All the Easter eggs I spotted in Season 2 of Good Omens

image by Prime video

“Easter eggs” can be so much fun when they are done right. The most recent season of Good Omens had many of them, so I thought I’d write down all the ones I noticed. It’s like a treasure hunt for your mind.

Not all of these may have been planned, but that’s part of what makes the hunt fun: not all references are planned, and sometimes they happen by accident. People, dig in!

[Here are some hints about Good Omens 2]

Screenshot: Prime Video

Look, jokes in which a naked actor puts things in front of their nether region so they don’t get a full-frontal rating are a staple of silly movies. (Check out Austen Powers and others.) But if Jon Hamm walks down a street in Soho wearing nothing but a cardboard box, people will immediately think of the famous Lonely Island SNL skit “Dick in a Box,” which starred Justin Timberlake. This might be even funnier if you liked the Good Omens book before the TV show. In the book, it’s said that angels don’t have genitalia unless they “make an effort,” but the public’s reaction shows that Gabriel does once the box is dropped. Aziraphale is so sad. And no, we won’t have to deal with jokes about how it’s Jon Hamm, how dreamy he is, and how lucky Aziraphale should be: That’s his old boss, you guys. That’s not fair to anyone.

Sherlock
At one point, Aziraphale is thinking about what happened in the Book of Job, and when he comes to, Gabriel has to tell him that Crowley left while he was daydreaming. This is almost the same as a scene from the BBC show Sherlock where Irene Adler tells Sherlock that John Watson left while he was thinking. (You can see that he does this a lot. I think Aziraphale does the same thing but in a nicer way.)

Who Is It?
In the first season, there were a lot of references, but in the second season, Peter Davison, the Fifth Doctor and David Tennant’s father-in-law play the biblical character Job. (Tennant’s son Ty also plays Ennon, the grandson of Tennant’s father, which makes things even stranger.) Also, Beelzebub gives Gabriel a fly that, like the TARDIS, is “bigger on the inside.”

Screenshot: Prime Video

Crowley wearing a fez in the magic shop around the corner from Aziraphale’s bookshop might seem like another reference to Doctor Who since the Eleventh Doctor said, “fezzes are cool.” However, it’s more likely that this refers to the British comedian Tommy Cooper, known for wearing a fez during his act, which was half stand-up and half magic. Cooper might have bought his famous fez from this store since it’s been around for a long time.

David Hasselhoff Mr. Hoffman, Aziraphale’s magic teacher, wrote a nice note in the book and signed it “The Hoff” But we all know that the only person who can call themselves “The Hoff” is David Hasselhoff, who is famous for his roles in Knight Rider and Baywatch.

Not Sorry
When Aziraphale meets two rough-looking men in a Scottish graveyard, one of them has a lot of tattoos, including one on his forehead that looks just like the one that went viral on the internet after it was found in a collection of tattoos with spelling mistakes. This one says “NO REGRETS” in bold, black ink. It raises many questions, the most important of which is: Is this man the only one in the Good Omens universe with a misspelled name? Or is this a tattoo that is meant to be a reference to something? If so, it shows that this guy has a much more complicated personality than he wants to show in public.

Screenshot: Prime Video

Mispellings are always funny, so Shax’s (very small) legion of demons throw a plank of wood through Aziraphale’s bookshop window and demand that he give up Gabriel, the “angel,” to the forces of Hell. But this typo was used by a newspaperman in Hot Fuzz known for making typos. Sergeant Nicholas Angel gets teased about that all day by people in Sanford and at work.

Could you tell me about that suit?
Even though this isn’t an Easter egg, I had to mention it somewhere for my sanity: In episode five, Aziraphale makes everyone who isn’t “properly” dressed for his Austenian ball change their clothes by magic. But Gabriel is doing something strange. Specifically, he wears clothes that probably belong to Aziraphale before the party even starts: All of them are in his usual colors and styles, and it would make sense to give “Jim” anything he had stored away once it became clear that he was going to be around for a while…

We’ll have to discuss that powder blue suit with jewels (and fluffy cloak). Because it’s likely that these came from Aziraphale’s old or unused clothes, I know he doesn’t like bebop, so it’s unlikely that he stored it from an Elton John show. Aziraphale might have been filling in for Liberace. I must know.

Izzard, Suzy
When the Metatron goes to Nina’s shop to get a cup of coffee, he asks her if anyone ever asks for death. This refers to the shop’s name: Give Me Coffee or Death! But it also reminds me of Suzy Izzard’s stand-up routine Dress to Kill, in which she says that if the Church of England gave people the choice of “cake or death,” it would be much less effective than the Spanish Inquisition.

