Good Omens – Chapter 3: I Know Where I’m Going featuring the minisode The Resurrectionists

By: Kelly Kearney

Heaven knows Aziraphale and Crowley are up to something, so they send the Angel Murial to spy on them and report back to God. Meanwhile, Aziraphale takes Crowley’s baby, A.K.A., “their car” to Edinburgh to sniff out more clues about Gabriel and that song he’s been humming.

Monitoring the Situation

The episode opens At Nina’s (Nina Sosanya) coffee shop or one of her regular customers about how her coffee is always rancid whenever Nina gets in a fight with her partner Lindsay. The two women notice across the street the angel Muriel (Quelin Sepulveda) dressed in all white police uniform and looking quite proud of herself as she has to Mr Fell’s bookshop. Muriel is there hoping to sniff out Gabriel (Jon Hamm), but her lack of humanity lets Aziraphale (Michael Sheen) know she’s new on the job and he’s sort of amused by the whole transparent act. When Crowley (David Tennant) arrives the two men play along with the farce as the poor thing keeps slipping up on her human cosplay. She’s unfamiliar with tea – the drinking part, and her social skills are lacking, and it’s all so comical. The two men excuse themselves to talk about the angel inspector constable who they know is there because their tag-team miracle to hide Gabriel alerted their bosses. She’s there to find out if Aziraphale is lying. Luckily, Crowley has a plan to get Nina and Maggie (Maggie Service) together to trick this fake cop and their bosses and all they need to do is get the two women to kiss. Unfortunately, the coffee shop owner didn’t seem to be in a receptive or romantic mood. She’s sort of biting the heads off of her customers as if something is bothering her. Perhaps it’s that controlling partner of her’s she can’t seem to stop mentioning–and not in a loving way. While Aziraphale takes the keys from Crowley to speed off towards some answers in Edinburgh about that song Gabriel keeps humming, Crowley manages to convince the angel cop to help him play matchmaker – the miracle takes time to marinate and he could use some help at the bookshop while his partner-in-crime is away. Cops just love that romantic stuff, he convinces her, so to keep it authentic Murial is all in. Keeping her busy gets her out of their hair and away from Gabriel, who is holed up in his bedroom after Azitaphale managed to convince him that all stores in London close on Wednesdays. He needs to stay out of sight since there is no telling how long that miracle will hold.

Edinburgh, Yesterday and Today

Next, we flashback to the last time Aziraphale was in Edinburgh. It was a few hundred years ago when he and Crowley ran into a grave robber named Elspeth (Abigail Laurie) while touring a cemetery to admire the Angel Gabriel’s statue. Ignoring Crowley’s enthusiasm for the young criminal, Aziraphale turns the girl into his project as he tries to instill some morality in her. The problem is she’s poor, desperate and certain people will pay good money for corpses and there are plenty of those lying around in Victorian era Scotland. Ethics tends to take a backseat to starvation so Elspeth is unmoved by the angels’ spiel and even her friend Wee Morag’s (Julie McLellan) criticism falls on deaf ears. With nothing on their current agenda but saving and damning souls the Angel and Demon agree to team up to help the girl on her mission. They might have different agendas when it comes to Elspeth, but they can both agree on one thing: good doesn’t stick until you’re tempted by evil – and this girl is very tempted. Crowley points out how Aziraphale might see the world in a good vs. evil way but he sees things in shades of gray because not everyone starts off in life the same way, nor are they given the same opportunities to choose one over the other. His lesson in class warfare does seem to marinate in Aziraphale’s mind, pushing him to offer up their help. We next see them tagging behind Elspeth as she hauls her corpse through town in a barrel labeled pickles.

Back in the present finds the two frenemies having an argument through the car stereo that can only be described as marital. Aziraphale is making the slow crawl to The Resurrectionist Pub and Crowley, who is possessive of his car, can’t help but be overly critical of his friends driving and music choices. He doesn’t like anyone behind the wheel of his (not their) car and he lets the angel know it in very colorful and ragey words. He doesn’t love his slow driving, his classical music and he especially despises the color Aziraphale changed the Black Bentley to. Now it’s sunshine yellow and that change casts a dark cloud over the demon’s day.

Saving Lives One Death at a Time

Over in Hell, Beelzebub (Shelley Conn) is also in a foul mood as they seem to be experiencing some sort of existential crisis where they feel underappreciated for doing a good job in Hell. They seem to think they’re the only one keeping things afloat and that’s because not a single of their minions have any news about Gabriel. Topside in London, we catch up with Gabriel who appears to be fascinated with gravity and keeps bothering Crowley with questions about the universe. When the demon notices a fly he points out how those insects are an exception to the gravity rule, which only adds to Gabriel’s confusion and interest. Crowley cuts their science lesson short  when he notices Maggie and Nina and he starts to wonder how he can get those two lovebirds together.  This entire dilemma his friend got himself into reminds Crowley of the time in Edinburgh when he and Aziraphale delivered Elspath’s cash – corpse.

