“The Bad Batch” Episode 10 Muses On Morality

SPOILERS FOR THE BAD BATCH AHEAD!

It’s been almost two months since The Bad Batch premiered on Disney+, and you may have noticed that in all that time I haven’t been reviewing episodes weekly. Make no mistake, I’ve kept up with the show, and now that it’s nearing the end of its first season I’m back with what I hope will prove to be consistent weekly reviews for the final seven episodes, but the slow-burn episodic nature of the story made it difficult for me to commit to a weekly format with my reviews. I don’t regret that decision, but I will say this: in the time that I haven’t been reviewing it, The Bad Batch has gotten progressively better and better.

The Bad Batch
The Bad Batch | denofgeek.com

Just as I had hoped, the series doesn’t shy away from exploring complicated and surprisingly mature topics – take, for example, today’s episode, which starts getting to the heart of the extraordinarily messy political situation left in the wake of the Clone Wars between the Old Republic and the recently defeated Confederacy of Independent Systems (or Separatists, as they were colloquially known during the Clone Wars). The Separatists were portrayed as the “bad guys” throughout the war, and with their armies of faceless droids and Sith Lord leadership, it wasn’t exactly hard to see why.

But only a handful of people in the Star Wars universe are aware at this time that Sheev Palpatine, whose Galactic Empire swiftly usurped the Old Republic after the defeat of the Separatists and the Jedi Purge, had not only engineered the conflict, but had been secretly puppeteering both sides – so only the audience gets to fully appreciate the irony of the Separatists remaining devoted to their cause after the war’s end and by default becoming “good guys”, leading to a brutal crackdown from the Emperor whose ascent to power is attributable to hijacking their cause in the first place…or the fact that Separatist tactics were later adopted by the Rebels who would go on to fight in the name of restoring the Old Republic.

Basically, the galaxy is in chaos. And when the Bad Batch are called in to rescue a former Separatist senator on the planet Raxus who has been arrested by Imperial forces, it starts an interesting conversation about who’s really “good” nowadays. Is anyone? Something I’ve always loved about Star Wars is the idea that Light and Dark co-exist in all of us, making it our responsibility to find balance in ourselves: because the Dark Side of the Force is not evil by nature, no more than the Light Side is inherently good – an important lesson that both Jedi and Sith failed to learn in their pride. It’s part of what makes the clear-cut “good triumphs over evil” ending of The Rise Of Skywalker so underwhelming in hindsight, because it reduces Light and Dark to being simply Good and Evil, without any nuance.

This episode of The Bad Batch begins to reverse some of the damage caused by The Rise Of Skywalker, highlighting both the humanity in characters our protagonists have always known as traitors and the moral gray zone in a character they’ve come to love – which is already a compelling enough concept as it is, but the real kicker is that the second character in question here is none other than sweet innocent Omega (voiced by Michelle Ang), who proves to be quite the shrewd businessperson and money-manager while racking up wins at dejarik (the hyper-aggressive holographic version of chess which has reappeared several times in Star Wars since its introduction). I mean, should we expect anything less of a character who was recently revealed to be Jango Fett’s exact genetic copy and the closest living relative of Boba Fett?

The Bad Batch
Hunter, Tech, GS-8, and Echo | starwars.com

As for the other character, our imprisoned Separatist senator Avi Singh (voiced by Alexander Siddig), he’s a humanist who stands up to the Empire, recognizing in their blatant suppression of free speech the same authoritarian qualities he condemned in the New Republic (very timely episode, this). It’s admirable that he chooses to stand up to the Empire during a ceremony in which he is being pressured (quite literally, with stormtrooper guns at his back) to declare the Separatist movement dead and hand control of Raxus over to Palpatine – but his action proves reckless, and ultimately requires the Bad Batch to save him and take him off-world to escape from the Empire’s vengeance.

