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

Binge watched the first season in a weekend, and have been watching the second season live on Hulu shortly after it airs. Love it to death. Funny in a clever way a lot of network comedies just aren't. There are a lot of funny network comedies, absolutely. But this one is a special kind of thoughtful and twisty while still being about its characters at heart.

 

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Well I thought it was pretty clear that was because she was being used contrary to her design--not just the therapy thing but maybe the broader role she's playing here by "deceiving" most of the "neighborhood". After the last couple episodes I'm glad they found some new stakes to interject because the second people settle into a routine the show loses a huge amount of energy. And when you think about it, between her 800 evolutions and now the glitching Janet's a vehicle for basically anything they want to do. Hell, she could decide Vicky's cohort are making the humans "not happy" and obliterate them all.

 

Ooooh, here's a theory for you--from the AV Club's episode recap.

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While the preternaturally helpful Janet snaps into Tahani’s requested therapist mode with her usual chipper alacrity, every time she pronounces Jason’s relationship with Tahani in positive or encouraging terms, reality warps. D’Arcy Carden is yet another cast member tonight who is just stellar. We know that Janet and Jason’s improbable past love (I guess you’d call it) would have to come back into play in this new reality, just as we know that Janet’s constant rebooting has left open the door for this “sexy Alexa” (as coined by Eleanor) to expand beyond her pre-programmed soullessness. But, as the outwardly serene Janet, in turn, loses a thumb, barfs up a frog, and seemingly shakes the very foundations of the fake Good Place, Carden finds the subtlest of ways to signal Janet’s stirring distress at Jason’s newfound relationship. When she pulls an Eleanor and goes to Michael urging him to shut her down for the good of the group, she, too reveals that her nascent consciousness has started to grasp the insoluble nature of the trolley problem.

 

I hate the Trolley Problem.

The philosophical question. I enjoyed the episode.

 

Michael is a very talented artist. As someone who hated Philosophy with a passion, I loved Michael's re-enactments to torture Chidi.

 

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I think it's got to do with her being unable to lie she was having to do that a lot in the therapy sessions [\spoiler]

 

Can't believe I didn't see this before now--Kristen Bell recorded the rest of the cast finding out the finale twist.

 

I was just discussing this season with Jello and I think the one thing I'm most curious about right now is when and if Tahani and Chidi start doing, or even talking about, growth of their own. So far the show has stuck to the first season's basic structure of "Chidi teaches Eleanor how to be a good person" even though we've now learned that he technically wasn't that good himself. Yeah, the system is flawed, but there's just as valid a point to Chidi's exclusion from the real Good Place as to Tahani's--and while Tahani hasn't done much soul-searching yet herself I've appreciated that this season has shown her sort of wallowing in the realization that she wasn't as great as she thought she was (and you could even say that humbling is what opened her mind to getting involved with Jason). So far Chidi seems to have brushed that news off and moved on as always--dropped ball or pending twist?

 

This show's ****ing amazing.

 

The thing in this episode about them waiting for the Girls Gone Wild guy to get to the Bad Place seems to be a continuity error, since as discussed earlier, the 800 reboots should mean that ~300 years have passed.

Actually it's interesting to think about the Places existing outside of time in some way--except Mindy seems to have been experiencing normal time passage throughout the reboots, not to mention 30 years or so before the show started.

The show is ruined, clearly.

 

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New favorite Maya Rudolph character.

 

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So I understand there's been some debate over what exactly is going on now--for the record I'm fully on the side of this being another simulation. There's just too much to unpack from the notion that they'd rewind time (potentially centuries of it) and alter god knows how many other humans' lives to experiment with four people--not to mention Michael being able to pop in and work at an "Earth" bar.

With that said I feel like the show has finally resolved one of my recurring questions from this thread--the characters are definitely "banking" some degree of moral evolution across all the reboots. The alternative would be that "resurrected" Eleanor is no better of a person than she was when the show started and the shopping cart incident was enough all on its own for her to spend six months suddenly trying to be a better person. I don't think you get there without some lingering part of her that retains its growth even without any memory of the experiences that produced it. I guess that's similar to people with significant memory loss IRL--you don't suddenly have a different personality if you forget who you are, so as much as your experiences create your personality, it's "housed" in a different place from the experiences themselves. Or at least that's my understanding.

