We don’t know the average amount of time between reboots, but they must have been in The Bad Place for a few decades now.
I’ve more or less suspended my disbelief when it comes to the demons being sloppy.
It seems faintly ludicrous to me that the humans aren’t being watched 24/7 and that they can find moments to whisper and hide things and occasionally get one over on Michael, but if you reject **that **premise you have to reject every single thing that’s been presented.
Well we know Mindy & the Neutral Place are real.
I was thinking maybe even centuries.
It might be a limitation caused by Michael using bootleg Good Place “software”, which simply doesn’t allow for total surveillance of everything. Michael also can’t read minds or do manipulate their minds in any way other than resetting their memories.
Or at least that they’re not part of Michael’s scheme. I don’t think we can be totally sure at this point that Mindy and the Neutral Place are what they seem, but they do appear to be genuinely outside Michael’s control.
Janet also seems to be largely outside Michael’s control. She’ll obey instructions in accordance with her programming and he can reset her, but it appears he doesn’t have the access or ability to change her programming. She also seems to be genuinely trying to fulfill the requests of the human characters to the best of her ability. Again, it may be that some future twist will reveal that Janet is part of a greater deception, but for now it looks like she really was programmed to assist humans.
The writers here are fanfuckingtastic.
Don’t forget that Michael said he stole a good place Janet. So (again, barring yet more levels of fakeout) she honestly believes she’s in the Good Place, and thus has no reason not to treat the humans well, etc. (How she interacts with the fake inhabitants is unclear, probably better left unspeculated-about.)
I wonder if at some point Michael actually gets redeemed causing all kinds of bureaucratic chaos.
They are getting ready to mutiny at this point, and just plain don’t care about Michael’s plan anymore.
Redemption of Michael as well as our four may be the point of this. I still think it’s a kind of purgatory, because our four humans really aren’t all that bad. They aren’t evil people, just ordinary selfish and neurotic folk. The tortures Michael has thought up are really just circumstances of ordinary life in the living world – having to put up with irritating people you don’t like, and feeling like you are an imposter and have to fake it so no one finds out. Twisting and impaling are evil and demonic. Making the afterlife like earth life, just with more dramatic consequences, is not.
I don’t know how the memory erasing works into this, but they seem to retain something each time.
Funny if Elenor and Chidi turn out to be for real soul mates after all.
I believe you mean fanFORKINGtastic… 
I was wondering that. Eleanor seems to be the worst person in the bunch and even her sins are relatively minor
.
(a) I’m not sure she’s worse than Jason, although the two of them are clearly far worse than Chidi and Tahani.
(b) Consciously selling worthless “medicine” to seniors is pretty bad. I mean, sure, she’s no Hitler, but she never (as far as we can tell) did anything good, and she did lots and lots of things that were bad, if only minorly bad. She’s starting to display a goodish heart in the Good Place, but she certainly didn’t have any redeeming features on Earth.
Of course, maybe THAT is what’s really going on… forcing each of them to improve their faults before they can “move on” in some fashion… Chidi will need to learn to make decisions, Tahani will need to learn humility, Eleanor will need to learn to think of others, Jason will need to learn something or other, etc.
That’s my theory, too.
Also, that Janet is God.
I don’t think Janet interacts with the fake inhabitants at all; just Michael & the 4 humans.
It would certainly fit with their character growth, though I’m not sure what exactly Jason’s supposed to learn (other than not be a dumbass).
Now I’m almost curious enough to binge through the earlier episodes to see if Janet ever spoke to anyone other than Michael and the four humans (plus Medium-Place Mindy, who I’ll assume is human, for now), as well as noting everyone Bad Janet interacted with.
That’s more than a lot of people learn in life.
One of the writers linked to more restaurant puns that were prepped for the episode.
It’s forking awesome.
Vicki is real Eleanor, right?
There’s some scene, I think it’s when Eleanor figures everything out when they’re all sitting outside on the lawn, when Vicki catches the eye of another demon and gives him a satisfied smirk. It’s real quick, and it really came across like she was in on a game on Michael. Did anyone else catch that?
Also, super small request: if you’re the first person to start talking about the next episode, would you mind mentioning it in your post? I usually watch episodes a few days late, and it’ll help me avoid spoilers. No big deal either way :).
I think it’s more likely there is no “real Eleanor”. That there was a “real Eleanor” who this one took the place of was a big part of the original setup.
Ah–no, sorry, I misspoke. I simply couldn’t remember the name of the demon who originally played the part of Real Eleanor, so I was asking if that demon’s name was Vicki. I maybe shoulda asked, “Vicki is the one leading the strike, right?”