Keep Your Eyes Peeled For Easter eggs…
Season two doubles down on each these themes, so it’s hardly shocking to see that this season options a number of direct references to A Matter of Life and Death tucked away as Easter eggs, in addition to references to different works by Powell and Pressburger. In reality, each single episode options some type of reference to their movies. On 4th August, Amazon shall be releasing their X-Ray characteristic for Good Omens season two on Prime Video, which can enable viewers to lookup each one of many over 200 Easter eggs of varied sorts dotted all through the present, together with the Powell and Pressburger references. In the meantime, we’ll level out just some of essentially the most notable references to Powell and Pressburger, and to A Matter of Life and Death specifically.
The most outstanding is the American poster for the movie, which seems within the opening title sequence within the World War Two part, and which will also be seen straight behind Aziraphale when he’s standing in Maggie’s file store in episode two . In reality, the posters on sale in Maggie’s file store are all for Powell and Pressburger movies! Another nod to their different works turns up within the title of Episode 3, ‘I Know Where I’m Going’. This is known as for one other Nineteen Forties movie from the pair, a romantic comedy set throughout World War Two about an Englishwoman going to Scotland, coping with an historic curse, and discovering she doesn’t need the issues (or the folks) she thought she needed – very acceptable for an episode largely set in Scotland.
The deepest reduce Easter egg, although, is the e book Gabriel/Jim makes use of to check the pressure of gravity in the identical episode. The e book, Alexander Alekhine’s My Best Games of Chess 1908-1923, and particularly the version of it that Gabriel repeatedly plonks down on the desk, options prominently in A Matter of Life and Death. Conductor 71 borrows it from Peter after visiting him at his physician’s home and guarantees to return it. The physician’s home is stacked with books within the method of a real book-lover and Peter, who has been enjoying chess, could have been studying it. After the Conductor’s go to, Peter tells June and Doctor Reeves (Roger Livesey) that his heavenly customer has walked off with the e book. They, satisfied he’s affected by a mind harm, largely ignore this.
Without spoiling the film an excessive amount of, we do later see Conductor 71 return the e book by flinging it down the heavenly staircase/elevator, and it seems in Peter’s coat pocket. It is a key side of the movie’s refusal to substantiate a method or one other whether or not Peter is actually combating angels and the forces of Heaven to get one other probability at life, or whether or not he’s brain-damaged and hallucinating on account of leaping out of a aircraft with no parachute, and desires surgical procedure. (Or, maybe more than likely of all, each). Did Conductor 71 borrow the e book and return it to Peter’s pocket? Or did Peter, who’s after all affected by a mind harm, put it in his pocket and neglect the place he left it? Like the spinning high in Inception, the movie refuses to reply the query definitively.
In Good Omens, after all, regardless of the well-known atheism of not less than one in every of its writers (Terry Pratchett), there isn’t any such ambiguity. If there isn’t any Heaven, Hell, angels or demons, then there isn’t any story right here. But the looks of the e book as Gabriel/Jim desperately tries to know the world round him isn’t a coincidence. It is a reminder of how unsure we actually are about what is definitely occurring on this planet round us, of how mysterious the world could be, and the way we will by no means actually be fairly positive of what’s going on, even when we expect we all know the place we’re going.
If you will have by no means seen A Matter of Life and Death/Stairway to Heaven, we can not suggest it extremely sufficient. Even the court docket case, which turns into a dialog about British and American prejudices in opposition to one another in 1945, manages to be each compelling and amusing, and the remainder of the movie is a really romantic, epic, sweeping love story through which we’re reminded that, “as Sir Walter Scott is all the time saying, ‘Love is Heaven, and Heaven is Love’”.
