I thought it was just me!
Michael Schur and Amy Poehler go way back, so. . . could be?
It wasn’t Amy Poehler, not unless they de-aged her about twenty years. They said on the official podcast that it was just a bunch of extras they bussed in for the scene (or actors, if they had lines) and there was no mention of Amy Poehler, which they would say if it was.
Was D’Arcy Carden imitating the female voices, were they dubbed in, or was it some of both? To me, it seemed some of both. Did the other actors get the week off?
If no one has gotten into the good place for 520 years, then Abe Lincoln is not in the good place.
What have the good place architects been doing for 520 years if they did not need to design any new living space? I guess we will find out. Michael should not be the first person to find it odd that no one of billions is getting into the good place. The head accountant would know a detail like that without looking it up. He would be the person overseeing trends and such.
The accountant wanting to commit suicide because he was assigned to weird sex acts was hilarious. A great episode.
She did the voices, but apparently there was some ADR work, which might give the impression of dubbing. They had the cast do a full rehearsal playing their own parts, so D’Arcy could mimic them:
The whole idea is that the system is flawless (other than a couple examples needing the judge). So if no one gets in for 500 years, it’s the humans fault, not theirs.
In keeping with my theory that they just don’t like people, and are the ones who are manipulating the system - drinking abstract concepts by the pint, as far from the humans as they can get without moving to another cosmos.
And/or:
(1) Demons just lack the type of natural curiosity that humans have, which would cause “hey, I just noticed that no one has made it to the good place for 500 years” to leap out and demand investigation. Which Michael only gained after centuries of (corrupting?) exposure to humans?
or
(2) The head accountant is in on it
Here’s a potentially debate-worthy topic… a repeated theme of the show is that humans are capable of change and improvement. And it happens to be the case that the four “bad” humans have proven themselves to have moments of good-heartedness. Is that, in-show-universe, just a coincidence? I mean, what would have happened if the four “bad” humans being tortured in Michael’s fake good place had been four irredeemable sociopathic murderers? Are we supposed to believe that Michael was randomly assigned four humans at random? Or did he come up with his idea for psychological torture and then look through all the resumes of the recently dead, toss out all the murderers and rapists, and specifically choose our four because he thought they would be a good fit? (Or could there be another twist in store here… some higher power that directed these four to him?)
Well, considering that no one is making it in, it would be better odds for him to get four mediocre people than four purely evil people.
And given Mindy scraped a NP slot, this makes her the single biggest paragon of humanity for 25 generations.
They’re going to explain this, and it will make sense – but I’m not even going to TRY to guess how they pull it off. I’ve learned my lesson.
An actual ‘evil’ human wouldn’t have had the moral torture of not supposed to be in the good place. So what would be the point of putting them in Michael’s idea?
Michael already knew he was going to torture. He started out designing a traditional system before switching to “The Good Place.”
Were we told that the head accountant and his staff are demons?
They’re accountants. Same thing.
A truly evil human wouldn’t, for instance, be bothered by the thought that they had taken the place of “real Eleanor”. But that human would, presumably, be worried about being caught and send to the bad place, and thus would be stressed out and unable to enjoy paradise.
Heh.
But seriously, folks: the existence of a cadre of accountants kind of, sort of implies the existence of a whole list of types of bureaucratic workers, the status of which (demon? “angel” or equivalent? something else?) is unknown to us.
Someone has to be building offices and decorating them and equipping them with cool CRT monitors, etc. Who are they?
Yeah, 3 billion accountants seem like a lot.
It appeared Eleonor had made it into the good place, except she decided to stay with the others. So she would have been there by herself?
That is a truly excellent point. Presumably the judge (Gen) rarely intervenes directly (and in fact she talked about how bored she was). So if there has been chicanery in how good/bad is judged, it’s quite possible that it affects only the main accounting flow, not situations where the judge herself gets involved. So Eleanor improved enough in the judge’s test to make it into the good place, but was by no means at that point the most good person to live in the past 500 years. Interesting. I hope they address this.
I would assume a Janet blinked all the infrastructure into existence in an instant.
The judge must not use the point system to determine who qualifies for the good place - there is no way that Eleanor accumulated enough points during her test. The point system must have been set up to automatically map an individual’s actions on earth to the judge’s criteria. Somehow while the judge was distracted binge watching stuff Sean (or the bad place uber-demon, whoever that is) was messing with the point threshold so that no one can get into the good place anymore.
Of course, since I have been 100% wrong with any predictions I have made about this show I am almost certainly wrong about this.
Also, if there is a “supreme being” in this universe and we meet her, she damned well better be played by D’Arcy Carden.
I don’t recall: does anyone, at any point, ever say how many points are necessary to get into The Good Place?
Because from Neal’s comments it seemed obvious to me that there is obviously a fixed minimum that Doug Forster just won’t reach given how much longer he is likely to live.