Still entertaining, but it’s not my favorite episode of the season. There’s hardly any of the main plot at all, and this time around, the extended flashback feels extra padded. However, even in a just-all-right episode, David Tennant and Michael Sheen still make it worth watching.
As Aziraphale heads back from his investigative trip to Edinburgh from the last episode, he’s accosted by the demon Shax, who tries to ferret out information about where Gabriel is hiding. An offhand comment leads into an extended flashback—a continuation of Crowley and Aziraphale’s 1941 encounter during the London Blitz. After Crowley saves Aziraphale with a well-timed German bomb, Aziraphale looks to return the favor. By a rather circuitous turn of events, this involves filling in for an absent magician in a West End revue, which Aziraphale is ecstatically excited about, but he needs Crowley’s help to pull it off. Little do they know, a demon has dispatched three recently-deceased Nazis back to Earth as zombies to snoop on the two of them for evidence of fraternization.
As I said, the main storyline is practically nothing here. A few present-day scenes bookend the episode to nudge the plot forward a bit, and that’s all. The rest of the screentime is devoted to the uninterrupted flashback, which has a somewhat flimsy jumping-off point from the present-day story. Instead of following organically from the story around it, this makes it feel rather dropped in.
I love the Job and Edinburgh flashbacks of episodes 2 and 3, but this one is just okay to me. Aziraphale’s adoration for human magic tricks is a fun quirk in season 1, but doing an extended bit about it here belabors the joke a little and leans too far into cringe humor for my taste. Additionally, while I like the angle of Hell spying on Crowley and Aziraphale, and it leads to a good complication for them later in the episode, the zombie shtick goes on too long for me. Between this and the shortchanged present-day scenes, the whole episode feels like it’s playing for time, like a few amusing bits were stretched into an entire episode. If the season were five episodes long instead of six, I suspect that whatever’s necessary here could’ve been neatly slipped in somewhere else without much trouble.
But despite my complaints, I did still have a good time. I love Aziraphale’s exasperated and perplexed dismay when Shax tells him he’s revealed everything to her, and his enthusiasm for magic is very cute, even if I don’t think we needed a whole episode of it. I also like the theme that’s brought out of Aziraphale and Crowley’s trust in each other. Even though the dilemma they get into here is mostly one of Aziraphale’s own making, he has faith that Crowley can help him get out it—faith that Crowley doesn’t necessarily have in himself.
While Crowley is very much present throughout this storyline, he largely takes a backseat to Aziraphale. But that’s okay, because Tennant’s reaction-shot game is topnotch. I enjoy watching him observe the train wreck as Aziraphale wrestles with a set of linking rings while he remarks on his “gift for prop work” and “natural dexterity.” And when the notion of Aziraphale doing the magic show is first brought up, Crowley is alternately cautioning and reassuring. He’s pretty gentle in his intimations that Aziraphale might not be quite ready for such a big performance, but when Aziraphale starts to doubt his credentials, Crowley is all encouragement: “You, my Nefertiti-fooling fellow, are about to perform on the West End stage! If that doesn’t make you a professional conjurer, I don’t know what does.”
The only reason Crowley cares about any of this is because Aziraphale is so thrilled about it. So, regardless of his misgivings and overall disinterest, he steps up to help, scrambling to salvage things when their zombie/demon-induced complication crops up. Tennant does a nice job navigating that angle of This is dumb, but you love it, so I’ll make an effort to care for your sake. And while we only get a bit of Crowley in the present-day scenes, I love Tennant’s delivery when the demon reunites with his Bentley and speaks to it in a lovey doggie voice, cooing, “Did you miss me? I bet you did!”
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