Perhaps therein lies an interesting parallel between Omega and Singh. Omega uses her “darker” qualities for good, to help the Bad Batch pay off their debts to the criminal entrepreneur Cid (voiced by Rhea Perlman) and earn herself a full-time place on the team, where Hunter (voiced, like all the Clones, by Dee Bradley Baker) realizes that her uncanny strategizing skills can be put to good use. But Singh, an almost cartoonishly “good” character with no understanding of the decisive action required from him, lacks those very same skills and ends up blowing a chance to help his people on the ground where his help would matter most. Star Wars has a lot of characters like these in authority positions where they do about as much good as their equivalents in real life: the perpetually concerned moderate Republicans and the willfully ineffective moderate Democrats.

A character who does take bold action is Singh’s trusty assistant, an RA-7 protocol droid named GS-8 (voiced by Sian Clifford), who contacts the Bad Batch and helps to rescue the senator from the chamber where he’s being held captive, while taking efforts to protect his estate and belongings from wanton destruction. And when you put it that way, she sounds a lot like any of the incredibly brave staffers and interns who helped protect the U.S. Capitol earlier this year, rushing Senators and Representatives to hiding places while making sure classified information and electoral ballots didn’t fall into the hands of domestic terrorists. I doubt this parallel was intentional, if only because the timing probably wouldn’t line up, but it’s still worth noting.

The action scenes at the senator’s estate are very well-choreographed, making good use of the Bad Batch’s individual talents – although, interestingly, this is one of their first times fighting the Empire’s new legions of stormtroopers, and I noticed they had their guns set to stun for most of the battle. Clones are used to mowing down rows of droids, but aren’t quite as accustomed to turning on other sentient beings – with one notable exception. As the show quietly lays the groundwork for stormtroopers supplanting Clones (and continues to offer no valid explanation for why the Empire views this as a profitable exchange), I wonder if this will ever be touched on again.

The Bad Batch
Omega | cbr.com

Heading into next week, it’s pretty cool that Omega will finally get to join the Bad Batch on all their missions, although I’ll miss getting to check in with the endearingly practical Cid and her crew more regularly. Omega is this show’s true star and I appreciate that she’s easing into that role – not so abruptly that it feels like a heel-turn for her shy, reserved character, but not so slowly that it feels grating, either. Basically, Omega is doing in a single season of The Bad Batch what Baby Yoda still hasn’t done in two seasons of The Mandalorian, which is to become a reliable team-player. I’m gonna end this here before I start ranting about how Disney+ is exploiting Baby Yoda for cuteness without developing the character further, but you get the gist.

Episode Rating: 9/10

“Katla” Review!

The devastation left in the wake of a volcanic eruption is immeasurable: lives lost, entire civilizations wiped out, ecosystems and weather patterns thrown off-balance, lands left scarred by rivers of lava and falling ash. But over time, our miraculous planet always finds a way to rebuild. The lava cools and hardens into rock, the rocks are broken down into soil, plants take root again, animals return, humans follow, and the cycle continues: faster in some places than in others. Life doesn’t ever go back to the way it was, but it does come back eventually. And Netflix’s Katla takes that simple premise to an extreme only capable through science-fiction.

Katla
Grima | netflix.com

Katla, Netflix’s first original series produced in Iceland, is named for one of the island nation’s largest and most formidable volcanoes, which hasn’t erupted since 1918. Well, at least in real life. The Netflix series imagines a world where Katla awakens in the present day, forcing the citizens of the nearby village of Vík (also a real place) to flee. The few survivors who stick around, whether to monitor Katla or because they can’t bear to leave the only life they’ve ever known, are themselves hardening and/or breaking down, much like the cooling magma which surrounds them.

