I'M GUTTED. I was really hoping for Kang Sae-byeok to win it all, gaaaah
Also, I pretty much guessed that the Front Man is the cop's brother as soon as I saw he won the Game years ago. But he fucking killed his own brother, damn! Makes me wonder if it every really ends even for the winners, though...
I WONDER WHO THE JEDI COULD BE...?
Wow. Rosaria Dawson played a decent Ahsoka Tano. I really miss Ashley Eckstein's voice work, but this older Ahsoka did well nonetheless.
Also, Dave Filoni! Of course, he directed this. Ahsoka's from one of the biggest characters from the critically acclaimed animated TV series Star Wars: The Clone Wars, which he heavily worked on that elevated his name to the high regard it holds today.
I also liked that new planet, Corvus. It was just so dead, with all that dirt, green haze and leafless trees; mysterious and spooky. Also, the town that Mando enters is so menacing. The people who don't want to talk to him and the masked guards, with voice modulators reminiscent of the Death Troopers, made for such an ominous atmosphere.
I like how the only guy Mando talked to was the old Magistrate. They didn't need to tell us he was; they just showed him helping the townsfolk, instructing them and gets a set of robes put on him at the end. He also saved my boy's (Mando) life.
BABY YODA NAME DROP!!!
"Grogu"? that's Baby Yoda/the Child's name?! It's cute; I like it. I don't know if his name will reach most people, though. My friends might not believe me. I also liked his backstory and what Ahsoka decided to do with him. I mean it's obvious, given the way we've seen him around Mando, so her decision makes sense.
However, I'm confused as to why they call Ahsoka a Jedi. Didn't she leave the order? Didn't she get those white lightsabers to show she's not a Jedi (or Sith)? I thought she was in this grey area, that made her free from the Jedi and their dark past and burdens? The Star Wars wiki legit says she's a force-sensitive outcast (https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Force-Sensitive_Outcast#Ahsoka_Tano)
GRAND ADMIRAL THRAWN NAME-DROP. LET'S GO!!!
In the end, it was a solid (non-filler) episode. We got more worldbuilding, homages to established Star Wars material, and a fun, action-adventure set on a desolate, The Lorax kind of planet.
TECHNICAL SCORE: 7/10
ENJOYMENT SCORE: 8/10
I wish that they made the confrontation differ more from Vader and Ahsokas in Rebels.
That was cool. I really liked the mystery and the reveal of this one. I'm just a sucker for immortality tales, you know?
Ay, that was cool. It's nice to see some actual story. :P
Jeez, the snowflaky reactions of straight white men because not every single episode and narrative centres them - anything deviating from that priority is apparently "woke". Get over yourselves, you egomaniacal bigots.
Anyway, another great episode that nicely expanded Ellie's backstory - bonus points for the Mortal Kombat II appreciation, too :nerd:
[8.6/10] So there was a post on Reddit the other day, asking when movies stopped showing people getting into elevators. OK, it’s more complicated than that, but that’s the gist of it. Movies used to show their characters walking to the door, walking down the hallway, getting into the car, stopping for gas, rolling on, arriving at their house, opening the door, and boom, that’s how you got to the next scene. Then, Godard happened, and suddenly you just cut past that stuff. The character was just in one room and then in the next and with a brief establishing shot or transition or even nothing more than the switch of backdrop, we eventually trust the audience to understand that the character did all that boring stuff in the meantime.
It’s the grammar and literacy of film audiences, and it’s just baked into our brains at this point. You don’t need to be told that Michel Poiccard didn’t apparate from one part of Marseille to another. We understand it intuitively in a way that audiences in the 1960s didn’t because we were raised on it. Maybe not to the degree that BoJack Horseman was raised on film and television, but still we know.
There are expectations on how this whole T.V. show thing works. Even in the post-Sopranos, peak T.V. era where everyone wants to do something a little differently, there’s basic rules for what television is, and how its deployed. You may not have A-plots and B-plots. You may not have three cameras or rising and falling action. But there are rules, damnit, and you’d better abide by most of them or risk alienating your audience (or taking refuge in being confusing which means your show is daring and smart).
And one of those rules, not in so many words, is don’t just have your character stand around and talk to the audience for half an hour. Save it for your one man show. Leave it on the stage. But for television, you need dynamism, you need things happening, you need multiple characters and incident and developments or people will get bored. You can’t leave your main character naked out there, especially in an animated show, when you’re not even limited to sets or locations or visual variety in the way that live action does.
