Amph The Good Place - it really is about the afterlife this time

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Created by Mike Schur, co-creator of Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Parks & Recreation--but more importantly, Dwight's cousin Mose on The Office--The Good Place is best summarized as Parks & Rec meets Lost. The main character, Kristen Bell's Eleanor Shellstrop, is a self-described "medium person", i.e. kind of a ****, who dies and is accidentally sent to a quasi-paradise reserved for the very best of humanity, based on an exhaustive (tell a woman to smile: bad) and borderline-arbitrary (pay to see the Red Hot Chili Peppers: worse) point system. It's kind of heaven, but the major world religions are explicitly said to have only gotten about 5% of the system right.

In addition to being very funny, not surprising given Schur's pedigree, the show has already progressed quite a bit past that initial premise and does a great job of both resolving and introducing new conflicts and mysteries almost every week--Schur actually consulted Lost's Damon Lindelof on how to plan out mystery plotlines without running them into the ground, and the reveals so far could be seen as lightning-fast compared to Lost's first season. That said, there's enough ongoing questions and background lore that I was surprised not to see a thread for it already. That may not bode well for overall interest here, but I know for a fact GrandAdmiralJello watches it too, so at a minimum I will use this thread to pester him with all the little things I wonder about between episodes.

Last but not least, the latest episode included an exciting new hook that relates to Star Wars (very spoilery, though):

Spoiler

The "real" Eleanor, i.e. the one who lived a truly good life, was confirmed to have been sent to the bad place instead and appeared in the flesh in the form of Tiya Sircar, aka Sabine Wren on Star Wars Rebels. Not only did I love this as a Rebels fan, but it's just the latest example of how effective the show is at moving past one quandary--Eleanor admits she doesn't belong in the good place, Michael resolves to keep her anyway--and right into a new one: can Michael really let her stay there if it means the good Eleanor stays in the bad place? More importantly, can the somewhat-morally-improved Eleanor live with that?

 

Lindelof's involved? Well, I'm sold.

 

Lindelof's involved? **** that.

 

Learn to read, guys. Michael Schur, the creator of the show and Parks and Rec, consulted Lindelof during development. That's it. The writer of Prometheus is not employed in the production.

I enjoy the show so far, but they better not keep skirting around the fact that the whole afterlife arrangement is ****ing terrible.

 

What bothers me is that none of the supposedly "good" people who did all this **** in life are all that bothered by it. Chidi, the ethics nerd, only tries to keep Eleanor and Jason out of the Bad Place. If it hadn't been for those two, the Senegalese professor would have been content to spend eternity in a boring upper middle-class American neighborhood without a thought for the majority of humanity.

 

I forget how the spoiler rules work here with ongoing shows so I'll play it safe for the moment. Some of the big thoughts I've wanted to get off my chest:

Spoiler

A detail I've found especially interesting regarding the Eleanor "mistake" is that it seems different than the one that brought Jason there--if it was just her it could have been a freak occurrence where two people named Eleanor Shellstrop died at the same instant, but Jason and Jianyu (whom I suppose we can now assume does exist somewhere) don't even have the same name. That suggests either a "clerical error" situation of a much greater extent than simply swapping two people, or my own guess, that both "mistakes" were deliberate--and done by an unknown entity for unknown reasons.

An idea I've been toying around with is that the good place really is Eleanor and Jason's "medium place", in that it's testing their fitness to go to the good place for real--or alternatively, this universe's idea of purgatory is being in exactly this situation: your life is basically comfortable, but events conspire to keep you on edge and unsure of your future...forever. That would actually fit perfectly with the reality of this being a TV show that needs to maintain drama indefinitely without drastically upending its status quo; it's an interesting idea, but one that would ultimately hurt the show if they owned up to it, because there'd no longer be real stakes.

Another issue with the idea that this is all Eleanor's test: what does that mean for people like Chidi and Tahani? Either they're artificial and exist solely to affect Eleanor--lame, and unlikely given their flashbacks--or they're genuinely good people whose rightfully-earned paradise is being forked up for the sake of one "lesser" person's judgement--unfortunate for them, but not impossible given the imperfections in the good place system. In fact, maybe everyone here is actually being tested (Tahani certainly isn't perfect, though it's hard to imagine Chidi not qualifying), and the ultimate function of this neighborhood is to sort everyone into their final destinations.

Related to the Eleanor swap, one biiig question I have about the basic premise is how time of death factors in. The neighborhood consists of, IIRC, 322 people, divided into 161 pairs of soul mates--151,600 people die every year, at least as of 2011, which works out to about 105 per minute, meaning that filling up a neighborhood would only take a span of 3 minutes. That seems fair, but, is the show saying that true soul mates have to die within 3 minutes of each other? There are some depressing implications to that. And then there's the fact that the neighborhoods aren't just random batches of soul mates--they're further sorted according to which people would live in total harmony, and in an environment they'd be most comfortable with (other neighborhoods are said to be more metropolitan, for example). By that standard, finding 322 people who mesh together that well may require the full day's complement of 151 thousand--though even then you've got soul mates dying within 24 hours of each other, something that you do hear about IRL with couples that were married 60 years or whatever but still a stretch when you apply it to everyone.

And last but not least, I've been looking at all deaths here--who's to say how many of those 151 thousand people qualify for the good place to begin with?