But a year after the eruption, as most of the world is too preoccupied with which way the wind will blow Katla’s ash-fall to worry about the people of Vík who stubbornly choose to live in its shadow, the looming mountain sends a new kind of devastation down its slopes and into the village – a quiet, intensely personal devastation that affects each individual differently, as they’re confronted by mysterious strangers who appear to have stumbled out of the volcano’s heart, covered in ash and without any memories of how they ended up that way. These strangers are people from Vík’s past: some are recreations of Katla’s casualties; a few are younger, seemingly happier doppelgangers of people still alive and unwell; one is a murderous child. All are united by a single purpose which is slowly and delicately unfolded over eight episodes.

For a town so depleted by the volcano and its aftereffects, Katla has a surprisingly large ensemble cast – and once the doppelgangers start arriving in droves, that cast quickly becomes so sprawling that it’s a miracle the series is able to maintain its sense of intimacy. The decision to refrain from exploring its most outlandish science-fiction concepts proves a wise one from a purely thematic standpoint because the sci-fi is ultimately only in service of Katla‘s plot, not the plot itself, although I’m sure that will disappoint some viewers who tuned in specifically for the supernatural elements. Similarly, the “cliffhanger” ending can be read as either a thematically satisfying conclusion to the entire story that acknowledges the cyclical nature of life, or an invitation for a second season that’s more akin to what most viewers probably thought they were in for, which is a larger-scale epic. I’d be down for that too.

Katla
Katla | theguardian.com

Katla isn’t exactly small in scope as it is, however – certainly not when the series puts its entire location budget onscreen, with stunning shots of southern Icelandic scenery including Katla itself, the towering prongs of the Reynisdrangar sea stacks, and the stark silhouette of the Víkurkirkja. The show’s overwhelmingly bleak cinematography tries to further accentuate the natural beauty of the land and its encircling ocean, although I still felt neither was shot with the dignity they deserve and indeed command. I felt this again when the show finally takes us into the cavernous heart of Katla – yet never gives us a moment to marvel at the mountain’s very real and very beautiful cave system. You know that shot from literally every documentary about speleologists ever, where our human protagonist stands in the pinpoint light from their helmet, dwarfed by the scale of the caves illuminated around them? Yeah, that’s what I was missing.

In contrast, the town and its variety of interior locations are small, bleak, and untidy – reflecting the general malaise that has settled upon the survivors, reducing them to bleary-eyed, weather-beaten shadows of their former selves…former selves who, mind you, come wandering out of Katla looking youthful and radiant once they’ve scrubbed off the ash that coats their bodies. Guðrún Ýr Eyfjörð Jóhannesdóttir, who has a vibrant pop-music persona under the stage name GDRN, is here at her most mellow and understated, playing the central character Gríma – a first responder whose grief over losing her sister to the volcano is the impetus for much of what follows, although she has only a tangential connection to the first doppelganger who appears; a Swedish woman named Gunhild (Aliette Opheim) who was involved in an affair with Gríma’s father Þór (Ingvar Sigurdsson) twenty years earlier.

Gríma is an interesting character, albeit very guarded, but Opheim is phenomenal playing two sides of the same coin – the wide-eyed ethereal vagabond Gunhild who walks out of Katla under the assumption that it’s still 2001, and the rigid, world-weary, older version of Gunhild who is still alive and living in Sweden, and is both shocked and shaken to her core when she discovers that her younger self is back, stirring up memories of the traumatic events that shaped her. Although a couple of characters meet versions of themselves, Opheim and Sólveig Arnarsdóttir – playing the once effervescent Magnea, whose arc seems distanced from the rest until near the very end, where it becomes the highlight of the show’s finale – are the best at distinguishing these doppelgangers while subtly emphasizing their similarities to the versions we know in ways I found fascinating.

Katla
Gunhild | paudal.com

Again, this is a slow-burn, suspenseful, character drama – one which masterfully uses the building blocks of good sci-fi, but which never indulges in the sci-fi to the point where it overwhelms the story. If that sounds interesting to you, and you either understand Icelandic or simply don’t mind subtitles (I usually watch non-English media with subtitles, but pick a few scenes to test out the English voice-dub – Katla‘s is better than some, but not good enough to warrant missing out on the beautiful undulating sounds of spoken Icelandic, an endangered language that needs shows like this to remind people why it’s worth speaking), then this series will make an excellent addition to your Netflix watchlist.

