The Good Place season 4

Cafe Society
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Any one pay attention to Jason’s Madden score (~75 yards per play; opponent: -7) or Tahani’s list? (Solve the Poincare Conjecture, Break Graham Gooch’s record of 456 runs in a single test)
List here: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Recap/TheGoodPlaceS4E13WheneverYoureReady

tidbit I found online:

  • Jason’s perfect Madden score is stuffed with Easter eggs: His rushing total of 11,271 yards is the franchise career total of Jacksonville Jaguars great Fred Taylor, and his total number of takeaways is — of course — 69. (Nice.)

Brian

242

One of the nice things about the show was how the four of them became good friends in the afterlife, even though they were very different and unlikely to cross paths while they were alive. That sort of echoes how Leslie Knope and Ron Swanson were friends and colleagues who respected each other despite having very different philosophies about the role of government.

243

I loved it and cried a lot, which is unusual for me. With all of the death and loss of the past two years in my life, this show just gave a beautiful comfort to me.

244

Spoilers ahoy:

I have to admit that I really enjoyed the last episode. It wasn’t climactic but then it wasn’t supposed to be; it was pretty much entirely denouement. All the umpteen loose ends were wrapped up (I even got the return of Doug I was hoping for), and if we didn’t get the specifics of what happens to everyone post-arch, that was entirely intentional. I’ll admit part of me wanted to see how Tahani’s family reacted upon initially discovering that she was one of the four most important humans in the history of the universe, but I suppose that’s just me being petty; we got the family catharsis instead.

Michael’s human name amused me. Although Janet has to remain in the Good Place after everyone had left, I took some comfort from the fact this is mitigated by her perception of time; she will always be in every moment of her interaction with her friends. Despite Derek’s apotheosis I noted he still had his martini glasses (and remained fundamentally Derek). And Shaun’s failed attempt to sound less evil was quite amusing, as was the Radiolab joke.

In short, I’m happy with that. Sad to see them go but then not going on and on once all the conflicts have been resolved is good advice for television shows as well as afterlives.

245

I enjoyed the ending.

As a vision of heaven, “become the best version of yourself and spend time with the best versions of your loved ones until you are sufficiently spiritually fulfilled to move on” seems pretty great. And each character got a fitting end.

In addition to the more well-known cameos, the guy who delivers the letter to Michael at the end is Kurt Braunohler, a comedian possibly best known for hiring a skywriter to write “How Do I Land?” over LA a few years ago.

246

Same here. Due to a number of recent personal issues, I’ve been pretty emotionally raw lately, and I was absolutely not ready for the impact this finale had on me.

As for the plot, as soon as Jason said, “Yeah, I did it,” I pretty much knew what was going to happen. And nothing was terribly surprising after that, though letting Michael become human was a nice touch.
One nitpick: I didn’t think Eleanor was ready to go through the door. The others clearly were, but whether it was Kristin Bell’s performance, or the writing, or the directing, I just didn’t see it in her.

Still, I found it an extremely satisfying and surprisingly emotional finale.

247

I loved how the characters came to the ends of their arcs: Jason coming full circle to actually become Jianyu; Tahani, who in life learned nothing useful, striving to learn every skill; indecisive Chidi making the ultimate decision without hesitation; and selfish Eleanor making the ultimate act of selflessness. Plus Michael becoming the human he always wanted to be.

Chidi’s speech about the wave is one of the most profound and beautiful things I have ever heard. I want someone to read it at my funeral.

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The podcast mentioned a scene that was cut - after Chidi went through the door, Eleanor expresses confusion as to why the others were ready but she was not. Then she realizes her unfinished business and convinces Mindy (her alter ego) to move on from the Medium Place and gets Michael his shot at humanity. Now she is ready.

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I still think Michael dying and joining Eleanor hand-in-hand as they go through the door would have been very touching.

I feel bad for Janet for “living” forever without them now. Am I alone?

250

That scene wasn’t cut from the version I got from iTunes.