But BoJack Horseman does. It gives you 21 uninterrupted minutes of its title character giving his mother’s eulogy, recounting his family history, doing a gallows humor-filled stand up routine, and processing the death of a woman he hated but still wanted approval from in one giant stream of consciousness presentation.
There’s interludes of humor in the form of those black comedy bits and the occasional musical accompaniment gag. There’s a cold open that flashes back to a glimpse of BoJack’s emotionally screwed up and emotionally screwing up father, and of BoJack’s first taste of how he thinks he’s supposed to process his mother’s absence. But for the most part, it’s just BoJack, in a room, practically talking directly to the audience, for a whole episode.
It is bananas. You could perform it as a monologue for your high school. You could print the whole thing out and turn it into one of those giant movie posters where the words make up the imagery of the film in some kind of literary pointillism. You could listen to it in the car and not miss much beyond the occasional coffin-side glance or impressionistic moment. It’s not something that had to be on television, that could only work in this medium.
And somehow, that’s what makes it feel as bold as it does, because it chooses to set aside all those tools in the T.V. toolbox that help make us feel things: the sad music, the hauntingly lit scene, the expressive reactions of other characters. It eschews using those same sweetners that help keep up the audience’s interest during a half-hour sitcom: scene changes, change-of-pace sideplots, pure comic relief. And instead it just gives you a sad, messed up horse on stage, digesting his relationship with his parents in real time for what is an eternity on television, and hopes it can keep your attention, make you feel BoJack’s pain, and thread the complex emotional and familial needles the series has been toying with for four and half season, with words alone.
Television is, as BoJack and BoJack wink at, considered more of a writer’s medium than a visual medium like film. That’s changing, but it comes from the fact that television started out as something much cheaper, much faster, and much more disposable than its cinematic brethren. There wasn’t money or time to worry about fancy images or incredible sets or stunning cinematography. You needed to film twenty something episode in about as many weeks and do it on the budget provided, which meant the spark had to come from the talents of performers like Lucille Ball and the skills of writers who could make three cameras and two rooms feel like an entire world.
That’s the advantage of the T.G.I.F. shows that Horsin’ Around is spoofing. Yeah, it’s easy to make fun at the laugh track or the outrageous situations, or the cornball humor. But those shows emerged from a long and proud tradition, of folks who may have been doing what they had to for a paycheck, but who also made some magic with the meager tools at their disposal, who taught a generation of latchkey kids and people whose lives were far removed from the ease and security of a T.V. family what good could look and feel like it.
It’s a feeling that BoJack has been chasing for his entire life, and it’s led him here, to twenty-minute half-rant/half-confession delivered to his mother’s coffin. And in those twenty minutes, he chews on his confused feelings about his parents, the way that he doesn't so much mourn his mother but mourns the end of a possibility for love from her than he didn’t really believe in in the first place, the way that he tacitly admits his father taught him not to rely on her or anyone, the way he acknowledges the screwed up solace in admitting that you’re drowning together as a family, the way he cherishes those brief respites when you can stop and see your family being as graceful and happy as anyone else’s, the way we confuse and expect big gestures in lieu of the everyday work of being good, the way we look for hidden depths and transcendent meaning in coffee mugs and I.C.U. signs and sad horse shows that may or may not be able to sustain them.
He does it all from a podium, a lecturn, a stage, that lets all that raw emotion and complicated feeling spill out and just sit there with the audience. There’s no subplot to cut to, no wacky interlude from Todd to take the edge off, no break from a man making peace with the fact that he’ll never make peace over this. It’s just there, in one big dose, for BoJack and the audience to have to swallow at the same time, in a way that T.V. almost never makes you do.
T.V. is usually gentler, easier, more escapist than that, even at its most challenging and un-user friendly. If you watch the 1960s Star Trek series you can see the wild new locales the show journeys to every week, the occasionally repetitive but differently-flavored guest stars who would arrive on a daily basis to fight our heroes or help them or just create a problem for them to be solved. And if you watched long enough, you would recognize that every other episode seems to have Captain Kirk schmoozing, smooching, and seducing his way out of (or into) whatever the problem of the week is.
