Recap / Good Omens Episode 4 "Saturday Morning Funtime"

Episode 4

Saturday Morning Funtime

Armageddon begins, with phenomena such as nuclear reactors vanishing, Atlantis rising from the ocean floor, and the Kraken appearing. Adam begins to discover his abilities as the Antichrist. Aziraphale begins to have issues with the other angels, while Crowley has a date with the other demons.

Tropes That Appear In This Episode:

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• Absurdly Dedicated Worker: The Delivery Man finds out that he has to die to deliver the message to Death and does just that.
• Actor Allusion: When Crowley says everything's gone pear-shaped, Aziraphale sadly says he likes pears. David Tennant's incarnation of The Doctor hates pears to such an extent that, during a time where he had to live as a human undercover for a few months, his instructions to Martha Jones included a strong admonishment not to let him eat any. Though that portion of the video was not in the completed "Human Nature", it appeared in deleted scenes features, and Ten's dislike of pears has since become a well-known and fondly remembered part of canon within the Doctor Who fandom and the series.
• Actually Pretty Funny: One of Hastur's demon minions makes a joke about Megido's avocado fields, saying that Armageddon will be the biggest avocado grown in the valley. Hastur discorporate him for it... but not too long after he actually bursts out laughing at it.
• Alien Arts Are Appreciated: According to one of Hastur's demon accomplices, Crowley invented the selfie.
• Ambiguous Gender Identity: While the courier assumes that Pollution is male, the actor playing them is female, and God uses neutral pronouns to describe them.
• Asshole Victim: Ligur gets melted by a bucket of holy water, and this causes a Cessation of Existence. He was also an utterly ruthless demon lord who was most certainly going to do horrible things to Crowley.
• Bad Boss: Hastur. A demon tells a joke, he burns that demon because "He doesn't like jokes", then burns another demon for mentioning Crowley's name, then when the third demon is nervously giving him the itinerary that the other two were trying to give, he makes the same joke he burned the first demon for and laughs hysterically.
• Creator Cameo: Neil Gaiman is asleep in the movie theater.
• Description Cut: Shadwell realizes that he sent Newt into danger, and tells Madame Tracy that the witches could be doing all manner of horrifying, unimaginable things to him right now. Cut to Newt and Anathema having sex.
• Dramatic Irony: Upon seeing Aziraphale's Enochian ritual and declaring him a witch, he says he's been possessed by a demon.
• Drunk with Power: Adam is coming into his full powers, calling down a storm on Tadfield, floating a foot off the ground, and forcing his friends to stay and listen to him rant about ending the world.
• Evil Smells Bad: Warlock claims that Hastur "smells like poo". When the latter includes this in his rant in the theater, Crowley remarks there's some truth to that.
• Exact Words: Anathema knows that a Witch Hunter is foretold to arrive at her doorstep in a "Robins blue chariot". Not only is the "chariot" that specific shade of blue, but it's a Reliant Robin.
• Fingore: When Hastur realizes the truth about Warlock, he angrily bites his pinky so hard that it starts bleeding.
• Foreshadowing: When Newt asks if there are any relevant prophecies, Anathema gets embarrassed and says that there's one about them, but it's nothing important.
• Hearing Voices: Adam hears whispers in his head hissing "Make it happen! Make it real!"
• Holy Burns Evil: The holy water seems to scald Ligur while it kills him, judging by the steam that radiates off of him.
• Idealized Sex: In contrast to the book (where it was implied that Newt didn't last very long), Newt and Anathema's lovemaking is clearly enjoyable for both of them. Even though Newt was explicitly a virgin beforehand.
• Geometric Magic: Aziraphale makes an Enochian ritual circle on the floor of his shop in order to contact God directly. After Shadwell stumbles in on him using the circle and assumes that he's some kind of demon, Aziraphale tries to reason with him but accidentally steps inside it while it's still active, which discorporates him.
• I'm Melting!: This is what dumping a bucket of holy water will do to a demon.
• Internal Reveal: Newt is the one to reveal to Anathema that Adam is The Antichrist.
• Lack of Empathy: Metatron coldly tells Aziraphale that the point of the war is not to avoid it, but to win it, before casually mentioning the millions that shall die in the nuclear war once the apocalypse starts.
