arc

Here are some freeze frames from Eleanor's google search:

Over the course of the series, how many characters have gotten the extreme close-up on eyes opening shot? It's been almost entirely Eleanor, plus one time on Janet in her origin episode, right? None of the others? Also, Michael was grossed out about mashing food holes together just a few episodes ago!

Quibble: in s01e02, Tahani offhanded said her godmother was Diana, a princess of something.

Michael did turn one Bad Janet into a marble very easily a few episodes ago. He kind of surprised her with it, but like @wilnil just said, Janets probably shouldn't be designed to resist the process. Also, he didn't have to work hard at surprising her since she was on her phone the whole time.

It's fascinating that this universe posits an eternal afterlife earned one way or the other for what one did with just one human lifetime. Edit: well, I guess many real religions that don't preach reincarnation but do preach an afterlife do that.

When the judge magicked them out of their Bad Place costumes, that might have been the first time Eleanor and Jason have really been comfortably dressed in the afterlife. Maybe excepting parts of the end of attempt #1. But otherwise, Eleanor has mostly been living in hiding as Fake Eleanor, and similarly with Jason-as-Jianyu. Even granting that most of the final attempt has been fake torture since flipping Michael, there’s a limit to how openly those two, esp Jason, could dress as their true selves, not while the other demons thought the experiment was finally running smoothly.

I've often thought The Good Place has some resonance with Westworld, and I could expand on this if anyone is interested, or even if no one is. (They're about constructed worlds, things are going wrong, both shows ended up having big twists in the S1 finales, etc) But also - Chidi selecting from two colors of hats reminded me of a similar thing in Westworld. But it was a pretty quick choice on that show.

Yeah, without a full description of the test, I thought Tahani and Chidi’s tests might just be about completing the task at all, not that there was a time limit. Tahani as she was initially might very well have stayed in any of those rooms forever. In the show’s universe, both consequentialism and deontology are wrong. Tahani did amazing things for wrong reasons and wound up in the Bad Place. Chidi almost never did a wrong thing because he was so obsessed with doing right things for the right reasons, but his indecision and paralysis hurt his friends and family even so. (And there’s still that almond milk issue.) I think Schur and company are endorsing moral particularism, like Eleanor suggested last episode.

Rules nerdery: Janet did have her object-summoning (creating?) powers while on the train to Bad Place headquarters. This suggests to me that even if she was mostly depowered while in the Medium Place, she could have walked back to the train station there, conjured up cocaine (and a car to get back), and then brought it back to Mindy's. Or maybe her other powers don't even work on the MP train station, but she has train-summoning powers even there, and she could have summoned a train to get back to some point where she has full powers.

No, he definitely said “Jortles” when he threw the Molotov cocktail, but it was either a ‘b’ or ‘p’ sound on entering the portal. (Oh, the Vulture recapper heard it too.) Hawaiian pizza is extra funny in that it’s first legitimately a bad food to go with Maine soul food and Arkansas bagels, but it is one of the few foods where the world at large agrees with Mike Schur that “hot fruit” is bad. (He is also opposed to fruit pies.)

At the end, when Jason entered the portal, did he yell "Bortles" or... "Portles"?

I thought Gaiman said earlier that he’d be too busy showrunning on Good Omens to step in on American Gods. also, “Addressing Fuller and Green specifically, Albrecht claimed that they were neither fired nor did they quit.” Riiiiiiiiiiiiight, but are they still getting paid and going to run the show? Cause if not, something between firing and quitting has occurred.

The show reinvents itself a lot, but for practical making-TV reasons I'd be really shocked if they really moved the show to a place with different sets. I kinda hope the judge isn't anyone from Parks and Rec. Or B99. Or The Office.

It's pretty clearly shown that she did not do a 360 scan, and in any case, not seeing about five feet down - where we _know_ this neighborhood has (at last) two story buildings (such as Tahani's own mansion) and even a temporary (fake) sinkhole - seems... less plausible than my theory. Bad Janet starts her scan with her back to the train, a scan that starts about parallel to the train. The shot then sweeps to an overhead shot for about the next 180 degrees and then cuts back to Bad Janet finishing up, having scanned about 180 degrees and ending again parallel to the train but facing the other direction.

Hannibal was made on a relatively tiny budget and it ended up looking amazing despite that. Fuller's shows have always looked gorgeous even despite budget constraints. I doubt that the budget requests weren't necessary. and the way Fremantle/Starz have played this is bonkers. To just let Green and Fuller walk without a succession plan? It's been over a month and they still haven't announced a new showrunner.

^ that sounds right. so why would Shawn show up now then?