It’s easy to write of Kirk as a womanizer until you realize that T.V. was different in the 1960s. However more colorful and adventure-filled Star Trek was relative to the twenty-minute speech of “Free Churro”, it was also meant to be disposable, watched once and never seen again, before Netflix binges or home video or even syndication were reasonably expectations for people to string all these disparate stories together in one cohesive whole.
You realize, then, that Kirk wasn’t meant to be a lothario in a series of continuing adventures. He was meant to be a passionate man in a bunch of disconnected stories that happened to feature the same characters. He didn’t leap from bed to bed -- he was just fated by the laws of television to find The One over and over again, because like BoJack says, and the arrival of the Starship Enterprise in last year’s Star Trek Discovery vindicates, the show just goes on.
That’s what we do when people die. We try to make sense of their life, and our relationships with them. We try to take all those individual moments that they lived, all those big events, and the moments that we shared with them, and sew them together into some sort of narrative that makes sense to us.
But lives aren’t stories. They don’t always have happy endings, or arcs, or resolution. Sometimes they just end. Sometimes you only see part of who your parents were and are and try construct the rest into something you can extract meaning from. Sometimes you only feel the ways your absent friends shaped you, or scarred you, and try to understand how and why it happened now that they’re no longer around to be asked. Sometimes you take that rush of moments and try to build it up into something you can wrap your head around, a series of episodes with lovable characters and continuity and choices that are as comprehensible as they are kind.
And sometimes, someone important in your life is gone and everything’s worse now. There are rules for television, unwritten stricture for how we communicate with one another in the medium, expectations that the audience can walk in with that may be subverted but have to be respected.
But life and death have no rules other than that each of us must experience both, however brief or painful or confusing that may be. And there are no rules for grief, the process by which we try to come to terms with a parent’s death, the marks their presence and absence have left on our lives. So BoJack Horseman breaks the rules of television, stops telling us stories, and just gives us twenty minutes of raw, writerly confession and digestion, as interconnected and familiar and yet unknowable as the real life tangles of being alive and watching someone die, without the comforts the glowing screen normally provides its hero, or its audience.
At first I thought it was going to be another "Alice in Borderland" (which wasn't bad at all), but I feel like that one was too action packed, and I really like that for this show they are focusing so much on the characters and outside world.
"oh, bojack, no. there is no other side. this is it."
YOU’RE GONNA CARRY THAT WEIGHT.
My personal favorite episode. "Fire is life, not just destruction"
[8.7/10] I’m not sure I’ve seen a show re-pilot so successfully before. The way this episode told and retold all the events of Version 2 of The (Faux) Good Place from so many different perspectives was masterful, and helped give us continuing insight into how each of the characters work.
I was particularly impressed at the branching narrative of the episode, which took care to use the same basic events to springboard from one character’s story to another, and reveal their inner “themness” even when pointed in a different direction.
It’s particularly neat how Michael calculated to make each new situation even more miserable than they were in the last simulation. Eleanor has to give speeches and face the guilt of being crowned (well, sashed) as “best person.” Indecisive Chidi has to deal with the incredible difficulty of choosing his soulmate, and then has to deal with the fomo and regret of likely ending up with the wrong person. Tahani has to deal with difficulties that are frivolous, but nevertheless bother her, making her upset about things she shouldn’t be upset about like the size of her house or the height of her soulmate or the having to wear cargo shorts, and torturing her even further because she can’t reasonably complain about them. And Jason, who enjoys being able to be his real self in his “bud hole” has to live with a complimentary baby sitter there to ensure he lives the quiet life.
It reveals Michael’s, and the show’s, great understanding of these characters, knowing exactly how to twist the screws on them in creative ways that really seize on the things that will truly bother them.
It’s also really interesting getting to see behind the curtain of the demigods/demons/whatever in charge of the torturing. The fact that Michael is on his last chance here, and risks “retirement” if he fails, creates stakes for him as a character too, and the fact that he tries to slip the fact that he failed under the rug in front of his boss produces a ticking time bomb that will no doubt go off halfway through the season.