• Make-Out Point: Before it became a trash-dump, the river where the Delivery Man finds Pollution was used not only as a recreation site to bring the kids, but a place where the delivery man had brought his wife to spoon and, on one occasion, "fork."
• Metatron: Appears when Aziraphale attempts to speak with God. He confirms to Aziraphale what Crowley has been telling him: that Heaven is just as eager for the Apocalypse as Hell is, and they don't care that humanity will be destroyed.
• Mistaken for Superpowered: Shadwell confuses Aziraphale for a witch when he sees the Enochian circle that he drew to contact God. When Aziraphale accidentally steps into the circle and gets discorporated, Shadwell thinks that his exorcism vaporized a demonic entity, and for the rest of the series, he thinks that his finger is a Weapon of Mass Destruction.
• Modernized God: After Pestilence retired, he was replaced by Pollution who would go on to help the invention of petrol-engines, plastics, and high-tech weed-killers.
• New Media Are Evil: Inverted. Adam says that the various conspiracy theories in Anathema's magazines are more believable because they are in magazines instead of the internet.
• No Body Left Behind: To show how utterly lethal holy water is to demons, it completely dissolves Ligur's body; all that's left is a steaming pile of clothing.
• No, Except Yes: The Japanese "research" (not whaling) ship that is researching how many whales it can catch in a day.
• Oh, Crap!: Newt jokingly asks Anathema when the Apocalypse is coming. Then she looks at the clock.
• Precision F-Strike: When Aziraphale gets discorporated in the circle.
  Aziraphale: Oh, fuck.
• Punny Name: The name that Hastur chooses when with the American Ambassador is "Hastur LaVista."
• Reality Is Unrealistic: Adam is reminded of his school trip to a nuclear power station, and complains about how much more boring that stuff is in real life compared to in films.
• Secret Test of Character: Subverted. Crowley stalls for time when he pretends that everything - The Antichrist being switched and Crowley's supposed treachery - was one big test by the Dark Council to see if Hastur was loyal enough to be given authority over The Legions of Hell during the Apocalypse.
• Shout-Out:
  • Brian believes that aliens are the type to shout "Exterminate!" Later on, when Crowley is going through the pages of an astronomy book, trying to find a new home after Armageddon, one of the pages shows Gallifrey, even listing it by name.
    • Other Doctor Who alumni make guest appearances in this episode. Derek Jacobi (Metatron) played The Master in "Utopia," and David Morrissey (Captain Vincent) played Jackson Lake in "The Next Doctor".
    • About 34 minutes in, the short passerby who tells the angel "You're better off without him" is Dan Starkey, who played the Sontaran Commander Skorr in "The Sontaran Stratagem" (from the Tennant run) as well as Strax from the Praternoster Gang of Matt Smith's tenure.
  • The Kraken strongly resembles the Kraken from Clash of the Titans (1981). Crowley and Aziraphale refer to krakens in the first episode, but given that it resembles the Kraken from Anathema's magazines, it is very likely that this kraken does not resemble real ones and was created by Adam's Reality Warping powers.
• Skewed Priorities: When Newt tells Shadwell about his encounter with aliens, Shadwell asks if he counted their nipples and brushes off his concerns as unimportant to his mission. He's not wrong.
• Spotting the Thread: Hastur sees that Crowley is bluffing with the plant mister when a drop of water falls onto his trigger finger. If it had actually been holy water, then Crowley would have been very hurt.
• Subverted Kids' Show: After Hastur finds out the truth about Warlock, he appears to Crowley in a stop-motion children's film where he kills one of the other characters in a fit of rage.
• Sucks at Dancing: According to God, demons aren't very good dancers, but that doesn't stop them from doing it anyway. Angels, however, don't dance at all— with the exception of Aziraphale, who learned the gavotte in the 19th century and had gotten quite good before it went permanently out of style.
• Weird Weather: "You don't get tornados in England." "You do today!"
• Wham Line: Somewhat downplayed compared to the book, as we've seen the angels' stance on the war very often by now, but the Metatron clarifies without a shadow of a doubt what the angels think of averting the apocalypse.
  Aziraphale: There needn't be a war! We can save everyone!
  Metatron: The point is not to avoid the war. It is to win it.
• Witch Hunt: Aziraphale makes an Enochian ritual circle on the floor with the intent of contacting a "higher authority", successfully contacting Metatron. Shadwell then sees it and thinks that he's a witch or demon.

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