wilnil

Janet may remember having been married to Jason despite all the resets since then. We already learned in Season 1 that while she starts out as a nearly blank slate after a reboot, that's only until she finishes downloading all the knowledge in the universe -- and there's no reason that wouldn't include everything that's happened in Michael's neighborhood. I wonder if it'll occur to any of the four to ask Janet questions about their 802 other afterlives, which would be interesting if only to see how she'd answer.

One big handicap is that The CW, being one of the newest broadcast networks, can be kind of under-the-radar in many smaller TV markets. If you're in a major metro area that's long had at least six TV channels, then the CW affiliate can be potentially as prominent as ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC or PBS. But in some Littlecity Tri-County TV market, then chances are good that The CW is aired on a low-power station or a digital subchannel of a pre-existing station (for example, station WZZZ channel 22, the local CBS affiliate, has a subchannel 22.2 that carries CW programming), and viewers old enough to have based their TV habits around the pre-digital lineup of channels may not even know about these newer options. I think even Fox suffers from this problem to some extent; a lot of broadcast TV viewing habits in smaller markets were based around the Big Three plus PBS for a long time. (And it might be part of why Fox and The CW both lean toward programming for the younger demographic, who are more likely to "explore the TV dial.")

I think the "coyness" was because the government program was based on the idea that its subjects had "classical" powers such as telepathy, telekinesis, precognition, etc., but we're eventually shown that what they had was much weirder: Dirk and Bart are "holistically" connected to the world in such a way that problems that need solving come to detective Dirk arranged in a way that he can solve them, and people who need killing present themselves to assassin Bart in such a way that she can kill them almost effortlessly. The Rowdy Three thrive by causing, then literally feeding on, people's fear, and they're almost as unstoppable as Bart when they're doing that. (The rest of the subjects in the original Blackwing program probably also had powers too weird to be useful to the government, since the program seemed to have been back-burnered.) But my assumption on the shapeshifter was that she came from the fantasy dimension that the Mage (and maybe Suzanne? She's a natural magic-wielder) comes from. I don't have anything to base that assumption on, though, other than her otherworldly eye color.

Oof. I'm too old and have been disappointed too many times to be a shipper anymore, but I do think the title of the episode, "EPS3.0_POWER-SAVER-MODE.H" in combination with Elliot's voiceover line about his feeling hurt by Angela's rebuff to his kiss but his being used to it because she always loves those who don't love her, that this is her "safe mode," seems to telegraph that they are end game. When Angela had her overnight adventure with Mr. Robot, I thought for a minute that it would turn out she was in love with that side of Elliot, until she said something to him as Mr. Robot on the subway ("You and I, we are not friends") that ruled that out.

She was often self-contained, but on some occasions she accepted favors & other considerations from other people when she wasn't willing to reciprocate -- one big example we got was the designated-driver rotation in her circle of drinking buddies. She would accept rides but would never be the DD herself, until her friends got sick of that, which is probably one reason she was out buying Lonely Gal Margarita Mix for One the day she died.

Interesting theory, though I haven't seen all of those series. For The Newsroom, I think Reese Lansing fits this slot even more, especially as that series went on -- he wasn't opposed to the news show's new watchdog/op-ed thrust when it wasn't costing the network viewers and goodwill, but he had to be the one to push back when it did.

They said something later in the episode about the briefing with the Congress critters being an impromptu Saturday meeting.

I'd love to see how that was written in the script. It could also be "the Real Bad Place" as in "Very Bad" -- maybe there are supposed to be levels of badness, or at least Michael now wants them to think there is.

Apparently, they're implying that his problem started when the kids were about 8, and it kicked back up again when they're 16. I wouldn't be surprised if they revealed that he slipped a few times in between these years. Maybe he had a drink or two and then went right back to the boxing gym before the problem got worse. It wouldn't be all that surprising if he lied to Rebecca throughout these years so he wouldn't disappoint her. My feeling all along has been that Jack isn't a "classic" alcoholic/addict but someone with a drinking problem -- specifically, that he uses the booze as a crutch when he's stressed out. If his life is going along fine, he probably doesn't have any compulsion to drink and could have one beer and then stop, but whenever he's feeling overwhelmed, he "self-medicates," so to speak, and that probably creates a vicious circle (because really, drinking just adds to his problems). A truly addicted alcoholic might need to go to an AA meeting every week or so forever to hang on to sobriety; Jack should probably have gotten into the habit of going whenever he feels his stress level rising.

Just caught Ep 3 ("Dance Dance Resolution") ...

That was the exact thought I had. Looking at all of them gathered together, I found myself wondering "So what are their races/subspecies, Wrought Iron, Lead and Aluminum?"