It’s also fun seeing the “actors” struggle with their parts. Real Eleanor (whose real name, I think, is Vicky) being perturbed at how she’s been demoted in the narrative, going so far as to create a limp and a backstory is amusing. Details like the bearded guy being so interested in biting, or Eleanor’s “soulmate” constantly going to the gym, or other folks just not understanding why they can’t resort to regular torture gives Michael the beleaguered middle manager vibe trying to wrangle all his unruly employees, which is an amusing look. The overall comedy for the show even seems to have improved.
Plus, the episode is propelled by Eleanor’s discovery of her note and attempt to piece the mystery together. I have to say I’m impressed that the show didn’t use the note and the investigation to fuel the second season as a whole. But turning it into a quick turnaround case-solve for Eleanor just creates more possibilities going forward. Joss Whedon is known to have said “play your cards early, it makes you come up with more cards,” and with this sort of virtuoso episode, I’m excited to see what new cards The Good Place comes up with in its second season.
ed and ein, name a more iconic duo, i'll wait
That fight sequence between Katara and the Waterbending master was EXCELLENT.
Really nice animation, interesting story, feels really simple, interested to see where it will go from here
[7.5/10] There’s a good term paper to be written on why we as a culture are so drawn to stories of supernatural occurrences in small towns. Maybe it’s because the distance from big cities gives cover and plausibility to magical or spooky goings on where the public writ large wouldn’t know about them.Maybe it’s because, as shows like Twin Peaks established, they can be a means to process the real life dark things that can happen in these idyllic locales Maybe it’s because we still idealize them as “real America”, so when something goes wrong there, it feels more tragic and more senseless.
Whatever the reason, in its opening bout, Stranger Things channels all the tropes from Stephen King, Stephen Spielberg, David Lynch, and a dozen other cultural touchstones about unexplained happenings in small town America. This is plainly a pastiche, one that’s counting on its audience’s affection for a particular time and place and genre, but also using them to good ends.
It sets up various cliques and interested parties, quickly establishing the different centers of gravity in the town. There’s the quartet of geeks who play DnD in their parents’ basement, get excited about ham radio, and unsurprisingly based on those first two points, get hassled by bullies at school. There’s the older sister, Nancy, who’s trying to stay devoted to her studies but finds herself both excited and made uncomfortable by Steve, the popular boy who’s taken an interest in her.
There’s Hopper, the drinking, smoking, layabout sheriff who’s suddenly faced with a case far more serious than an owl attacking someone’s hairdo. There’s Joyce, the single mother of two trying to make ends meet and understandably devastated and scared by the disappearance of her son. There’s Mr. Clarke, the encouraging science teacher who has a kinship with the nerds in his tutelage. And there’s other parents, siblings, and townspeople the show can pick up or put down as the story unspools.
Most of these characters play on tropes and archetypes: the dorky kids, the good girl sister, the donut-dunking local officer, the single mom scraping by, and so on and so on. But Stranger Things is remarkably efficient in using those tropes to fill in the gaps and get the different corners of the show up and running in one forty-seven minute opening jaunt. Not all of them get as much depth as Joyce in the early going -- and her memories and search for her son is the most emotionally-involving and, not coincidentally, realest aspect of this first outing. But each has potential, and the lines that run between them, or could in the future, are clear and compelling.
What’s particularly striking, though, is how restrained but effectively the show weaves in the supernatural into what could work just as well as a regular missing child story. We see the effects of whatever creature is haunting these woods. We hear breaths and watch lights flicker and watch as panicked scientists are seemingly consumed. But Stranger Things achieves most of this through suggestion, with electricity humming or shorting, mysterious agents preparing for something awful and doing things that are even worse, and a mute little girl who appears to have powers of her own.
Eleven is the most fascinating element of this first episode. Without a word from her, “Vanishing” makes you care about her plight, wonder about her connection to these bizarre goings on, and fear who or what might be after her. There’s some kind of linkage between her ability to stop a motorized fan and the lightbulb-blasting effects that whatever’s really happening at the Department of Energy outpost here. There’s also some kind of experiments or other horrors being visited upon her that makes her so ready to run. With those two elements combined, hers is the right mix of sci-fi intrigue and empathy-inducing character introduction.
The chief move that Stranger Things makes in its first chapter is to get us to sympathize with something or someone and then show it tragically taken away. The audience cares about the titular disappearance of young Will Byers not just because it’s sad anytime a kid goes missing or it's easy to feel for his distraught mom and older brother. We care because he had the opportunity to cheat at Dungeons and Dragons and instead offered scrupulous honesty -- because, as Mike points out, he could have saved himself and instead put himself at risk to protect others. We only get a short amount of time with him, but it’s enough to establish that he’s a good kid and understand why his family and cohort are so anxious to save him.
