arc

The freak-out itself is one thing. The subsequent three month abandonment of his entire life including being off his cell the whole time? That's not cruel, but it is so monumentally selfish it weighs as heavily as any cruelty.

In the very first episode (s01.e01), Eleanor says her parents were bad and are probably in the Bad Place:

Todd VanDerWerff writes about the show, the most recent episode, and how it functions as a sort of counterpoint to Parks and Rec: https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/10/1/16387064/the-good-place-episode-3-recap-dance-dance-resolution

Yeah. If I promise you a top that will spin for an hour, and it falls over after a minute max, you probably won’t be impressed if I say “you can just keep restarting the top every minute and you’ll get to an hour.” The dream Michael has is for a hell powered by the humans themselves. It’s a more subtle and devious punishment than the traditional Bad Place, but also one that should result in less effort by the Bad Place denizens. If they’re constantly resetting back to the initial high-effort stage of the project, then his project cannot be judged a success even if he’s hidden it from Shawn for 802 attempts.

I dunno, Jerry’s Mindblowers used a NES cartridge type system rather than liquid memories in tubes. And every single tube Morty picked up was a Morty memory. It would make more sense to me if Beth and Summer’s memories are kept in different vaults from Morty’s.

I think he owns but he's still paying mortgage. Not really sure but I think mortgage payments might have been mentioned this season or last.

The Medium Place was set up in the 1980s, so well after the initial setup of Janet and the Good and Bad Places. Maybe that’s why. Or maybe it’s just that a Janet doesn’t have powers outside her home neighborhood, like she said in S1. But then again, Bad Janet did have her powers, so either that’s an inconsistency or that Bad Janet was given an exemption by our Janet as part of a diplomatic party. If the latter, well, Mindy didn’t get her own Medium Janet, so there’s no one to give visiting Janets powers.

Given that Attempt #1 collapsed on Michael right in front of Shawn within a few months though, Shawn would have every reason to think Attempt #2 was similarly fragile. Mindy and the Medium Place being real means Trevor is a real Bad Place representative. He was probably not lying about his own Bad Place neighborhood. But yes, I doubt he could have been involved in any of attempts 2-802 for the reason you mention. Y’know, the first season finale laid out Michael’s elegant dream of a Bad Place where the damned torture each other: a perpetual motion hell. But from the second season premiere to now, it seems like he didn’t factor in that Bad Place demons like being hands-on. Architects like Michael might just care about how the damned suffer, but demons like Chuck actually want to bite and twist.

They'd need a new trick because (as per the end of the season premiere) Michael now knows that one and checks for it. Except when he's being sloppy, like forgetting to close the door before Eleanor's orientation starts. If you like the food puns, check out Megan Amran's abridged list of what she handed in with her first draft.

I figure that could be happening offscreen. There could be a pause while Janet reboots where the humans are just kept in a sort of coma. The neighborhood remodeling itself can probably be done instantaneously, but Michael probably needs downtime to redesign the place between attempts anyways.

In the credits, writer/actor Joe Mande is credited as Toddrick Hemple, and Todd sure sounds like Mande, so... I guess that's Todd's full name.

Michael’s powers of lying—at least lying to Shawn—must be phenomenal. While it’s likely no individual attempt has gone past 200 days, it’s been 802 attempts so far. They’ve been here for at least a few years. He must just be making up stuff to Shawn wholesale by now. I like the Eleanor-Chidi ‘ship. I couldn’t read all the plans they came up with at Mindy’s, but it’s interesting that they’ve apparently never thought about escaping to a real Good Place neighborhood rather than just the Medium Place. This episode moved at breakneck pace, but I hope next we’ll start to really see how a Janet that’s been rebooted and thus upgraded hundreds of times is more advanced than version 1.0.

I think the hair-over-the-face and crawl were straight out of THE RING, hence Edgar saying she was acting like a Japanese ghost.

The two are and always have been comparably damaged but in their own different ways. For example, Gretchen lies a lot while Jimmy wants to put out a reckless and selfish, unkind sort of radical honesty. That urge, actually, I think ties in to how he's been incredibly self-absorbed (with some laudable exceptions) through most of this series. But I agree with @AlliMo overall. You (@whiporee) are correct that he wasn't malicious, but to me that doesn't matter. The damage he caused -- I'm more talking about the abandonment than texting the rappers -- was tremendous. I guess I'm a little consequentialist here: it doesn't matter much to me if his actions were not maliciously intended. That said, as far as she knows, they entered a truce about their professional lives and then Jimmy immediately broke it. Personally, I didn't care for the music cues. I gather from reading reviews that it was Hitchcockian or something? I'm a cultural boor who doesn't know the classic film canon. I did like that Gretchen was outthinking Lindsay from basically the first sentence Linds got out.