Screenshot: Prime Video

In season two, there are a few well-placed references to Good Omens, which are always fun to spot…

The actual book
Gabriel is putting books on the shelves in Aziraphale’s shop by the first word of the first sentence. He comes across many classics, like Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen and The Crow Road by Iain Banks. He also finds a book that starts with the words, “It was a nice day.” This is how the book Good Omens starts, of course. Hamm’s thoughtful, naturally emotional reading of the line is enough to make any fan a little teary.

Stickers of bullet holes
Last season, Crowley’s bullet-hole-through-the-windows decals on his favorite car were hard to see, but in season two, they are easy to see. These are brought up directly in the book because Bond’s first car in the Fleming books is a 1930 Blower Bentley, which is only a few years different from Crowley’s 1926 model, which seems to have made the demon very happy. Crowley is supposed to seem “cool,” but he’s just a big nerd. He had to buy gas for the Bentley, which is something he never does, to get the stickers and everything else.

How do you say the name Aziraphale?

Screenshot: Prime Video

When the demon Furfur talks to Aziraphale and Crowley about how they worked together in 1941, after he has sent three Nazi zombies after them, he is proud of his victory. Or, at least, he tries to. Crowley doesn’t seem to remember the guy with whom he fought against heaven, which makes the underlying sad. He keeps trying, though, and says he knows everything about Crowley’s little partnership with Azizaraph—he even checks his notes. Azirpail, Azirapapa.

This is a nod to the fact that, before the show started, fans asked Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman many questions about how to say Aziraphale’s name. No joke, there was real talk about this, like how angels get their names and other things. There was talk that both authors had given different answers and that there had been an agreed-upon way to say the word, but it didn’t catch on, so the authors gave up. Some characters in the show say “Azira-fell,” and others say “Azira-fail” (though that could largely be an accent issue, which is fascinating all by itself). Watching Furfur trip over it more than once was a nice nod to those struggling for decades.

Screenshot: Prime Video

There are also several clear references to Terry Pratchett, Gaiman’s late co-author and close friend. All of them are so good…

“A Bad Idea”
It’s possible that the lines were just read wrong, but when Angel!
Crowley says that someone should be able to tell God when he or she is making bad decisions. He says, “Boss, this is a terrible idea.” One member of the New Firm, Mr. Tulip, often said “ing” without the clear curse. This is shown in The Truth.

Large Letters
When Aziraphale tells Crowley with excitement that he wants to solve the Gabriel mystery and has even found a clue, Crowley tells him to shut up and “don’t say the capital letter.” This was, of course, one of the things that made Pratchett’s writing stand out. He loved putting capital letters on important words to emphasize them and make them funny. As Crowley does here, many of Pratchett’s characters will discuss how they can “hear” the capital letters in someone else’s sentences.

Laudanum by Dibbler
In the flashback to 19th-century Scotland, Crowley and Aziraphale meet a young bodysnatcher named Elspeth. Her luck goes downhill when the angel’s interference makes it necessary to steal another body, killing her best friend. Elspeth steals laudanum from Mr. Dalrymple’s office so she can be with her friend in the afterlife. The bottle is marked “C.M.O.T. Dibbler & Co Chemists.”

Cut-Me-Own-Throat In the Discworld books, Dibbler is a businessman from Ankh-Morpork. He sells “fine” foods like sausages in a bun, meat pies that might contain meat, and even worse, sausages in a bun. Dibbler never met a business he didn’t want to try, and you can find him doing everything from making movies to writing for tabloids. (You could say that selling poison cuts out the middleman.) Pratchett clarifies in his books that every place has its own Dibbler, so it makes perfect sense for him to show up here.

Nac McFeegle
Crowley decides to drink Dibbler’s laudanum to save Elspeth, but it has some effects he didn’t expect. One of them is that he gets smaller, seems slightly drunk, and fights. This makes him look a lot like the Nac Mac Feegle, a race of fae creatures who are supposed to be the Discworld version of Scottish people (which Crowley is pretending to be and David Tennant is), and who all have red hair, are very small, and love to drink and fight (and check thanks to the laudanum). Even though he quickly gets very big after the fact, you can’t deny the similarities.

Mrs. Snacks
Mrs. Sandwich owns the brothel on Aziraphale’s Street, which is a name that sounds like something Terry Pratchett would come up with. After all, everyone in Ankh-Morpork knows to be careful around Mrs. Cake.

• Seamstresses

Screenshot: Prime Video

At Aziraphale’s ball, everyone is charmed into using language and discussing things that fit the time. This causes some confusion when Ms. Cheng asks Mrs. Sandwich what she does for a living, and Mrs. Sandwich always says “seamstress” when she tries to explain. She can’t say anything about the brothel, so she uses a metaphor to talk about how she helps lonely men by darning their socks and sewing on buttons.

In Ankh-Morpork, the Seamstresses Guild is a group of people who do sex work. This causes a lot of confusion for City Watch Commander Sam Vimes when he meets a woman named Sandra, a seamstress in the guild. She ends up helping the men who get confused about the name and do come to have their shirts fixed for a fee.