Meanwhile there's an interesting new hiccup in the aforementioned timeline situation. By all rights the 800 reboots should have taken at least a century if not two or three, but Gen said something last week to the effect of not having had a case in thirty years, which seems pretty clear as a reference to Mindy. It's always possible that it's something else we don't know about, but if you take it at face value then there's some crazy repercussions to that--it means that however much time the reboots took from Michael's frame of reference, it's still roughly 2016/2017 from Gen's. At a certain point it seems easy to just say it's all happening outside of time/in the blink of an eye, except it's pretty explicitly been thirty years for Mindy as well--or rather, it had been when we first met her. And if the reboots were happening in some sort of time pocket that she's outside of, how would she have distinct memories of the numerous times Eleanor and company have visited her?

 

The Good/Bad/Medium Places are in a different universe/plane/whatever. Time is a dimension, so beings like Michael and the judge can just plop down whenever they want just like they can go wherever they want. It doesn't matter how much time has passed from their perspective.

I would say that the four aren't in a simulation; we see that it took Michael a lot of planning to make his neighborhood. It could just be one of an infinite number of parallel universes-- one where the four did not die. I dunno. Maybe the judge has better simulation skills than Michael.

I also liked seeing Ted Danson as a bartender.

 

Chidi's speaking English -- it's almost certainly a pocket recreation vs. actually back-from-dead. Remember, from his POV everyone around him was speaking French, and he can speak English (as he taught in the US) but it would not be in Eleanor-hearing English (which is our default).

They could be playing fast and loose with that, but Occam's Razor suggests another simulacrum of some sort.

 

This is what I think--it was his proposal but he needed Gen to do it.

 

Callbacks and homages just in that season finale (that I can remember):

- Eleanor talking about getting a sash or tiara.
- Obvs. Ted Danson as a bartender, but also he was playing with the fruit at the bar.
- Chidi (from the hot air balloon episode) wished that they could have met under "normal" circumstances like (paraphrasing) "After a philosophy lecture, or after watching my philosophy lecture, or coming to my office to need help with philosophy" (to which Elanor properly scoffs)

 

STOP EVERYTHING

 

The best scene in the series so far. Showed this to my office at one point and they could not stop laughing.

 

A) How has no one else upped this threat yet you monsters

B) A couple thoughts.

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First, Mike Schur has stated pretty conclusively, and the premiere seems to establish even more conclusively, that this is Actually Earth and not a simulation. Nevertheless I'm standing by my initial conclusion, or at least some version of it--given Gen's apparent level of omnipotence and all the times the show has made a joke of how utterly lifelike their "simulations" can be--the dog from the pilot, the trolley victims, etc. What we're seeing may be a continuation of "Earth" in any way that's scientifically measurable, but it's separate from the Earth everybody died on. Pocket universe, I guess? Michael uses a lot of terms--"new timeline", "ripple effects", "experiment"--that suggest to me that Earth Prime, for lack of a better term, still exists and this is something happening off to the side in a controlled environment. Another hint that something is up: Shawn hacking specifically into Gen's system--not Michael's, Gen's--and figuring out exactly what's going on suggests she is in fact aware of Michael's repeated screwing around and is letting it happen. So maybe Michael's the one getting long-conned now?

Second, as much as I enjoy this show overall I have to say that this was the second premiere in a row that didn't really do a lot for me--both this and the last one were so preoccupied with overcoming the ramifications of the preceding finales and getting things back to a new version of "normal" that the humor and pacing weren't quite up to snuff. But then, last year's premiere was followed by the spectacular 800-reboots episode so now that the gang is together again I'm sure we'll be back to the races soon.

 

I have thoughts, but different from yours -- and we couldn't watch until today so not upped due to that!

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I agree with you that Gen knows what Michael is doing but is okay with it because the premise -- that bad people can become good with a push -- is still in play. They became better in the Bad Place because of each other -- not because of a specific condition other than being together and trying to avoid eternal damnation -- so what happens when the four of them are together without the damnation part.

But the kicker is: it's not them that's going to convince Gen; it's Trevor. Trevor doesn't know that this all kicked off because of the four's influence on Michael and I suspect he may get "corrupted" in the same way, especially given the penchant for Schur to make Scott into a likable guy... I'm interested to see how this plays out, especially with the potential pairing of Bell/Scott given their easy chemistry as a foil to Chidi and his new interest (who is amazing)...

 

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I'm doubtful that Adam Scott will be in the picture long enough to do that idea justice but I'd be into it.

Thing is, I LOVE the basic concept of "people teach each other to become better through their differences"--it's why I'm a city guy, and why I rant about diversity in SW--but what exactly does that accomplish in this universe? If the meta-arc of the show turns out to be the breakdown of the ultra-strict points system, how do they implement that without vastly institutionalized divine intervention? It's a fun experiment but it needs to be divorced from Michael's influence at the end of the day if they're really trying to say something.