It'll also be interesting to see how Janet fits into everything. We've already been told that she was a stolen good-place Janet, so we can assume that Bad Janets are (like the good ones) too literal-minded to be deceptive; a Bad Janet wouldn't be able to pretend to be a good one convincingly. "Our" Janet must have been instructed not to reveal that the four are in the Bad Place, and probably was just given that Bad Place audio snippet to play for anyone who asked about that subject. But the thing about her being literal-minded is that Michael & co. can't just tell her to help them with the torture project; they'd have to give explicit instructions on what she can and can't do for the four. Any gap in those instructions is room for Janet to actually be helpful to Eleanor and her "cellmates." I think this is what happened when she brought Jason to Eleanor after he confessed to her and hugged her (and also what happened when he proposed to her in the 1.0 version of their afterlife -- she explicitly told him that nothing in her programming prevented her from marrying him).

OK, so if Earth-X is a "Nazis won" universe, Kara will be ... Übermädchen?? (Anyone else old enough to remember the Saturday Night Live sketch that riffed off of "what if Kal-El's spaceship had landed in Nazi Germany"?)

Forgot that plotline. Shit -- quadruple cliffhanger.

Back in July in the media thread, @Llywela passed on some info on what the writers said their plans were ... which wasn't what we got: What they said at the time made enough sense that I can't understand why they would go with the triple cliffhanger finale: asteroid is still coming, but Liam has an idea; D.C. is about to be nuked; and the ark is ready to take off with its crew of ... bystanders? WTF? Only thing I can imagine is that either CBS decided to renew the series early enough to demand the cliffhanger ending, or the showrunners decided to try to force a renewal by finishing with all of the questions unanswered.

It's possible. I've been rewatching via Comcast On Demand, which has original (i.e., as originally broadcast on NBC) and "extended cut" (including extra scenes) versions of each episode posted. NBC might have supplied Netflix with the broadcast edits, while you might have first seen an extended version when the episode was new.

My take on it (earlier in this thread) was that the thing they had in common was selfishness. It's obvious, of course, in Eleanor's and Jason's cases; but Tahani was only into philanthropy as a status game to ease her feelings of inferiority to her sister (even in the supposed "Good Place" she could never help bragging and name-dropping about every charity event she hosted), while Chidi kept trying to find the definitive "rules" for being good without ever learning how to see what his real-life actions might do to others (he intellectually agonized over the one friend's ugly boots without once doing the right thing in that situation). We get childhood flashbacks for both Eleanor and Tahani explaining how they became the way they were; for Jason and Chidi, we're just left with the impression that one was too dumb for his own good and the other too smart. Either way, they're all self-indulgent, but they all sort of have "excuses" for being that way. So given that... Yeah, I'm with those who think the ultimate point will be that you learn where you went wrong in a "Bad" Place and, by fixing yourself, earn your way into a Better Place. We never do definitively get told that the Selfish Four would have ever been turned over to the lava monsters for major physical torment in a Really Bad Place; the monsters may have been part of the system to get the attention of the hard cases -- say, the Hitlers -- of the afterlife. I also think the Architects (who clearly aren't perfectly good beings themselves) have things of their own to learn, and the Place system may have been set up for that purpose too.

I've started to think along these lines too in the months since the season finale. My best guess now is that it's actually an Elastic time-travel model: the one in which it's possible for a time traveler to make changes in the past, but history has a "preferred" course (as a river "prefers" to stay in its course), so major changes tend to be avoided by, for example, dead Cornwallis' military protégé succeeding him and doing almost exactly what his mentor would've done. Net result is only the kinds of minor changes the series has shown us: same battles, same outcomes, different name in the history books. So why did Lucy's present life change so much? Sorry, Luce, you and your family must just not be historically significant, even with the Rittenhouse connection. (Speaking of which: Did it occur to anyone else that the Hindenburg snafu, in preventing Lucy's mom's cancer, did Rittenhouse a big favor? Could the bad guys possibly have engineered it that way somehow?)

A spoiler wrap-up on TV Line includes info about Season 2's casting/characters:

That would have been cool. Actually, Seveneves is slated to be a movie, though it doesn't appear to be in production yet. I'd rather it had gone the miniseries route, because I figure a movie will have to give short shrift to -- or skip entirely -- either part I or part II of the novel.

Well, provided the freezer doesn't break... ;)

@retrograde, right, I forgot that scene. Thanks. @ProudMary, that could be. But oddly I got the opposite feel from that scene. Gonna be tough waiting until October to see which way they go!

One (the only?) good thing about having the four "character-driven stand-alone" episodes already done is that it allows for the Comic-Con trailer to have all-new content, which is really rare this early in the filming season. I'm assuming that other than the shots of winged Lucifer, most of the rest of the scenes in the trailer are from those held-over eps. And the teasers they showed make me optimistic that those episodes are going to be worth the wait. As for those episodes (spoiler'd for those who avoided the trailer):

Everyone has great examples on the science fails in this episode. I missed almost all of them due to getting distracted when they saw the asteroid in the probe's camera view about five seconds after they fired its thrusters -- especially since the trajectory they'd shown when planning this was one that would've taken weeks if not months to intercept the asteroid. What kind of freaking propellant did they have in that probe, and why couldn't they use that for the gravity-tractor mission?

No! Now we'll all be wiped out by that telephone-handset-borne plague, and/or be eaten by a space goat!