Series Rating: 8.5/10

“Loki” Episode 4 Proves That Marvel Can Do Mystery Boxes

SPOILERS FOR LOKI AHEAD!

The “Mystery Box” style of storytelling used in film and television has become quite popular over the last decade or so, thanks to J.J. Abrams. Mystery Boxes, for those unfamiliar with the term as applied to TV, are stories in which the status quo the characters find themselves inhabiting is generally a mystery upon a mystery built upon yet more mysteries, which only continue to grow deeper and more complex as the series continues, until the overarching throughline of the story becomes untangling the many plot-threads and revealing some intricate kaleidoscope of “highbrow” storytelling where everything intertwines to create answers for every other smaller mystery along the way…at least in theory.

Loki
The Time-Keepers’ Chamber | goldderby.com

In execution, the Mystery Box rarely works as intended because showrunners very rarely plan out the entire course of their series from day one. Abrams’ own series, Lost, famously fell apart in its final season because the mysteries had become too sprawling and convoluted. Abrams’ Star Wars movies, The Force Awakens and The Rise Of Skywalker, also followed his trademark formula but had no cohesion, leading to an increasingly bizarre and unnecessary series of plot twists for the sake of plot twists.

And that brings us to Loki. Because while all of Marvel’s Disney+ shows have tried to follow a small-scale Mystery Box formula in order to drive weekly discourse, Loki is the first one that feels like it’s actually doing it right. In WandaVision, the trail of Mystery Boxes led nowhere, many proving entirely inconsequential for reasons that varied from intentional to accidental. But at least there the initial mystery was relevant to the plot. In The Falcon And The Winter Soldier, the looming question of the Power-Broker’s identity was handled so poorly, only working on a meta level, that it felt completely extraneous and distracted from the thematic heart of the story.

And Loki could still suffer from the same problems, but so far the thing I find myself consistently enjoying about the series is that Loki (Tom Hiddleston), the God of Mischief, is simply too chaotic a character to abide by the laws of a Mystery Box. He’s not the type of character to patiently form a pattern from a tangle of plot-threads – he’s the type to slice the whole thing to shreds. As a result, Loki never revolves around the mysteries themselves, but around their consequences; specifically how Loki reacts to new information, and how he grows. That’s what makes a mystery work: the answer to all of the questions has to be emotionally resonant to the characters and their journeys, not merely satisfying to the audience member who cracked the code.

Another crucial difference between Loki and the two previous Marvel shows is that Loki actually builds upon its central mystery progressively, throughout the first four episodes at least, instead of presenting the audience with the mystery of the season and expecting them not to figure it out within a week (Agnes is Agatha Harkness; well, no kidding). So for instance, up until today the central mystery of Loki had been the identities of the Time-Keepers – who were today revealed to be convincing fakes, a bunch of lifelike androids serving as figureheads for the Time Variance Authority. Heading into next week’s episode, that mystery has now changed to “who is actually running the TVA?”, because it sure as Hel isn’t the Time-Keepers, and never was.

For a moment, however, I was myself deceived by the Time-Keepers – and that was great, because it made my joy when they were revealed as fakes all the more cathartic, although I was suspicious of their authenticity when they asked to personally oversee the execution of the Loki Variants. I’d always been of the opinion that the Time-Keepers never existed, were being held hostage by someone at the TVA, or were three large skeletons gathering dust in a storage room somewhere, so I’m very happy that not only was the first of these theories correct, but that the answer proved meaningful to both our characters, particularly Sylvie Laufeydottir (Sophia Di Martino), and that this mystery was resolved with two episodes left to go: two episodes which can now tackle the big question of who’s really pulling the strings.