Likewise, we don’t get much of Benny, the restaurant owner. We just see him looking after a young runaway, giving her free food and ice cream, taking care with the woman he thinks is a social worker because he doesn’t want to scare the child who’s unexpectedly come into his care. We see, in just a few short scenes, that he’s a good person, which lets us know, in no uncertain terms, who the good guys are, who the bad guys are, and what’s at stake when the suits come in, guns blazing, and take him out, sending Eleven running.
Maybe that’s the biggest draw here. The setting of a small town in Indiana gives us potential to have a distinctive ecosystem of kids and adults where mysterious things can go down amid cover-ups and disbelief. But it also conveys a certain innocence, a certain uncorruptedness, within this way of life, that tugs at your heartstrings and makes you that much more invested to see if that innocence can be rescued.
The makeshift heroes and unwitting victims in the stories the Duffer Brothers are pulling from have a mixed record in terms of undoing the evil that’s befallen their friends and their town. We can only hope that Will, and Hawkins as a whole, fare better than Benny did. Either way, I’ll keep watching.
DIdn't expect Jimmy Fallon to appear in WWII, but here we are.
7/10
Bad show but I'm sure we can all agree that we are fortunate nothing controversial happened...
Luz: "You!"
[Other Luz screams.]
Number Five: "I'm a basilisk, and technically, I— I shouldn't exist. My kind went extinct a long time ago. But we were brought back. They wanted to know how we drained magic."
Stranger: "I'll expose your vile plans on Mew-Tube and finally get my account verified."
Jacob Hopkins: "Usually I don't take it out for just anyone, but what the heck!? If I'm gonna be working with the government, I might as well show off a little!"
Luz: "Staying here was the best decision I ever made!"
Camila: "You... chose... to stay there?"
Luz: "Oh— uh..."
8/10
Gus Illusion: "Did we do bad?"
[Luz gasps.]
Everyone: "Whoa!"
Luz: [Pants] "Gus, you ran away so fast, but I didn't want to interrupt, so..."
[Luz inhales and puts her hand on Gus' shoulder.]
Luz: "I think you should go."Gus: "All right, I'm in. Where do we find these Galderstones?"
Amity: "If you give me back my hairband, I'll read you whatever book you want tomorrow."
Kid: "I can grow an entire forest and make my own butterfly sanctuary."
Amity: "Huh, the human world sounds... odd."
Luz: "Maybe it would be less odd if I showed you around someday."
[Amity sits up.]
Luz: "But, uh, let's turn back. I don't wanna push you."
[Quickly, Amity grabs Luz's arm and pulls her along.]
Amity: "We're getting that diary."
Bria: "Angmar!"
Angmar: "Hmm?"
Angmar: [Playfully] "I said you're on lookout duty. And if I catch you playing with any more bugs, I'll make you eat them! Okay? I believe in you!"
Gus: "No, this isn't right! I won't let you steal these."
Gus respecting the dead. I approve :)
I like the worldbuilding of past Illusionists and human citizens in Bonesborough. It makes the world feel more lived in
Malphas: [Deep voice] "Amity."
[Cut to daytime outside.]
Malphas: [Normal voice.] "I'm just, like, super disappointed in you. Like, I can't even process these feelings right now."
Stranger: "Oh-ho! I am the keeper of the Looking Glass Graveyard."
Amity: "Everything's changed since you came here. Being around you, it... makes me do stupid things and I wish it didn't."
[Luz & Amity tear up.]
Luz: "It's okay, I, uh—"
[Luz sniffles.]
Luz: "I-I do stupid things around you too, Amity."
Bria: "Why isn't my magic working?"
Amity: "So, how's it look?"
Edric: "It looks like you're about to get in big trouble with Mum."
[Emira slaps Edric.]
Edric: "Ow."
Emira: "I think it looks great. But, yeah, maybe don't tell her I helped."
Edric: "Bold move, sister."
Amity: "Uh, okay. Good to see you. Farewell forever."
8/10
Lilith: [Giggling] "Watching the ink dry is the best part."
