What I like about Good Omens is that the characters’ ages directly correlate to their overall usefulness to the plot
- Crowley & Aziraphale- 6,000+ years old and do next to nothing to stop the apocalypse except be incompetent at their jobs and give Adam a pep talk
- Shadwell & Madame Tracy- 60+ years old, unlike Crowley & Aziraphale, their usefulness doesn’t stem from incompetency rather they do relatively small things that have a bigger impact (i.e sending Newt to Tadfield, keeping Zira from murdering Adam)
- Newt & Anathema- early 20s, Newt stops World War 3 and Anathema has The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter Witch which ends up being a huge resource to help stop the end of the world
- Adam & The Them- around 11 years old, destroy the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse, disintegrate Satan himself, basically do all the work in stopping the end of the world, restore realty back to how it was before
You know, I don’t think Aziraphale and Crowley get enough credit. Their incompetence kept both Heaven and Hell complacent for 11 years, secure in the belief that the Antichrist was right where he was supposed to be and everything was going according to plan. And by focusing on the wrong boy, they indirectly succeeded in doing exactly what they set out to do: they ensured that the Antichrist grew up as a normal human child. Their plan worked, y'all. Just not…quite…how they expected. Also, let’s bear in mind that Crowley wasn’t solely or even mostly responsible for the mixed-up babies. He followed the orders he was given: he handed Adam off to the Satanic nuns at the hospital. It wasn’t his fault that he wasn’t told to which nun he should surrender custody (and seriously, WHAT THE HELL, HELL–the most important Entity in the most important Plan you’ve carried out since Creation began, and you didn’t establish and carefully carefully check and re-check a full chain of custody??? You let your man Hastur burn all the records so that no one, INCLUDING YOU, could go back and verify them later?!?) or that the first person he encountered there was a non-Satanist who wasn’t even supposed to be there that particular evening and had no clue what was going on, or that all the competent nuns had gotten thrown out of their reckoning and distracted by the Youngs’ early arrival, or that the one nun who wasn’t otherwise occupied happened to be Sister Mary, who wasn’t the sharpest crayon in the box and didn’t stop to wonder why the guy who’d just arrived and stayed for under a minute told her something different from the Mother Superior who’d carefully orchestrated the whole business.
Oh yeah, nor was it Crowley’s fault that the nuns weren’t in the habit of immediately tagging each newborn with an ID bracelet. Which you’d think they would at least have done with the Young child straightaway, because he wasn’t supposed to be involved in the Antichrist plot and after all, they were expecting two other babies that night…
Even after the hand-off and he raising of Warlock, they were still involved:
- Crowley hit Anathema (she hit him!) which led to her losing the book
- Anathema losing the book led to her meeting Adam properly
- Meeting Anathema led to Adam’s new found interesting in many subjects, kicking off both the Almost-Apocalypse and his final decision to save the world
- Aziraphale, meanwhile, found the book
- His decoding of the prophecies led him to know the exact location of Adam, which he gave to Shadwell
- Shadwell, having received instructions from two of his “sponsors,” sends Newt to Tadfield
- Newt crashing his car leads The Them to bring him to Anathema
- This visit to Anathema kicks off the argument between the kids that leads to the Almost Apocalypse, and also brings Newt who will stop it
I mean it’s complex, but Ineffable plans, amirite?
And honestly, Aziraphale was instrumental in getting Shadwell and Tracy there, too, and we know from the book that it was seeing all those pairs of enemies teamed up together including Aziraphale and Crowley, that inspired Adam in his final acts of defiance.
Not to mention they stepped up just as Beelzebub and Gabriel were trying to convince Adam to restart the Apocalypse. How terrifying is that to a kid, even an all-powerful one? (Especially Gabriel, king of gaslighting, amirite?) And then, to have an angel and a demon stand up to their bosses, back you up, promise to take your side, no matter what you choose to do?
I mean it’s fun to joke about their incompetence, but really. They save the world by being themselves, and that’s a big theme in all the versions of the story.
mmhmm! and in the applicability dept, life is full of Great Tasks that get done by lots of people each doing their part, large or small, loud or quiet, in the middle of things or around the edges.