I'm all caught up on The Good Place!

[jayeless]

I promise that one day, I'll resume talking about things that are not The Good Place, but today is not that day.

As of last night, I have finished catching up on all three seasons!! And wow, has it flown by. Someone in the show's subreddit compared its pace to that of Dollhouse, and that is definitely fair. Massive plotlines are rushing past in like, an episode or two. It's intense. And despite that the show manages to consistently be so funny!

So, clearly I was off-base in some of my speculation last time, but now I've caught up on the whole show I wanted to just write a little more about it.

So, we now know how good you have to be.
Last time, I was thinking that moderately good people had to be going to the Good Place. Then there came the twist that no one has gone to the Good Place in over 500 years, and I have to say… this is way better!

I loved the point it made about there being no such thing as ethical consumerism under capitalism. With capitalism being the system predicated on cruel and ruthless exploitation as it is, and our modern world being so interconnected, almost every decision we make is indirectly causing harm to others – however much we try to make that not so. I loved it when Jason, of all people, pointed out that his former dance crew buddy was working three jobs to try to keep himself and all four of his grandparents just barely afloat, and definitely did not have time to research ethical tomatoes. And I mean, I think we all know that the harmful impacts of our modern lives go way beyond tomatoes… almost every foodstuff is grown on the back of exploited labour, likely using pesticides that are devastating insect populations. The more electricity you use, or the more you use a petrol-powered vehicle, the more you're contributing to catastrophic climate change. The vast majority of mass-produced goods are still manufactured in sweatshops; if you own any electronic goods, you can also lie discomfited in the knowledge that it probably contains rare minerals which can only be mined in severely exploitative, abusive conditions in Africa. And I mean, I could go on and on and on.

But what was great about this show is that it made the point that the system is broken. We're not all evil people just for living in a capitalist society that causes massive amounts of harm to people all around the world constantly. Capitalism is an evil system that harms the vast majority of people and forces everyone to be complicit in it. Even if the afterlife did adjust its processes so everyone's point totals weren't destroyed by these indirect consequences, it would really only be tinkering around the edges, because all of this evil would still be taking place. To actually prevent the evil, we've got to change the system we have on Earth as well.

Now, do I think that The Good Place is actually going to become a vehicle of anti-capitalist education on US prime-time TV? Realistically no. But it's getting there.

Also, I appreciated that the show treated it like a joke when Chidi wailed that he was clearly in the Bad Place for buying almond milk despite the bad environmental consequences, yet in the end that's the exact kind of reason why everyone is going to the Bad Place.

WTF is even wrong with the Good Place.
As we saw, the Good Place is obsessed with “rules” (no matter how disconnected these have actually become from the basic principles of doing good and reducing harm), and wasting hundreds of years doing nothing but being embroiled in bureaucratic bullshit.

The show kind of moved on from this quickly, but this runs so contrary to the actual concept of what it means to be good, that I'm sure we'll be revisiting this at some point.

The set-up for season 4!
So, Simone is going to come back. On the one hand, I am sad I'm going to have to sit through yet more extremely horrible-sounding and inaccurate fake!Broad Australian accents. On the other hand, I actually did like her character quite a lot so maybe this won't be terrible. But oh my god, could the writing team maybe add an Australian to their number and get them to write all Simone's dialogue? Maybe even hire a (very good) accent coach? Or why not just retcon her character to make her a Brit, at this point I would be so relieved and wouldn't even complain about continuity. Chidi gets to sound American despite being Senegalese!

Obviously Chidi has had to be memory-wiped again due to the whole Simone sitch… I've got to say that I am still not a Chidi/Eleanor shipper. I felt sad for Eleanor because of the character growth she's had this season, realising that she is capable of love and vulnerability and she can grow past the emotional damage her parents have enacted on her… only to have that physical embodiment of that realisation be ripped away from her. Buuuut – and maybe it's just because the show moves so fast that it didn't have time to build them up properly – I still felt like the Chidi/Eleanor thing has been forced. In contrast, the whole Janet/Jason/Tahani triangle has been a much slower burn and I feel it more.

Oh yeah, and I am so excited for a season that's almost a retread of season 1, except with the substantial difference that our main characters (at least Eleanor, Tahani and Jason… not sure Chidi will be up to it) are now the show-runners rather than the guinea pigs in the experiment. Also, Michael having a freak-out so Eleanor's had to step in seems ripe with potential. So excited for Eleanor's C+ performance!

So that's that. And now I'll have to wait probably nine or ten months or something before there are any more episodes of this show out to watch ☹ On the bright side… I do have a lot of other shows on my Netflix list that I could watch…