So that leaves us with the alternative interpretation that everybody shows up in the good place at the same time but it doesn't necessarily relate to when they died--everyone who's received flashbacks thus far seems to have lived pretty much in the present--it's vital for the pop-culture jokes--but could it be that some pairs of soul mates died, say, 30 years apart? And if so, what determines their apparent age in the good place? Many are young and fit--what you could call the Hayden Christensen versions of themselves--but others are middle-aged, which suggests that either you look the age you were when you died (and soul mates tend to die at around the same age, even if not at the same time) or that some people are "meant" to be Hayden and some are meant to be Alec Guinness. On a related note, I do wonder if Eleanor will turn out to be Chidi's soul mate after all, in that his soul's true purpose was to save her, giving him the validation he never really got on Earth.

...okay, I'll stop talking now.

Well what's interesting is the idea that the universe is saying yes, this is the place Chidi would be most happy in, weird as that may seem--and the fact that the system is kind of crappy allows for him not to be quite such a good person as to upend his eternity in paradise by trying to change things. That's good for dramatic purposes, but I wouldn't go so far as to say the show is suggesting this is all fine and just.

 

Well...from the Schur interview I linked up top:

Whatever reveals might be forthcoming, I'm inclined to take that at face value--while she may have gamed the system somewhat, they really are saying that Tahani, and certainly Chidi, are "better people" than Eleanor according to this universe.

Spoiler

But that doesn't mean they're saints, nor does it mean the system is supposed to be a good thing--the last episode literally culminates with Chidi saying "these rules are stupid", and Michael agreeing with him.

I guess I'm saying that I do like the "medium place" idea, but I don't think the show hinges on it.

 

That's boring. I'm more inclined to believe that there isn't actually a bad place, and the way to keep everyone happy for eternity is to leave them thankful they were good enough to be in the good place--even if they might have to wonder why they're there in the first place. In fact, the not so good people who "slip through" the system will instead have to reflect on why they deserve to be there, when really everyone deserves to be there, in some capacity.

 

I dunno about everyone.

I do suspect something's up with the bad place though, especially after what we saw of it this week--I didn't buy the screaming from the first episode. Good gag, but it's too simple.

 

Related to, luckily, my last post, we did learn a lot about the bad place this week--Eleanor says it's "classic torture" by night, custom-tailored nightmare scenarios by day. It's also interesting that Trevor has a whole crew of "demons" with him, while even Michael himself isn't supposed to live in his own neighborhood--the bad place apparently requires a lot of attention, while the good place is designed to be left alone.

Related to some of the demographic questions I raised earlier, we got a brief, fuzzy look at an "arrivals" map of the US:



About 6800 people died in the US every day as of 2008--disregarding Mexico because I couldn't find a figure for it, there's maybe a dozen green dots there? I'd bump that up to 20 just in case there are some clustered closer together than can be made out, or even buried within red clusters--that comes out to .3% of people who die in the US being good place-bound. I don't take the show so seriously as to assume this image is gospel, but "the best .3%" seems pretty much in line with the high bar they've been suggesting. What would be interesting to hear, though, is if the good place rate varies at all around the world--with all our western excesses, do fewer Americans end up qualifying? This is especially interesting when you think about how many of the good/bad point earners we've seen are very much western mores, though I guess it's possible that there are plenty more "off-screen" that are specific to other cultures.

Come to think of it, the degree to which the rules evolve over time is also interesting--IIRC one from the pilot was about fixing a child's tricycle; that wouldn't have been relevant a thousand years ago, so is it new or is it a modern adaptation of an older rule?

 

Well, that had a great payoff. First time I've been impressed by a "twist" in a while. It's a nice deconstruction of sitcom tropes.

 

Lindelof's involvement is proof there is no afterlife.

I have heard it is a good show though.

 

IT WAS AMAZING.

And, even if it's only one season, it's pretty much a perfect one-season TV show -- though I'd love it to have more.

 

No. One season should be one season. Too many shows go on and on. Just stop right there.

Seinfeld on the other hand…that show should have gone at least another season or two.

 

... says the person who never watched it?

 

Alright….I will have to watch it. Lindelof gives me zero confidence though.

 

That was a brilliant twist. It definitely caught me off-guard and then the explanation really makes you realize that it was hiding in plain sight the whole time. I think its a testament to the actors that they were able to so thoroughly distract us from realizing the twist was staring us in the face the whole time.

 

Spoiler

Someone in the AV Club comments pointed out that literally one of the first actions Michael made was to kick a dog -- which is one the longest-running tropes of identifying an evil person in media history!

 

Whenever someone says twist coupled with this shows premise…I immediately think of a The Sixth Sense twist.

 

But they're already dead! That's literally the first scene!

 

SOOOO perfect, second only to my relief that you guys dug this thread back up.

Spoiler

For a split second I was a little wary because I thought it would be a purgatory-esque thing where they had to prove they deserved to be in the Good Place. Then I had trouble getting why Chidi would be there, and once they explained it I was 100% sold--it was RIGHT THERE. Now the idea of multiple seasons where the neighborhood keeps iterating and they keep figuring it out...I am so freaking excited for this story. Jerks vs. the Universe.

 

Also, one note: Ted Danson absolutely deserves an Emmy for simply 10 seconds of screentime in this entire first season, all contained in the finale.