Relationship Spotlight: Aziraphale & Crowley (Good Omens)

Catching up on all the Good Omens rambling I missed over the summer because I hadn’t seen it then. Anyone who’s watched the miniseries adaptation of this novel can tell you that the real headline of the piece is Michael Sheen’s Aziraphale and David Tennant’s Crowley, particularly the combination of the two together. Most who adore the miniseries will single out these two as its greatest asset, and even many of those who dislike the miniseries will still admit that Crowley and Aziraphale are great onscreen together. Whatever way you slice it, this is what it all comes down to (some spoilers.)

Right from “in the beginning,” Aziraphale and Crowley have had a complicated history. After Crowley tempts Eve into eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and after Aziraphale gives the two exiled humans the flaming sword he was supposed to be using to guard the gates of Eden, the angel and the demon meet and aren’t altogether sure what to make of each other. They reflect on heaven, hell, God’s Ineffable Plan, and the possibility that they may have bungled which one of them did “the good thing” and “the bad thing.”

The series later takes us on a scenic tour of Crowley and Aziraphale’s relationship throughout history, hitting highlights such as Noah’s Ark, the Globe Theatre, the French Revolution, and World War II. Throughout, we get glimpses of this unseen tie that binds them. They’re ostensibly enemies, on opposing sides of a holy war, but every time they run into each other early on, they’re congenial with one another. And not only Aziraphale as you might expect, it being within reason that angels would be nice to everyone – Crowley is also thoroughly pleasant toward Aziraphale, going out of his way to greet the angel in a crowd and make small talk. As time goes on, however, they go beyond even that, moving from amiable acquaintances into becoming very genuinely important to one another. About halfway through that tour of history, we start seeing a pattern of Crowley seeking Aziraphale out, either to get him out of trouble or to proposition him for a two-celestial-being ceasefire (reasoning that he and Aziraphale, working for the forces of evil and good respectively, “cancel each other out,” he points out that they could just not bother and end up with the same result.)

But let’s focus on where Aziraphale and Crowley are in the main time period of the series, during the whole Antichrist/end of the world business. At this point, there’s very little that’s reluctant or tentative about their relationship. They regularly call each other, meet up for lunch or drinks, and discuss the work of their individual sides. Call them friends, call them lovers, call them frenemies, whatever you’d like – these are two celestial beings who are very decidedly in one another’s lives. While it’s not a relationship they’re keen to advertise to their own kinds, there’s no real pretense about them being actual adversaries.

This gets a little thorny for Aziraphale, though. As an angel, like I said, he’s pretty conditioned to be friendly and nice, but he knows he’s also not supposed to “fraternize” with demons. In their relationship, if one of them is going to shy away or pull back, it’s usually Aziraphale. He’s particularly resistant when Crowley suggests they team up to stop the apocalypse. It’s one thing for Aziraphale to let his heavenly orders lie once in a while, but it’s quite another to go against the Great and/or Ineffable Plan, especially working shoulder-to-shoulder with a demon. This is when he starts talking about sides and insisting that he can’t team up with Crowley. Even when Crowley wins Aziraphale over to helping him (after all, if the earth is destroyed in Armageddon, there won’t be any Stephen Sondheim premieres in heaven!), the angel spends a good chunk of the miniseries trying to deny what Crowley really means to him.

As with the “Aziraphale and Crowley throughout history” flashbacks, Crowley in the present day is pretty much all in, both on his plan and his relationship with Aziraphale, which I find continually surprising. For all of Crowley’s growling that he’s dangerous and not “nice” as Aziraphale repeatedly avows, there’s very little that the demon isn’t ultimately willing to do on the angel’s behalf, and he’s often the one fighting for the bond between them. It’s Aziraphale who continues to be unsure. He’s caught between all he’s ever believed in and this friend he technically isn’t supposed to have, one who keeps pointing out how all he’s ever believed in doesn’t actually line up with what he holds most dear. But no matter how often he tries to pull away, he can’t bring himself to cut that tie completely. Ultimately, it comes to him and Crowley standing together between humanity and the end of the world, and there’s no one the other would rather be standing there with.