I normally find Jason’s stupidity annoying even though he gets all the best lines. But this episode was hilarious. Kudos to whoever cast Donkey Doug.
Am I remembering wrong? I thought there was something in an earlier season about Jason having been raised in an orphanage?
The comic timing was off on a few of the jokes. It all felt just a little askew to me. I blame the editing.
I think that was the “mistake” story Michael made up for him as a monk. Not his actual life in Florida.
This season has been a bit hit-or-miss for me… but this episode was a hit. A particular highlight was Simone being driven by Eleanor pretending to be Janet.
I also love that Pillboi got his name from his job of… dispensing pills to seniors at a senior center. It’s so obvious it’s not obvious.
But his name tag did say Pillboi. He could have chose whatever he wanted for his name tag, but I choose to believe that is his real name.
Am I confused, or was Pillboi Jason’s brother or just his friend? When It turned out Donkey Doug was his Dad, and Pillboi showed up, I thought that meant they were all family…
Also, love that the body spray/energy drink invention was apparently just body spray mixed with energy drink.
For a lot of these, you’re assuming that whatever is running the afterlife cares about how humans define morality Since they live in a looped causality (with a dot), everything to them is either finite or infinite (not sure who to assign that). And a human concept of ‘fair’ has no reason to enter into their consideration.
The whole thing could just be a filtering system to find the 1% or whatever that matches the demon/angels definition of good, who are then processed into new beings (or jackets, who knows).
And infinite reward for finite good doesn’t really make any more sense than infinite punishment for finite evil. We Christian-influenced folks just like to hope it is true, given an afterlife at all.
I’d like to think Pillboi thought they were all from NASA because he misunderstood what NSA stood for.
Enough people to cause even weirder ripple effects.
I was waiting for that reveal too.
Not what I am thinking I remembering which is something he told Tahani.
Is spaced-out / dumb Asian guy a trope now? I love Jason as a character, but I get sort of uneasy watching that new sitcom about single parents with Brad Garrett where there is another spaced out / dumb Asian guy who at times appears to be written as Jason from The Good Place. It’s kind of taking some of the fun out of Jason for me.
That aside, I loved this episode. The tearful over-the-top elaborate handshake goodbye was absolute perfection. And the way they savaged Jacksonville was a delight. (The Macho Man Randy Savage (Not) International Airport? Ha!) And when Donkey Doug takes off running from the cops, of course he yells “Bortles!” So good.
I’m reasonably sure albeit not positive that Pillboi is Jason’s brother.
“Spaced-out dumb guy” is definitely a trope, but it’s irrespective of race. Why be specifically uncomfortable with it happening to be an Asian dude?
If anything, the show called out the truly stereotypical trope of the wisdom-dispensing Asian by forcing Jason into the role of Jianyu (something the audience accepted as only natural) before turning it on its head later in Season 1.
I guess it stands out because they’re both the only Asian character on their respective shows.
I agree with you that it was a fun and clever subversion that of course we the audience accepted that he was a wise monk but once he started speaking our assumptions were totally turned on their head.
But now seeing essentially the same trope played out again by the lone Asian character on another primetime sitcom is kind of turning it into a thing, and that’s the part I’m not loving. The fact that the crappy/mediocre Single Parents is retroactively harshing my mellow for a great show like The Good Place is a bummer.
One last thought and I’ll drop this tangent. I’ve been googling around to see if anybody else has commented on this, and no, nobody has. Since it’s pretty much just me, I’ll dismiss it as being nothing more than white liberal guilt.
Two links I found seemed interesting:
Asian Airhead (TV Tropes)
Note: Male examples of this are tremendously rare. It is almost Always Female.
Dumb as rocks but warm as a blanket, Jason Mendoza is changing Asian stereotypes. (Inverse.com)
That second article makes a compelling case, though the cited character examples are reaches. For example, I think of Ravi from iZombie as Indian, not Asian. But anyway, the thrust of the article is that Jason is a long-overdue stereotype-busting character of the “Asian Bro” mold. As in, not an egghead, not socially awkward, not a nerdy brain, but a regular guy you could “bro down” with.
In light of that, I can now view seeing the same Asian Bro character on Single Parents as a step in the right direction.
Uh…
I think it’s interesting that three of the four humans are very international. Tahani was born in Pakistan, raised in the UK and schooled in France. Chidi was born in Nigeria, raised in Senegal and, I think, taught in the US and/or Australia (I can’t remember). Jason’s ethnicity is unspecified, but the actor was born in the Philippines and raised in Canada. Eleanor seems to have the simplest background of any of them.
I’m guessing Jason (& any siblings he may have) spent a lot of time with children and social services growing up.
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Another dumb-but-sweet asian bro character is Josh Chan on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, who is explicitly Phillipino, I think (the character) (and also the actor?).
I noticed the similarity between Jason and the Single Parents character too. He’s not as cartoonishly dumb as Jason, but aesthetically they’re very similar. It didn’t trouble me, though. Just annoyed me.