’s trying their best, especially Rachel Talalay who could only film what was on the page, but almost nothing meets the mark. Hamstrung by time and resources. It is, ultimately, a real shame. It’s too flawed, too compromised.
Ultimately it probably shouldn’t have been made if it couldn’t have been done properly. Amazon should have let the team shoot the whole thing as it was or else redeveloped it properly as a TV movie with the time and budget to start again on the script. Or else… not done it at all. Instead we got a patchwork mess that doesn’t do the original scripts or Pratchett and Gaiman’s original vision justice, full of visible scars and phantom limb syndrome from the uncomfortable amputations.
The ending, as lovely a thing as it is, doesn’t redeem the rest of it. But it does mean the show ends honestly, which is more than most of us were expecting. We were, once upon a time, promised a Good Omens finale co-plotted by Terry Pratchett. Every failure here feels like a betrayal of that promise. It’s no coincidence that, on the rare occasion the finale works, it feels like it does so because someone thought about what Sir Terry would have wanted it to say.
Still. A bitterly missed opportunity and a sad end to a series that shot for the stars and very, very nearly reached them. Perhaps Azirophale and Crowley should have been allowed to go to Alpha Centauri after all?
Pre-order Marc’s book A Reader’s Guide To Terry Pratchett volume one here.
