Dear Neil,
when are we going to see YOU🫵 doing the apology dance for the way you ended the season hmm?
damiancrowley askedI only apologise for things I’m sorry for having done.
And why should he be sorry? He’s doing his job.
(Not that @neil-gaiman in any way needs me standing up for him. But this is what it’s right to do for your friends… sometimes more when they don’t need it than when they do.)
It’s a storyteller’s job to make their listeners feel things. And the things won’t always be positive! Nor is this at all a new kind of behavior.
Sort of, oh, three and a half thousand-and-a-bit years ago, Homer (or the collective of poets and writers we now refer to under that name) tells us in the Odyssey how Odysseus, cast up after numerous disasters on the shores of the friendly and tech-savvy* Phoenicians, is thrown a big feast by his hosts. As was normal for such events, the city’s greatest bard is brought in to sing in the guest’s honor. Demodocus the bard, as it happens, sings tales of the Trojan War that leave Odysseus (not just once, but twice) hiding his face in his cloak to attempt to conceal that he’s crying like a baby—not just over the awful things that happened, but his [often terrible] role in them during the war.)
What’s noticeably missing from the “background voice” in these passages of the Odyssey is any sense that, in storytelling, it’s bad to upset your story’s listeners (either inside the narrative or outside it). It’s assumed, by these oldest and consummate storytellers, that this is a completely normal part of the procedure. So old a tradition in Western drama, therefore, is violated at a newer storyteller’s peril.
And here, as always, structure is everything. Tolkien (when discussing it) suggests that without the shared pain of the drama in a story’s midsection, the eucatastrophe or “upward turn” that would make it all worthwhile at the end—or make it “earned”, in modern idiom—would fail, leaving no one satisfied.
If at this point in Good Omens 2 (which we know to be a midsection leading to the material that Neil and Terry plotted out together), if we’d been left not giving a damn what happened with the two protagonists… then we’d know we were in big trouble.
As it is, plainly we’re not. Neil, to the viewership’s general anguish, has straightforwardly left us not knowing how the hell the Angel and the Demon are going to come out of this mess and find their way to the kind of place where we want them to be at the end.
And this is exactly as it should be. We’re all writhing! (And I’m guessing most of us who also do this kind of work for a living are both applauding Neil and cussing him out. Jeeeeeeeeez you should have heard me the other night! …But I know (at least in a general sense) what he’s up to.) What’s important is that Neil’s not doing this because he hates us. He’s doing it because he’s serving that higher power, Story… which requires that for best effect, he drag us down deep before he boosts us up high.
So our job now is to embrace feeling the pain Neil’s (and John’s!) gone to the trouble to craft. The better and more completely we feel it, the more glorious it’s gonna be when everything comes out into the light on
the far side of the horrific heartrending crap that Neil and John are doubtless about to put us throughthe other side. And as usual, the Greeks had a word for it: katharsis. It is, essentially, what one needs to pass through to get one’s emotional money’s worth out of drama… and this team is clearly intent on us getting value for money. May take a while, circumstances being what they are: but I for one feel sure it’ll be worth the wait. And I for one am also entirely willing to see what prestidigitation they enact in part 3.…Now if everybody’ll excuse me: I’ve got to go start another watchthrough… and then, in the morning, go put my own characters through some more crap. :)
*What Homer describes is apparently some kind of telepathic bond between the Phoenicians and their ships that helps their craft sail where they ought to go. These days we’d call it active GPS. The Phoenicians seem to have managed it it without satellites… so you tell me what I should be calling it. …But then again I’ve got my mind made up, so you might as well spare the effort. :)
I am a fan of many things and my attention is never where I left it.