I mean, not to sound too predictable, but…it’s totally Kang the Conqueror, right? It just seems a little too convenient that Judge Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), Kang’s love interest in the comics, is the only TVA employee with unrestricted access to the Time-Keepers’ chamber. Speaking of Mbatha-Raw, her performance in episode one was okay, but she has quickly become a highlight of the show for me: watching the façade of weary charm and humor she’s built to mask her penchant for cruelty begin to come apart is truly chilling. As for other suspects who could be behind the TVA’s creation, Miss Minutes comes to mind – but somehow, I don’t think the show will veer in that direction.

That said, I also didn’t expect selfcest discourse to emerge from this latest episode, yet here we are. Yes, much to the horror and disgust of some fans, it was revealed – or at the very least, strongly implied with the potential to be a misdirect – that Loki has romantic feelings for Sylvie, who is meanwhile confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt to be a Loki Variant who diverged from the timeline as a very young child for reasons still unclear to Sylvie even as an adult, although she tells Loki it might have something to do with having been born the Goddess of Mischief – and if the TVA pruned her because of her gender, the fact that they waited until she was around ten instead of soon after birth suggests that she could be coded as transgender or gender-fluid rather than having been assigned female at birth. Loki is gender-fluid in the comics and according to a dossier used as set dressing in the show, but this has yet to be addressed through dialogue.

However you interpret that, the fact that Sylvie is a Loki variant has provoked some heated discussion over whether it’s problematic to ship the two together, because someone has to get outraged on behalf of the alternative versions of ourselves with whom we’ll never interact, much less do any of the things that individuals on Twitter are legitimately concerned about. Personally, I find the topic conflicting – because on the one hand, I don’t ship Loki and Sylvie, but on the other hand, a narcissist like Loki falling in love with himself is arguably one of his milder offenses, if we take into consideration the fact that Loki is the same Norse deity who turned into a mare so they could seduce a stallion and have a magical horse baby.

Loki
Sylvie | superherohype.com

Seeing as that latter fact has never made it into the movies or the new series, however, I’ll admit I didn’t expect Marvel to actually go in this direction with a controversial selfcest pairing. Nor was I prepared for the real kicker, which is that whatever Loki and Sylvie feel for each other, whether it’s mutual attraction (I don’t think so, given Sylvie’s confusion when Loki seemed tempted to kiss her), unrequited pining on Loki’s part, or something completely platonic like I’d prefer, it’s powerful – powerful enough to cause a Nexus Event in an apocalypse where Nexus Events were previously established to be impossible because nothing you do in an apocalypse has any chance of altering a timeline bound for total obliteration – unless you hold hands with an alternate version of yourself, apparently. Powerful enough, too, to bring down the TVA; or at least that’s what Mobius (Owen Wilson) says, and I believe him, even though I hope it doesn’t take a Loki/Sylvie kiss to do that.

And for the record, it’s totally okay to be disappointed or angry that the MCU’s first canonically queer and theoretically genderfluid characters are heavily implied to be falling in love with alternate versions of themselves, and that’s an important issue to raise. It’s a sentiment I largely agree with, and I hope both Loki and Sylvie find other romantic partners in the near future. But if your problem is specifically with selfcest in general, a thing that quite literally does not and cannot exist, and if you’re going around claiming it’s equivalent to real-life incest or calling the director and creative team perverts, then…I don’t really know what to tell you. Weird stuff happens in fiction sometimes, and Loki has always been a weird character in his mythological pantheon and in the MCU.

But whether or not Mobius was right about Loki and Sylvie causing a massive Nexus Event by falling in love, this theory doesn’t get tested out before the TVA, alerted to Loki’s presence, comes to arrest both Variants: solidifying my biggest complaint about last week’s episode, that the cliffhanger, while epic, felt like it would be easily resolved. An intriguing Marvel Easter egg flits by in this sequence, as Mobius runs through a list of Variants brought in by the TVA at one time or another – including vampires, who have never appeared in the MCU to date. It’s not much, but it feels like pretty solid groundwork for the Blade movie we’re supposed to be getting soon.