Well, the design was to have them torture each other, which would only work long-term if they didn't know they were doing it. Like Shawn said in the s1 finale, it was very hard to get humans to even pull each others' teeth. I guess naturally they would aggravate each other, but if they knew they were in the Bad Place, and they knew the plan was for them to torture each other, then they might try to hold back their worst selves. Also, what's to stop all four humans plus Janet from taking the train to at least the Medium Place? I guess by the rules, the Bad Place probably has some claim on the four, but it's not clear whether or not they could extradite from the Medium Place... The name was coincidence, though Schur acknowledges there may have been something subconscious going on. Michael was named for the archangel Michael, because Schur saw some art at Notre Dame cathedral. Potential mild spoilers for s2: http://www.vulture.com/2017/09/the-good-place-michael-schur-season-2-premiere-interview.html

Becca is the worst, and I felt that even before her drunken collapse. Just everything she said while with her new gay BFF was super awful. I don't really see what the point of Edgar's plot here was. It wasn't that funny on its own and it felt like just a lot of table-setting for the rest of his season arc.

I really wasn't expecting the premise to be blown up again by the end of the premiere. What a great twist. Vicky really is well-suited to this more subtle Bad Place, which is why it's a shame for her that Michael gave her so little to do. Now that we know this show has crazy twists in store, I think @Fukui San's prediction is right. Things went as badly for Michael as they did for the human four.

That his initial apology had not in fact fixed things nearly enough to start both-sides-ing, much less assume that they were back together and she would want to see his galley? That the three month abandonment was not forgiven and forgotten?

The Cronenberg-y rule seems to be that they move to an adjacent-as-possible universe. So if they fled the squirrel-revenge universe, Rick would have fled to one where that Rick (call him Rick-squirrel in absence of a proper universe designation) solved the problem and then he and Morty immediately died, and so that universe's Summer should be functionally identical to s2 Summer. (And therefore, Rick-Squirrel himself would have come from a universe where he too caused a Cronenberg problem and couldn't solve it and switched into a universe where the original Rick-Squirrel's universe did solve it, then blew himself and Morty up.) Infinity is fun!

If this wasn't a TV show, "what's next" (after just the initial apology) would be that Gretchen would probably never talk to Jimmy again, not willingly. (I felt so much for her in the second half of the season premiere when she said "what if I run into him and then I die???")

By my lights, his initial apology was sincere but his tacked on "but you did say 'family'" was impossibly smug. And then he buys it when Gretchen says -- and you can hear the barely hidden sarcasm -- "you got scared, because you asked me to be your wife, and I said yes, and then I used the word 'family'?" I mean, it's blindingly obvious how ridiculous and unacceptable what he did was when she frames it like that, but he's just "yeah, so you do understand why I ran." Her dropping the book wasn't remotely sufficient revenge.

Yeah, turns out they used a body double and CGI stitched John Gemberling's head on. I think that the Asian Abbi and Ilana that Abbi sees at the froyo place might be the same actresses who played Asian Abbi and Ilana back in s02e01 "In Heat". (In that one, they were just there for a second, in the subway, not only looking like Abbi and Ilana but also with maced-out eyes, similar to what happened in s01e04 "The Lockout".)

There's plausible deniability there but I think he was manipulating his way into being a freeloading leech. (I guess technically Melanie's half of the rent might as well cover him living there since Melanie doesn't seem to actually be there, but that rent doesn't cover his eating Abbi's food.)

What was Gretchen licking in that box of stuff at Ty's? A baseball?

I'm on Twitter all the time and yet it still didn't register for me that the final moment, hat and all, was a total reference to the dog sitting in the middle of a fire, saying "this is fine." It was obvious from the moment Jimmy said "but you did say 'family'" that Gretchen would take it very badly (and she was absolutely justified!) but even so, her fake-out went so long I started to lower my defenses by the time she deliberately didn't catch the book. Ty is the woooooooorst.