Hooty: "Avenge me!"
[Hooty pretend dies.]
Hooty: "Bleh!"
Hooty: "Porta-Hooty, reporting for Hooty!"
Luz: "Ooh! A door fit for a tyrant!"
King: "Hehe, that's me!"
Eda: "Get out of here. I'll hold it back and meet you outside."
King: "Ah, no! Keep that thing away from me!"
King: "Eda was right, wasn't she? I was never king of anything. I'm nobody."
Luz: "You are somebody, and I love that somebody very much."
Eda: "You sure they'll be all right?"
Luz: "Hooty knows what to do."
[Hooty spitting maniacally.]
Eda: "You sure they'll be all right?"
King: "But I was too small to do anything."
King: "Someone called me their son. Luz, I think it was my dad."
8/10
I'm a quite sensitive watcher so you can imagine how much I cried during this episode. Like a baby. So sad yet brilliant!
Can i say that the best episode so far was in fact without Boba Fett? I had more interest watching Din Djarin build his new ship than the last 4 episodes.
This was a really hard episode to watch. Pulled at every single emotional string in your soul. The ending, was beautifully done, but wow, crying like a baby.
[8.4/10] We live in the finite. Everyone reading this has a limited amount of time on this plane of existence. Maybe you believe there’s an eternal paradise waiting on the other end. Maybe you believe in reincarnation. Maybe you believe that we’re simply waves whose essence is returned to the fabric of the universe. Whatever you believe, almost all of us can agree that whatever we have here, our fragile world and fragile bodies, are not built to last.
That is both terrifying and maddening: terrifying because, like Janet, none of us truly knows what’s on the other side, and maddening because there is so much to do and see and experience even in this finite world, and given how few bearimies we have on this mortal coil, most of us will only have the chance to sample a tiny fraction of it.
So The Good Place gives us a fantasy. It’s not a traditional one, of endless bliss or perpetual pleasure or unbridled success. Instead, it imagines an afterlife where there’s time enough to become unquestionably fulfilled, to accomplish all that we could ever want, to step into the bounds of the next life or the next phase of existence or even oblivion at peace. The finale to Michael Schur’s last show, Parks and Recreation, felt like a dose of wish fulfillment, but with this ending, The Good Place blows it out of the water.
Each of our heroes receives the ultimate send-off. By definition, nearly all of them have found ultimate satisfaction, a sense of peacefulness in their existence that makes them okay to leave it, having connected with their loved ones, improved themselves, and accomplished all that they wanted to. If “One Last Ride” seemed to give the denizens of Pawnee everything they’d ever wanted, “Whenever You’re Ready” makes that approach to a series finale nigh-literal for the residents of The Good Place.
And yet, there’s a sense of melancholy to it all, if only because every person who emerges from paradise at peace and ready to leave, has to say goodbye to people who love them. Most folks take it in stride, with little more than an “oh dip” or an “aw shoot”, but there’s still something sad about people who leave loved ones behind, and whom the audience has come to know and love, bidding what is, for all intents and purposes, a final farewell.
But The Good Place finds ways to make that transcendent joy for each of our heroes feel real. Jason...completes a perfect game of Madden (controlling Blake Bortles, no less). He gets loving send-offs from his father and best friend. He enjoys one last routine with his dance crew. He inadvertently lives the life of a monk while trying to find the necklace he made for Janet. It is the combination of the idiotic, the sweet, and the unexpectedly profound, which has characterized Jason.
Tahani learns every skill she dreamed of mastering (including learning wood-working from Ron Swanson and/or Nick Offerman!). She connects with her sister and develops a loving relationship with her parents. And when it’s time to go, she realizes she has more worlds left to conquer and becomes an architect, a fitting destination for someone who was always so good at designing and creating events for the people she cares about. Hers is one of the few stories that continues, and it fits her.
Chidi doesn't have the same sort of list of boxes checked that leads him to the realization that he has nothing more to do. Sure, he’s read all of the difficult books out there and seemingly refined the new afterlife system (with help from the council) to where it’s running smoothly, almost on automatic. But his realization is more from a state of being happy with where everything is, with what he’s experienced.