Alone with Mobius in the interrogation room, Loki tries his best to tell the agent about the true intentions of the TVA without sacrificing any of his leverage. It’s significant that ultimately Loki’s care for Mobius’ safety outweighs his own desire for freedom – and he tells Mobius that he and everyone who works at the TVA are Variants, something it’s clear Mobius has always known on some subconscious level he’s been too afraid to access, but Loki’s words put everything into perspective for him. The same thing happens to Hunter B-15 (Wunmi Mosaku), who defies all of her training to break Sylvie out of prison so the enchantress can show her a glimpse of her past life. I would have liked to have seen Hunter B-15’s memories and learned her real name instead of just watching her talk about what she’s seeing, but Mosaku is such a good actress and sells the heartfelt scene so well, I’ll give it a pass.

For both characters, waking up to the reality about themselves requires trusting someone they’ve been taught to demonize. And both characters also take steps to undo the damage they’d caused by fighting back against the system that had been using them – though their actions come with sacrifices. B-15 gets knocked unconscious while battling her fellow Hunters, while Mobius sets Loki free and is almost immediately thereafter pruned out of existence by Renslayer and her bodyguards, after a brave showdown between the coworkers that ends with Mobius defiantly embracing the past life that was stolen from him with the most iconic final line (temporarily final line, most likely) ever uttered: “I might have had a jet-ski.”

As compelling as this material may be, I do think this entire sequence of events could have been tweaked slightly to make the episode’s first half flow more smoothly, because the pacing is a bit slow. Between the slightly redundant and disconnected scenes of Mobius and B-15 learning about their pasts; the frustratingly brief flashback to Sylvie’s childhood that feels as though the creative team only had the budget for a single establishing shot of Asgard; and the fun but eventually tiresome scene of Loki trapped in a TVA-designed mind prison with a timeloop of a vengeful Lady Sif (Jaimie Alexander) that feels like an extremely random and inorganic way to bring back the character, this episode isn’t quite as polished as last week’s, and a couple of scene transitions feel clumsy.

But towards the end, the episode finds its groove and settles into it very snugly, just in time for a major action scene in the Time-Keepers’ chamber. After beheading one of the Time-Keeper animatronics, Loki and Sylvie are left confused about what to do next, and the plot could easily have trailed off at this pivotal moment – but Loki takes advantage of this quiet scene to try and confess his feelings to Sylvie. He’s interrupted by what has to be the most shocking twist in a very twisty episode: Renslayer stabbing him in the back with a Hunter’s baton, pruning him just as she did Mobius before being disarmed by Sylvie.

But for Loki, his story is just getting started. In a mid-credits scene, the series’ first thus far, the God of Mischief awakens in a desolate area surrounded by the ruins of New York City, prompted by an old man’s voice. The moment I heard that voice, I guessed what we were in for when the camera pans around to reveal who’s talking, but not the scale of the reveal: for it’s not only Richard E. Grant standing there, dressed from head to toe in a wonderfully hideous comic-accurate Classic Loki costume – it’s also Kid Loki (Jack Veal), a popular member of the Young Avengers team, and Boastful Loki (Deobia Oparei), an original character who has no clear precedence in the comics, but who carries a large hammer: perhaps because, like Thor in the MCU, he is his universe’s only being worthy of carrying Mjolnir, something that would certainly explain his boastfulness.

Loki
Loki Limbo | comicbook.com

These humanoid Variants are also joined by one very peculiar new addition to Marvel canon – Loki the Alligator, a toothy reptile companion to Kid Loki who wears an adorable miniature gold helmet. I’m not sure if this is a version of the shapeshifting god who just prefers living as an alligator for reasons, or if he was born in an alligator in his timeline, but one thing is clear. Wherever Loki is now, is wherever the TVA has been discarding all its Loki Variants every time one gets reset; some kind of Loki Limbo. And that means plenty more deep lore and obscure references for us to examine next time we catch up with the trickster.

