Recap / Good Omens Episode 5 "The Doomsday Option"

Episode 5

The Doomsday Option

While Adam discovers his dark powers, the Horsemen meet again to begin the Final Ride. Aziraphale begins his fight against the forces of Good, and Crowley begins his crusade against the forces of darkness.

Tropes That Appear In This Episode:

---

• Abnormal Ammo: The Witch Finder gun can apparently shoot anything.
  Shadwell: Silver bullets.
  Aziraphale: That's werewolves.
  Shadwell: Garlic?
  Aziraphale: Vampires.
  Shadwell: ...bricks?
  Aziraphale: That should do nicely!
• And I Must Scream: Adam uses his powers to force his human friends to sit with him, listening to him talk about destroying everyone and everything that they love. He takes away their mouths when he doesn't like what they have to say, then returns their mouths only to make them smile in uncomfortable rictus grins.
• Big "SHUT UP!": The ghost of Ron Ormorod (who's possessing Madam Tracy thanks to Aziraphale enabling him to do so) delivers one to his wife, after being fed up with how she never let him get a word in edgewise when he was alive and how she's now only contacting him to tell him about pointless gossip.
• Blatant Lies:
  • Aziraphale tells Shadwell that the Antichrist has "oodles of nipples" to get him on-board.
  • When Newt tells Anathema that he's never had sex before, she claims that she never would have known.
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe: Crowley manages to drive through the wall of fire without discorporating because he imagined it that way.
• Creator's Show Within a Show: A soldier is seen reading American Gods, another Neil Gaiman work.
• Demonic Possession: When Aziraphale considers going back to Earth without a body, it's pointed out that he can't possess a human since he's not a demon. Except there's no reason he can't do that, since angels and demons are mostly the same at the core. He ends up in Madame Tracy.
• The Determinator: Crowley manages to keep his burning car running for at least a hundred miles through nothing but sheer force of will.
• Drowning My Sorrows: Crowley's response to Aziraphale being discorporated is to abandon his plan to run away from Earth and get drunk in a nearby pub.
• The Farmer and the Viper: Hastur devours everyone in the scam insurance office in the form of a colony of maggots after one of them frees him by calling Crowley's home-phone.
• Girls Love Stuffed Animals: Madame Tracy's bedroom is full of stuffed animals.
• Glamour: The Horsemen appear to the military base's guard as US military officials.
• Heel–Face Turn: Dog, one hundred percent. His entire purpose was to be with Adam and protect him as he set off the Apocalypse... but Adam has inadvertently turned him into such a good dog that now he doesn't want anything to do with the Apocalypse at all, and decides to leave with the Them instead of sticking with Adam.
• Heel Realization: Adam, who has spent the last couple of episodes getting increasingly Drunk with Power, realizes just how far he's gone when Pepper, Brian and Wensleydale walk away from him... and Dog decides to go with them.
• Henpecked Husband: Apparently Ron Ormorod was this in life, very clearly annoyed by his wife contacting him from beyond the grave to talk about pointless gossip, and takes the chance to cathartically scream in her face.
  Ron Ormorod: BRENDA!
  Brenda Ormorod: Yes, Ron?
  Ron Ormorod: YO-YO-YO-YOU NEVER G-GA-GAVE ME A CHANCE TO GET A WORD IN EDGEWAYS WHEN WE WERE MARRIED! AND NOW I'M DEAD! THERE'S ONLY ONE THING I WANT TO TELL YOU!
  Brenda Ormorod: You've never spoken to me like this before. Ron, remember your heart condition.
  Ron Ormorod: I DON'T HAVE A HEART, ANYMORE! [Insanely laughs.] AND, BRENDA?!
  Brenda Ormorod: Yes, Ron?!
  Ron Ormorod: SHUT UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUP!
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Crowley gets stuck on the M25, a roadway that Crowley himself designed both to annoy the people driving on it and to continuously produce demonic energy. Not only that, but Adam's adverse effect on reality caused it to spontaneously burst into an unquenchable wall of fire, leaving him (and everyone else in the city) trapped within London.
  God: Crowley had made it, now Crowley was trapped inside it.
• Limited Wardrobe: Crowley keeps multiples of the same sunglasses in his glove-compartment.
• Modernized God: Instead of using horses, the Horsemen ride motorcycles.
• Mythology Gag:
  • In the arcade machine next to the one that Death plays in the diner, you can see every high score labeled "D.EATH", with the first place high score being "T.PRATCHETT"
  • The gate guard at the Tadfield air base is reading a copy of American Gods.
• Phony Psychic: Madame Tracy hosts seances where she offers to "draw aside the veil" to the spirit world for a "small donation". She's been doing this for years, and has regular customers who come to talk to their dead loved ones. Madame Tracy even claims to have a "spirit guide", the ghost of a little Irish girl who was "very psychic", that allows her to communicate with the spirits of the dead. Subverted when she's actually possessed by Aziraphale (and briefly by the ghost of Ron Ormorod) because she was a "receptive body" to his discorporated self.
  Mrs. Ormorod: She's going under. Nothing to be alarmed about. She's just making herself a bridge to the other side. Her spirit guide will be along soon.
  Madame Tracy: Are you there, my spirit guide?
  Madame Tracy: *in a girlish Irish accent* Ah, begorrah 'tis me. Little Colleen O'Leary.
  Mrs. Ormorod: Colleen died in Dublin in 1746 when she was nine years old.
  Madame Tracy: *singing and mumbling in the background with an Irish accent*
  Mrs. Ormorod: But she was very psychic.
• The Power of Friendship: His friends leaving him is what snaps Adam out of his mad power-trip and causes him to decide to cancel the apocalypse.
• Race Lift: Downplayed, in that the character isn't actually real in either the original book or the series. In the book, Madame Tracy's "spirit guide" is a Native American, while here, it's a young Irish girl.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: The Them give a short, but savage one to Adam when he's gone all power-mad. It's this, combined with the fact that even Dog pulled a Screw This, I'm Outta Here and went with them instead of staying with hin, that fully sets off his Heel Realization.
  Adam: Give me back my dog!
  Pepper: He's not your dog, he's his own dog! And I don't think he likes you anymore!
  Wensleydale: You're really scary, and you aren't our friend!
  Brian: You aren't anybody's friend! You're going to burn all this away — why? Because some adults mucked things up? That's a reason to fix it, not destroy it!
• This Bed of Rose's: A downplayed example— when Shadwell returns to his apartment building after "exorcising" Aziraphale, Madame Tracy takes one look at him and invites him back to her rooms for a lie down. Shadwell's apartment is right across the hall from hers, but from her point of view he's shell-shocked and raving about "demons" and "witches," clearly in no state to be left alone. And although Madame Tracy is about to host a Phony Psychic session, she also advertises her services of "intimate personal relaxation and stress relief for the discerning gentleman" in the local papers. She cares for Shadwell, despite his rude behavior towards her in the past.
• Weirdness Censor: Subverted. R.P. Tyler can plainly see that Crowley's car is on fire and wants to point it out, but figures that there's no reason to point out the obvious (on top of being thoroughly in-shock), so he instead gives Crowley directions to the airbase like he did with the Horsemen.

---