We head back to Victorian Edinburgh where Aziraphale continues to try to lead Elspath away from her grave robbing nights. In fact he goes as far as to sabotage her sale when the three of them show up at Mr. Darlymple’s medical research laboratory. The angel used his miraculous powers to turn the body in the pickle barrel into soup, leaving nothing behind worth buying from the poor hungry girl. An angry Elspath realizes Aziraphale was behind that transformation and storms out of Mr. Darlymple’s leaving Crowley intrigued by this entire business. Dalrymple clears things up when he explains why he purchases the bodies. He says he can save more lives by researching the dead then he could ever do on the living. He tells the angel and demon that he once failed to save a young boy with cancer and how he might still be alive if he had had access to those research bodies before. The story of the young boy moves Aziraphale and he finds Elspath and declares his mind has been changed. He gives her his full permission (as if she needed it, to continue stealing bodies and selling them for food and shelter. Her friend Wee Morag however still feels a bit weird about the entire ordeal) and in between her coughing fits she begrudgingly agrees to help Elspath dig up a new body. Everything goes wrong when Wee Morag gets scared by the dead body and winds up getting fatally shot by a group of people trying to catch those late night grave robbers. Wee Morag dies in her friend’s arms and seconds after her final breath Elspath callously asks the angel and demon to help her get the body to Dalrymple. The man winds up underpaying her for her friend’s body, making this entire sale sort of worthless. As he’s reaching for the money Elspath steals a bottle of laudanum from one of his shelves with the hopes that she can join her friend and put an end to her daily graveyard hustle. When Aziraphale and Crowley catch up with her inside a closed mausoleum holding a glass of poison, Crowley magics the liquid away and downs it himself. Aziraphale tries to reason with the young girl about why she has other options besides suicide just he effects of the laudanum start to take hold. Crowley turns into a drunken mess and he can’t seem to control his otherworldly powers. He winds up shrinking himself into a ranting miniature and then expanding his stature until the giant looms over the terrified Elspeth. Even Aziraphale is confused by this until he realizes Crowley is trying to scare her straight. The giant bellows about how suicide is a sin and the only way out of her predicament is for Aziraphale to hand her enough money to buy her own farm and live a life of faithful devotion. He makes her promise that she will live a good life – one worth the wealth Aziraphale is giving her. She agrees and takes the money and runs, leaving her beneficiary and the more sober and normal sized Crowley walking away from the graveyard wondering if their night with Elspath altered Hell. Before he gets a chance to even ponder that the demon gets sucked down into hell for his punishment.

Love Rains Down on London

In present day Scotland, Aziraphale walks into The Resurrectionist pub and immediately sees an homage to Darlymple. He knows he’s in the right place and shows the bartender a picture of Gabriel. The man recognizes him and says the Archangel was a regular at the pub and often came in with an acquaintance. With that information, Aziraphale heads to the graveyard where he runs into two criminally mischievous men who he charms into letting him use their phone. Of course he calls Crowley to fill him in on what he’s found out at the pub but he doesn’t really have any new information so Crowley hangs up. The demon has better things to do; namely spying on Maggie and Nina talking outside the shop’s window. Apparently, Maggie is concerned by Nina brushing her off and treating her differently after their lockdown together. When she asks Nina why she’s mad at her since the outage that trapped them wasn’t her fault, Crowley summons a little rain to bring the women closer together. The sky opens and it drenches the two women who run to take shelter under an awning where Nina apologizes for being rude and admits she was actually angry at Lindsey for accusing her of having an affair with Maggie. she makes an off-the-cuff comment about how that would never happen because Maggie wouldn’t have feelings for her, and the stunned record shop owner looks her in the eye and says. “You have no idea.” The moment is romantically charged and as the two lock eyes, Crowley looks on with excitement. As the music swells and the two women are just about to admit their real feelings for each other, the downpour of rain breaks through the awning and drenches Nina. Soaked and upset, she storms off back to her coffee shop with Maggie running behind her.  The romantic moment is over and Crowley fills Gabriel in on the failed plot to get those two together. This somehow triggers his inner Gabriel to reemerge and as his eyes gloss over he speaks about a day the dead will rise. When he comes to, the Archangel has no idea what he just said and he’s not alone, Crowley is equally confused but now he’s also worried. That’s the moment Shax shows up to let Crowley know that Hell is about to declare war on Aziraphale. They know that he’s the one that’s hiding Gabriel in the bookshop, and as she mentioned before, the sanctions they have planned for the angel would erase his existence from the Book of Life. Crowley can’t listen to her anymore so he pushes her out the front door and turns his worry on Gabriel– who he threatens, and it only confuses the man more. For as much as this demon  flourishes in the darker corners of Hell, one thing remains true: his love for Aziraphale outranks his love of chaos, and that’s a problem for both God and Beelzebub.  Crowley will do whatever it takes to keep his friend– and we can use that term loosely now that hearts and feelings are revealing themselves, safe from heaven, Hell, and even himself.  With both the up and down working together to find the Archangel and make his accomplice pay, Crowley has his work cut out for him.