1x12 Mindy St. Claire

[6.8/10] Once again, I find myself frustrated with how on-the-nose and clunky The Good Place is with its character development, particularly with its use of flashbacks. Don’t get me wrong, it’s interesting enough to learn that Eleanor’s parents were narcissists who didn’t take care of her and that’s what set her on her current pack of self-reliance turned selfishness, but it’s just too easy. It’s BoJack Horseman-style simple psychological arithmetic and it just rings false.

In the same way, having the titular Mindy St. Claire be a selfish Reaganaut-type who lives in The Medium Place and tells Eleanor to be selfish underscores the absurdity of the opposite perspective too heavily. There’s some really good gags about everything being medium (only live versions of songs, lukewarm beer, “The Making of Cannon Ball Run II”) but the emotional calculus of the whole thing is too straightforward and too telegraphed. I like what the show is going for, with Eleanor having a moment to choose selflessness over selfishness, but yet again, The Good Place is overly didactic about its point which ends up weakening it.

(I did like the moral gymnastics required to figure out how to score Mindy's act. It's a fun way to explain the existence of the neutral area.)

The shtick with Michael, Chidi, Tahani, and Real Eleanor making their case to Sean wasn’t much to write home about either. I enjoy the actor who plays Sean (another Parks and Rec alum), but the whole “we can’t be emotional at all or he’ll retreat into a coccoon” was more wacky than it was clever, and didn’t pay comedic dividends (unlike the equally ridiculous but more amusing attempts by Janet and Jason to figure out how to consummate their “marriage”).

Overall, most of this is perfectly fine, but the big personal growth moment for Eleanor doesn’t quite click because of how heavy-handed the episode gets in trying to explain why she was who she was when she died.