Episode Rating: 8.5/10

And Behold, It Was Very “Good Omens” Season 2!

Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Good Omens is officially returning for a second season over at Amazon Prime, in collaboration with the BBC. In the excruciatingly long two year gap between the first season’s release in 2019 and today, there had been occasional whisperings of a continuation, some even straight from the lips of the series’ creator, Neil Gaiman, but nothing ever seemed to pan out. Many fans had given up hope that we would ever see the future misadventures of Crowley and Aziraphale, and the first season’s fairly conclusive ending seemed to back up that dreary assumption.

Good Omens
Aziraphale and Crowley | bbc.com

But the long delay can now be attributed to Gaiman’s deep respect for the source material, Good Omens: The Nice And Accurate Prophecies Of Agnes Nutter, Witch, which he co-authored with the late great British fantasy novelist Terry Pratchett. Gaiman today revealed that many of his and Pratchett’s ideas for the Good Omens sequel they never got to write together will now form the basis of season two – meaning the series will continue to be as much Pratchett’s work as Gaiman’s. The first season of Gaiman’s Good Omens adaptation borrowed a couple of major characters and plot beats from this unwritten sequel, but the second season appears to be a mystery story revolving around the sudden appearance of a stray angel with amnesia in a street market in Soho, where Crowley and Aziraphale are now living quite peacefully, having averted Armageddon and prevented a war between Heaven and Hell at the end of season one.

What happens after that is anyone’s guess, but Gaiman did give fans reassurance that Good Omens will continue to explore the far-distant past, putting a quirky and humorous spin on Biblical events – this time including the moments leading up to Genesis, and the creation of all things. We’ll also presumably see more of Crowley and Aziraphale’s time on earth, meddling in human history or cautiously observing it from a reasonable distance – and most importantly, just as in season one, we can safely assume these flashbacks will give us more insight into how the unique relationship between the begrudgingly spiritual demon and the charmingly worldly angel has developed over the years, and how it will continue to grow.

Good Omens
Crowley | themarysue.com

Good Omens has one of the few fandoms that is almost unanimously in support of the two male (or in this case, more likely male-aligned) leads becoming an explicitly romantic couple – perhaps because Good Omens is already so abhorred by the right-wing that very few homophobes seem to watch it at all – so it wouldn’t surprise me at all if Gaiman gives the fans what they want in this case. Regarding Crowley and Aziraphale’s relationship in season one, he said that he consciously structured it as “a love story”. And with the stakes a little less high in season two (at least at the outset, it seems), there’ll be plenty of time for more cute moments between the duo, whom fans have dubbed the Ineffable Husbands.

David Tennant and Michael Sheen will return to reprise the lead roles in season two, which will begin filming in Scotland sometime later this year. We can reasonably expect to see other major characters from season one return, including Jon Hamm as the Archangel Gabriel, Adria Arjona as the good witch Anathema Device, and Frances McDormand as the Voice of God, but I’m very excited to see which new characters Good Omens has in store for us. We’ve met the literal Antichrist already, so one has to wonder if some version of the Messiah themselves – like, the real one – might pay a visit to Earth in season two. It seems obvious, but at the same time perhaps a bit too obvious? The wheel-shaped Ophanim angels, or Seraphim angels with six wings and hundreds of eyes, might offer less predictable alternatives.

Good Omens
They’re in love, your honor | polygon.com

With the first season of Marvel’s Loki – which I described as brilliantly emulating the spirit of Terry Pratchett – nearly over, it’s comforting to know that we’ll soon be seeing more zany comedy on our screens, and from Pratchett’s own wild imagination, no less. Now how about we finally get the Discworld adaptation we deserve?