He has dinner with his best friend and Eleanor’s best friends and has so many times. He’s spent endless blissful days with the love of his (after)life staring at the sunset. His mom kissed Eleanor and left lipstick on her cheek, which Eleanor’s mom wiped off. I love that. I love that it’s something more ineffable for Chidi, a sense of the world in balance from all the bonds he’s forged rather than a list of things he’s done. And I love that he felt that readiness to move on for a long time, but didn’t for Eleanor’s sake.
Look, we’re at the end of the series, and I’m still not 100% on board with Eleanor/Chidi, which is a flaw. But I want to like it. I like the idea of it. And I especially like the idea of someone being at peace, but sacrificing the need to take the next step for the sake of someone they love. The saddest part of this episode is Eleanor doing everything she can to show Chidi that there’s more to do, only to accept that the moral rule in this situation says that her equal and opposite love means letting him go. Chidi’s departure is hard, but his gifts to Eleanor are warm, and almost justify this half-formed love story that’s driven so much of the show.
Unfortunately, no matter how much peace he finds, Michael cannot walk through the door that leads to whatever comes next. So instead, he gets the thing he always wanted -- to become human, or as Eleanor puts it, a real boy. Ted Danson plays the giddiness of this to the hilt, his excitement at doing simple human things, the symbolism of him learning to play a guitar on earth, on taking pleasure in all the mundane annoyances and simple fun and things we meat-sacks take for granted. Each day of humanity is a new discovery for Michael, and there’s something invigorating about that, something heightened by his own delight at not knowing what happens next in the most human of ways.
The one character who gets the least indication of a next step is Janet. We learn that she is Dr. Manhattan, experiencing all of time at once. We see her accept Jason’s passing, hug our departing protagonists, and take steps to make herself just a touch more human to make her time with Jason a little more right. But hers is a story of persistence, of continued growth, in a way that we don’t really have for anyone else.
Along the way, the show checks in with scads of minor characters to wrap things up. We see the other test subjects having made it into The Good Place (or still being tested). We see Doug Forcett deciding to party hard now that he’s in Heaven. We see Shawn secretly enjoy the new status quo, and Vicky go deep into her new role, and The Judge...get into podcasts! As much as this show tries to get the big things right for all of its major characters, it also takes time to wrap up the little things and try not to leave any loose threads from four seasons of drop-ins across the various planes of existence.
That just leaves Eleanor. She takes the longest of any of the soul squad to be ready. She tries, becoming okay with Chidi’s absence. She overcomes her fear of being alone. But most importantly, she does what she’s come to do best -- help people better herself. There’s self-recognition in the way her final great act, the thing that makes her okay with leaving this plane and entering another, is seeing herself in Mindy St. Clair and trying to save her. The story of The Good Place is one of both self-improvement and the drive to help others do the same. Saving Mindy, caring about her, allows Eleanor to do both in one fell swoop.
So she too walks through the door, beautifully rendered as the bend between two trees in a bucolic setting. Her essence scatters through the universe, with one little brilliant speck of her wave, crashing back into Michael’s hands, reminding him of his dear friend, and inspiring him to pass on that love and sincerity back into the world. It is, as trite as it sounds, both an end and a beginning, something circular that returns the good deeds our protagonists have done, the good people they have become, into some type of cycle that helps make the rest of this place a little better.
Moments end. Lives end. T.V. shows end. The Good Place has its cake and eats it too, returning to and twisting key moments like Michael welcoming Eleanor to the afterlife, while cutting an irrevocable path from here through the crash of the wave. It embraces the way that the finite gives our existence a certain type of meaning, whether we have a million bearimies to experience the joys and wonders of the universe, or less than a hundred years to see and do and feel whatever we can. And it sends Team Cockroach home happy, wherever and whatever their new “home” may be.
In that, The Good Place is a marvel, not just because it told a story of ever-changing afterlife shenanigans, not just because it tried to tackle the crux of moral philosophy through an off-the-wall network sitcom, but because it ended a successful show, after only four seasons, by sending each of them into another phase of existence and made it meaningful. There’s a million things to do with our limited time on this planet, but watching The Good Place was an uplifting, amusing, challenging, and above all worthwhile use of those dwindling minutes, even if we’ll never have as many as Eleanor or Chidi, Michael or Tahani, Janet or Jason, or any of the other souls lucky enough to be able to choose how much eternity is enough.
crying and sobbing. ji-yeong was so sweet. and ali! and il-nam. fucking hell.
