Favorite Characters: Crowley (Good Omens)

Dipping my toes into Good Omens again. I’ve already written about Crowley and Aziraphale together – twice! – but they’re both great on their own as well. Today is all about a certain snake-eyed demon with a taste for Queen and Bentleys (some Crowley-related spoilers.)

Crowley is, in a sense, framed as the numero uno evil since literally the dawn of humanity: in snake form, he’s the one who tempts Eve to the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. He’s responsible for the first sin, and yet, from the very start, even that moment is cast ambiguously. After the deed is done, he and Aziraphale meet and discuss the recent falling-out between God and the first humans, and the two of them wonder whether Crowley’s act was in fact part of God’s Divine and/or Ineffable Plan, making it not evil at all. Crowley good-naturedly muses on the possibility of his having done something “good” by accident.

And that’s Crowley, really. He talks a big demon game, but when you get down to it, that isn’t who is. By the time we get to the main thrust of the story, he’s long since grown tired of what he regards as the tedious and pointless business of tempting humans to sin, and so he instead pursues his own interests on Earth, maintaining his reputation in Hell by sending reports of the outrageous sins he’s just pretending to inspire. Though he’d be the first to argue this point, we see him doing good far more often than he does evil; he saves Aziraphale more than once throughout history, and while he insists that his motives are purely self-serving, he’s the one who comes to Aziraphale suggesting they work together to stop the apocalypse.

He’s an undercover agent of Hell who, let’s be honest, was never really that sold on the party line, and after millennia on Earth, he’s gone native. He likes tooling around among the humans, having fun and low-key keeping Aziraphale out of inadvertent trouble. He admits at one point that he “didn’t mean to” become a fallen angel, and that, when he became a demon, it was more about asking questions than being evil. (And question he does: I love the flashback of him running into Aziraphale as Noah’s building the ark, seeing him try to wrap his head around how flooding the earth could be part of God’s plan.)

All this isn’t to say he’s a secret softie who wouldn’t hurt a fly. He’s certainly not as bad as he purports to be, and he has a soft spot for Aziraphale a mile wide, but calling him “just a poor misunderstood demon” wouldn’t cover it. He’s willing to get plenty underhanded in service of his goals, even if those goals are ultimately for the greater good. This comes in handy, as Aziraphale is chronically averse to crossing lines and you don’t avert apocalypses playing by the rules. Still, he plays dirty and he’s not afraid of a little collateral damage. He can definitely be selfish too – when it looks like their plan isn’t panning out, Aziraphale wants to keep working at it, but Crowley is ready to get the hell out of there, wanting the two of them to abandon the earth to the Antichrist and escape to a different solar system.

In other words, he’s a character with a lot to offer: smart and savvy, jaded and self-serving, bored and mean, curious and determined, imaginative and wrathful. At any given moment, he’s at least several of those things at once, and he’s always delightfully cool while doing it!