[8.5/10] “It’s a long long road, but I’m gonna get there.” Those are the word that Sesame Street taught us years and years ago, instilling the idea that just because something doesn’t happen right now, doesn’t mean that it’s never going to happen. It’s hard to feel like you’ve made tons of progress, and yet aren’t where you want to be, but to some degree that’s just life, where for most of us, for most of the things we truly want, it’s a long road.
Apparently it’s true in the afterlife too. That’s the main idea of “The Burrito” where our heroes make it to The Judge, who gives each member of the show’s foursome a test to see whether they’ve made enough progress to make it to The Good Place, and finds that each has improved, but hasn’t quite gotten to where they need to be.
They all fail, but they each sort of succeed, or at least do better than they would before they got here. Tahani bipasses all the doors with celebrity acquaintances talking about what they truly think of her, but just can’t walk past the door with her parents. Still, she makes peace with the fact that their standards were impossibly high, and that even if they always favored her sister to a cartoonish extent, she’s lived a good life, and a good afterlife, where she’s broken out as a person and found all sorts of new personal heights when she didn’t feel the need to strive for their approval. It’s not enough to get her into Heaven, but it’s an improvement.
Jason is able to play against his beloved Jacksonville Jaguars in Madden, even finding the inner strength to play as their bitter(?) rivals the Tennessee Titans despite his hesitancy to ever take a stand, even a virtual one, against his favorite team, something he never could have done before. But as The Judge points out, he still didn’t totally master his impulse control (which I didn’t realize until this episode was his hamartia), just jumping into playing the game without even stopping her. And while Chidi did finally choose between two mostly-identical hats, showing a decisiveness that is a step up for him, it also took him 82 minutes to do it.
So what we have is improvement without mastery. I’ll admit, it’s hard to know why indecisiveness or striving for parental approval or even plum stupidity (albeit manifested through poor impulse control) justifies you being tortured for the rest of eternity, but each little thought experiment, illustrated in real life, is a great way to indicate how far our heroes have come and how far they have to go.
Everyone except Eleanor. Eleanor, whose fatal flaw is selfishness, is given the (seeming) opportunity to go The Good Place despite the fact that her friends won’t. She chooses not to, and yet it’s not because she’s mastered her selfishness. It’s because, like she did in Michael’s incarnation of The Bad Place, she’s figured out the con. She doesn’t selflessly turn down the opportunity, she just recognizes that the Judge’s simulcra of Chidi doesn’t line up with the genuine article and calls The Judge’s bluff. It’s odd because it’s not really proof of advancement for Eleanor. It’s closer to a con artist recognizing that she’s being conned.
But then she does something truly selfless, which is not only give up her chance at getting to The Good Place individually, but hide the fact that she passed from her friends so as not to make them feel bad (though theoretically, it could be that she doesn’t want them to hate her). Eleanor passes the test through simple means, but proves her growth through more genuinely selfless ones.
All the while, The Good Place keeps us entertained with what’s going on elsewhere. Maya Rudolph as The Judge is a revelation. The way she’s a little bored with her job, a little amused by the foursome pleading for her mercy, and just generally finds them adorable is a superb take for a higher being. There’s something so quotidian about how she wields her enormous power, and Rudolph finds the fun in it every time.
In the same way, the adventure of Michael facing the music in The Bad Place has enough humor and suspense to keep things humming. The reveal that Janet prime got good enough to pass as a Bad Janet was a genuinely surprising one, and their last minute appearance in the courtroom sets up all kinds of intrigue for the show’s season finale.
What’s so exciting about the prospect of the finale, and about the show as a whole, is that it’s not clear where they’re going with all of this. The show seems to have a trajectory of Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, and Jason each getting better, but the places that quest for self-improvement takes them has been unpredictable so far, all full of twists, reboots, and friendships that grow in unexpected ways. Where that path goes from here is uncertain, but what’s sure and exciting is that our heroes have made it a long way, but still have a long way to go.