BTW, in one recap/review someone asked why didn't Bad Janet find the humans in her scan. IMO It wasn't anything magical about being under the train. It's just that the train tracks and train station are at the very edge of this Bad Place neighborhood, so Bad Janet, making a reasonable assumption that she was already almost at the edge of the territory, only scanned inwards from her position and not outwards at the small scrap of land to her back. I guess Michael was banking on Bad Janet's laziness.

I'd assume Shawn thinks version 2 has been running for those hundreds of years. I think Michael said earlier that he's been filing false reports all this time. Actually, maybe it's been a round thousand years? That was how long he said he could keep it going, according to the flashback at the end of season 1. So it would make sense that Shawn would drop in after a thousand years (of attempt #2) have passed. But yeah, attempt #803 is probably only a few months old. The only thing I think we can track it by is Michael's own growth, and the relationship between Jason and Tahani, which didn't even start right at the start of #803. I wonder what Derek's powers are an extension and/or duplicate of Janet's, who herself is depowered in the Medium Place in many aspects besides being able to call a train. Since she couldn't summon anything and everything while there, presumably Derek can't either. Though he could arguably summon a train to a Good or Bad Place neighborhood, summon cocaine, and then take the train back to Mindy's. But that'd be a little risky even if his brain wasn't wrong. I'm gonna miss Vicky too, but wow, this really does fulfill what the writers were saying when they said the Good/Bad Place neighbors were going to fall away and return the focus back to the humans. What a huge I'm not British, but I think that was the show exaggerating as far as "griddle chip" goes. Pancakes in the UK seem to just be called "pancakes"... maybe "griddlecake". And "ten stone" is a term of weight, where a stone is 20 lbs, so: a 200 lb pancake.

Bambadjan Bamba is undocumented: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-bambadjan-bamba-undocumented-20171128-htmlstory.html also, some words of support from Mike Schur: https://www.buzzfeed.com/marcusjones/the-good-place-bambajan-bamba-undocumented

I guess Enchantress was the weakest link but I could also see that title going to almost every character in the movie besides Deadshot and Harley Quinn.

I love little continuity drop-ins. I was just now rewatching a bit of "Try Real Hard" (s03e01) to see the part where Gretchen spoke fluent Spanish. Y'know, to get the Mexican church congregation to attend her party next door. Anyways, that's where the preacher told her to hurry up her message because the church turns into Pharrell's sneaker pop-up after midnight, and Gretchen also said she remembered when that church was a crepe restaurant. So, probably exactly the same sneaker pop-up Edgar invited Max to in s04e12.

It totally makes sense here. (You probably know but) It's a message about their shared history. The electrical fire from a vibrator hooked up via Christmas lights as an extension cord was what burned down Gretchen's old place and spurred them to move in together in the first place. Compared to an admittedly sweet hot rod that Jimmy probably has little real emotional connection to, I totally buy the smile. Gretchen and Jimmy had a bunch of real moments here but I still feel underwhelmed by the season as a whole. In a way it feels like a season-long stall before the endgame season. They went through this whole season just so now Gretch and Jimmy are engaged again? That's where they were at the end of last season! (Or at least right before Jimmy ditched her.) I also felt the Max storyline dragged out too much, esp considering he's really awful. (Side note, I just remembered Edgar's line from the first Sunday Funday: "Fun hipster shit is just poor Latino shit from ten years ago." I guess he would tamp some of that attitude down to fit in with Max, but at some point you'd think he'd see that Max is fundamentally a kind of incompatible friend even if he wasn't a selfish conditional friend.) Agreed, this season has contradicted or ignored a bunch of important stuff from the previous seasons. "I was supposed to go AWOL with my buddy Bowe" is an amazing joke esp how underplayed it was.

Renewed for a fifth and final season.

CBS runs a live theater sketch showcase to promote diversity in LA. It last five months every year. It’s not directly related to TV, but this story about how messed up it is made me share it here because the two biggest problems with the showcase were the program’s director* — and the casting director, who is also CBS’s VP of casting. * the director was forced out a month ago for sexual harassment complaints.

Ben Folds was great! And Honeynutz is gone because Allen Maldonado is way way way too busy. I think Max wasn't so much promoted as transferred, probably at his own request, probably so he could get away from Edgar. Max has been a weird cypher this whole season. Some times he's just the materialistic bad influence on Edgar, on rare occasions he's been legitimately helpful, and it's a little hard to get a sense of who he is. Then again, I guess Boone is also a weird mix of traits that changes a lot from episode to episode. In any case, whether or not he's more like Gretchen than Jimmy (who is a good complement rather than a good mirror), I don't feel any real investment in the Boone-Gretchen relationship. It doesn't help that Gretchen herself has had a figurative foot out the door with him most of the season.