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andraste... it is actually as good as everyone says it is! Which is one hell of an achievement given all the things I have heard about this show over the past few years.
(If you have managed to get this far into 2019 without having anything about The Good Place spoiled for you: do not pass Go, do not read anything about the premise, just try it. It is less disappointing than frozen yoghurt.)
Anyway, I just watched thirty-nine episodes in eight days because last weekend I got sick. The kind of sick where all I could do for some time was lie on the couch distracting myself from how terrible I felt with a course in moral philosophy disguised as a sitcom. This turned out to be a better use of my time than anything I would probably have done if I hadn't caught a nasty virus, indicating that we may not live in the worst timeline.
(Or maybe there is only one timeline and I was always going to get sick and mainline an entire television show. Who knows? I think the most important thing I learned from The Good Place is what to do if someone keeps talking about Determinism, i.e. pour iced tea on their head until they stop.)
Like basically everyone else on the planet who started watching this show after the first season finished airing, I went into this experience spoiled for the huge season-ending twist. The good news is, this doesn't actually ruin the story at all, although I imagine it's a rather different experience from watching unspoiled. The main effect was that I spent the first thirteen episodes wondering if Michael knew he was in the Bad Place or if he was actually as much a torture victim as the four humans. And, honestly, despite the end of Season One I still think that's a pretty good question. (Even if Eleanor deserved that cold tea shower when she brought up the idea of ever-escalating layers of demons.)
It's not like he hasn't been tormented as much as the rest of the cast at this point. Look at the evidence: he spends three hundred years watching the plan he's waited eternity to implement fail over and over and over again while hiding this cosmic screw-up from his boss and dodging Vicki, then has to join Team Cockroach, then learns about existential dread and guilt and other un-fun human things, then spends a season and a half desperately trying to keep his favourite humans alive and stop them getting tortured forever while also discovering that the system he's been serving in one way or another his whole existence is fundamentally broken and none of the other immortal entities want to help fix it. Then his former co-workers come up with the worst threat he can possibly think of - if he fails again they'll make his humans think he's betrayed them - and he just goes entirely to pieces. And what is Eleanor but an entity seemingly specifically designed to ruin his plans?
Except, of course, that's not all she does - after she's ruined his life by working out that she's in the Bad Place approximately seven hundred and ninety-nine times, she's also instrumental in helping him through the transition to good personhood. Except, in a way, she started helping with that even before the first reboot.
You know what I thought about all the time throughout watching this show? Their shared scenes in What We Owe to Each Other. Eleanor thinks that she's distracting Michael from catching her, while he thinks he's secretly torturing her. Yet what they they actually do is spend the day eating frozen yoghurt, singing karaoke and playing with a claw machine. I think that in some ways, that's one of the most important turning points in Michael's arc even if it completely passes him by at the time. At that point his primary intention is to torment Eleanor and the other three real humans in his neighbourhood - but one of the things he says in Season One that turns out to be completely true is that he's fascinated by humans and wants to learn all about them. Sure, initially his motivation may be that he wants to torture them better, but if he hadn't had all that natural curiosity then Eleanor and the others would have gone straight to being tortured by needles and bees with teeth. And Michael and Eleanor would never have become friends.
There's a straight line between Eleanor pretending to help Michael and Eleanor actually helping Michael and Eleanor finally stepping in for Michael when he just can't keep going at the end of Season Three. I can't wait to see where it goes in the end ...
(If you have managed to get this far into 2019 without having anything about The Good Place spoiled for you: do not pass Go, do not read anything about the premise, just try it. It is less disappointing than frozen yoghurt.)
Anyway, I just watched thirty-nine episodes in eight days because last weekend I got sick. The kind of sick where all I could do for some time was lie on the couch distracting myself from how terrible I felt with a course in moral philosophy disguised as a sitcom. This turned out to be a better use of my time than anything I would probably have done if I hadn't caught a nasty virus, indicating that we may not live in the worst timeline.
(Or maybe there is only one timeline and I was always going to get sick and mainline an entire television show. Who knows? I think the most important thing I learned from The Good Place is what to do if someone keeps talking about Determinism, i.e. pour iced tea on their head until they stop.)
Like basically everyone else on the planet who started watching this show after the first season finished airing, I went into this experience spoiled for the huge season-ending twist. The good news is, this doesn't actually ruin the story at all, although I imagine it's a rather different experience from watching unspoiled. The main effect was that I spent the first thirteen episodes wondering if Michael knew he was in the Bad Place or if he was actually as much a torture victim as the four humans. And, honestly, despite the end of Season One I still think that's a pretty good question. (Even if Eleanor deserved that cold tea shower when she brought up the idea of ever-escalating layers of demons.)
It's not like he hasn't been tormented as much as the rest of the cast at this point. Look at the evidence: he spends three hundred years watching the plan he's waited eternity to implement fail over and over and over again while hiding this cosmic screw-up from his boss and dodging Vicki, then has to join Team Cockroach, then learns about existential dread and guilt and other un-fun human things, then spends a season and a half desperately trying to keep his favourite humans alive and stop them getting tortured forever while also discovering that the system he's been serving in one way or another his whole existence is fundamentally broken and none of the other immortal entities want to help fix it. Then his former co-workers come up with the worst threat he can possibly think of - if he fails again they'll make his humans think he's betrayed them - and he just goes entirely to pieces. And what is Eleanor but an entity seemingly specifically designed to ruin his plans?
Except, of course, that's not all she does - after she's ruined his life by working out that she's in the Bad Place approximately seven hundred and ninety-nine times, she's also instrumental in helping him through the transition to good personhood. Except, in a way, she started helping with that even before the first reboot.
You know what I thought about all the time throughout watching this show? Their shared scenes in What We Owe to Each Other. Eleanor thinks that she's distracting Michael from catching her, while he thinks he's secretly torturing her. Yet what they they actually do is spend the day eating frozen yoghurt, singing karaoke and playing with a claw machine. I think that in some ways, that's one of the most important turning points in Michael's arc even if it completely passes him by at the time. At that point his primary intention is to torment Eleanor and the other three real humans in his neighbourhood - but one of the things he says in Season One that turns out to be completely true is that he's fascinated by humans and wants to learn all about them. Sure, initially his motivation may be that he wants to torture them better, but if he hadn't had all that natural curiosity then Eleanor and the others would have gone straight to being tortured by needles and bees with teeth. And Michael and Eleanor would never have become friends.
There's a straight line between Eleanor pretending to help Michael and Eleanor actually helping Michael and Eleanor finally stepping in for Michael when he just can't keep going at the end of Season Three. I can't wait to see where it goes in the end ...