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I came across some people discussing on Tumblr whether it would be acceptable for Aziraphale and Crowley to become human at the end of Good Omens 3, and I started to think about what the finale is likely to be.
Neil Gaiman says the finale of Season 3 was worked out by him and Terry Pratchett in 2006. This simplifies figuring out what the finale will be like, because we can use what Jeeves calls the psychology of the individual, and ask: What Would Terry Pratchett Do?
What kind of ending would Terry Pratchett want? Not necessarily the Pratchett who wrote Good Omens back in 1989, but Pratchett before he got ill, at the height of his powers of mind and understanding, after years of thought about questions of good & evil and the goals of human life.
The answer is clear and straightforward:
Imagine there’s no Heaven. …
No Hell below us, above us only sky.
And by "only sky" I mean space:
This is part of an image from the JWST: everything in this field is a galaxy, fading back to the youth of the universe. Our universe is MUCH larger, more various, and more awesome than that of the Young Earth Creationists, or of Good Omens, or of Doctor Who: greater than we have, so far, been able to imagine.
*That’s* what Terry would want. He was a humanist and an atheist, who said he'd much rather be a rising ape than a falling angel. Nothing that left God, Heaven, Hell, angels or demons intact would be a happy ending for him.
Then I remembered that one of the items in play in Good Omens is the Book of Life, where 'erasing you means you’ve never existed'.
So, my prediction is that at the end of S3 Aziraphale & Crowley will use their powers combined plus the Book of Life to make Heaven and Hell *never have existed*, and transform the Good Omens universe into our own: one that has existed for *billions* of years, not just 6000, one which will exist for billions of years more. One where dinosaurs were real, where we're cousins to beetles. One where we are made of starstuff.
I wrote the previous paragraphs just based on my decades of reading and re-reading Pratchett (and also many of the books that were important to him, because I've been a scientist and a science writer). Only then did I happen to re-watch the opening of S2.01, and see this:
CROWLEY
But that’s idiocy!
It’s the universe,
it’s not just some fancy wallpaper!
Millions of galaxies, trillions of stars, oodles of...
everything!
It’s not just put here to twinkle!
CROWLEY
You can't just create a universe, run it
for a few thousand years, and then stop.
So it looks to me as though my prediction based mostly on WWTPD is supported by canon, that this is in fact the direction the story is heading: Crowley, at least, has realized *since before the War in Heaven or the creation of Humanity* that there's something seriously out of whack about the way the GO universe is put together. It's not just the way the Heavenly/Hellish bureaucracies work, or the concept of Heaven & Hell, it goes deeper, it's a basic existential flaw. Do he and/or Aziraphale ever refer to this conversation or this topic again? In S1 or S2? Aziraphale and Crowley will help turn the thin Good Omens universe into our thick, deep, dark, beautiful & immense one. But the price will include their immortality, and a forever they might have spent together.
After Terry Pratchett died his computer hard drives were wiped and crushed so his writing canon is closed, there are no unfinished works to be dug out and published. That means Good Omens Seasons 3 is his final work, and for Neil Gaiman and for the rest of us it's *got* to be bittersweet, it's got to be in part about the acceptance (or not) of death, about saying good-bye. Don’t expect it not to hurt.
I'm not saying it won't be a "happy ending"--but it will be a happy ending that makes you cry, a eucatastrophe. Aziraphale and Crowley will be alive and together in that cottage on the South Downs--but as mortals, for only the few fleeting years any of us can hope for. “It’s not fair!” you say – but Granny Weatherwax, Terry’s stand-in, would point out that Life Isn’t Fair, It’s Just Fairer That Death.
And I may be wrong in the details, A&C may have some kind of immortal existence among the stars. Just as God may not be erased in the end, but may just … walk off, leaving an open door behind them. But I think we need to be prepared for a radical change of state–for something Terry would be satisfied with. Because there is NO WAY Neil will try to give his best friend anything less.