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Janet doesn’t experience time like everyone else. She lives in all times at once. according to her. So she’s still with them, just as she always was, and always will be, I guess.

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The Chidi wave speech broke my 15 year old son down to gasping sobs. I think it might have been too much for him to bear but he loved it. We were both crying but he’s been through hell lately and just a few weeks ago a classmate who had been harassing him for months killed himself. He’s been struggling a lot since then. He said after that speech he felt whole again. It’s amazing when a TV show can work that kind of therapy on a person.

The rest of the show was just about perfect. I was a little confused as to how Janet didn’t know Jason was hanging out through what, a least a few bearamies…instead of going through the door.

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And they even snuck in a Gardner Minshew reference.

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The TV Tropes page linked to above posits that the little sparks that were a person’s soul (or at least Eleanor’s) bond with other souls to make them a little bit better - I don’t know if this is canon but it explains why the neighbor, having thrown away Michael’s junkmail, turned around and retrieved it.

The page also mentions that Trevor can be seen still flying through the void between the worlds (having been flung there by the Judge in Season 3) in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment. Clearly I blinked because I missed it.

255

I just started watching the show two weeks ago and finished it last night.

Holy shit. Why haven’t I heard more about this? That was one of the greatest shows in the history of television. Jaw dropping.

While the wave speech was stunning - and in the end, what they implied was that it means we become a part of a billion other people, just as a wave becomes part of a billion other waves - the end of S4E9 still makes me tear up. “There is no answer, but Eleanor is the answer” is about as profound a statement on life and love as I can imagine.

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Well, we’ve been trying. Its just one of those great shows that never finds an audience. Quite probably a little too clever in many ways to have mass appeal.

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Hey. (Another one that required some thought. I’m really running into these lately, aren’t I? ;))

I recall that the original premise of this show was simply a world governed by video game-style scoring, and there wasn’t even any mention of an afterlife. As with any show based on an evolving concept, there’s the potential to keep things interesting but also to stray off message. The problem is that if it goes too far, it has the potential to become uncomfortable or even an outright disappointment even if the writing is excellent.

The good news is that the writing was excellent all throughout, and there never was a point where I felt slapped in the face. Even more remarkably, this is the only show in memory where I found everyone likable, even the ones I expected to utterly loathe. Jason was likable, Trevor was likable, Vicky was likable, Mindy was likable, Derek was likable in a goofy way, the various Janets were likable, Shawn…SHAWN, goddammit!..became likable, and even the dull-as-drywall judge had her moments. Hell, that entitled clueless schmuck who was meant to be as utterly unlikable as possible earned a small measure of redemption. This is light years beyond what I thought television capable of during the freewheeling 60’s, much less the demographics-dominated modern era. Being able to create compelling stories without introducing the colossal jerk who gets away with everything (especially when a number of characters are outright devils) was a masterstroke, and I’m glad that I finally got to see it.

That said, for all this show’s quality…I missed the manic comedic energy of the start of season 2. I really did. The final episode was like [Don’t say Grave of the Fireflies, for Yukari’s sake don’t say Grave of the Fireflies, you know that never ends well!] Rocky Balboa; a nice capper, genuinely heartfelt, but so emotionally draining that I don’t feel the need to subject myself to it again. The way I see it, if Michael Schur and company wanted a thoughtful, intelligent drama about humanity’s purpose in the universe and how our belief in an afterlife ties into this, they should’ve made it like that from the ground up. As it is, we’ve gone from restaurant puns and flying mishaps and Janet disgorging a small fortune in pennies to…something really, really serious, and I can’t help but feel a bit uncomfortable at that.

I also have to echo Exapno Mapcase’s misgivings about The Good Place’s residents getting bored with it. That’s the easy way out, and it left a bad taste in my mouth (even more than that entitled clueless schmuck, if you can imagine). Michael’s “solution” struck me as heavy handed. Given that he literally has all the time in the universe, couldn’t he devise a way to prevent boredom or complacency from sinking in? Give these people a purpose? I get the feeling that the writers were under pressure to put a bow on this and took the most “meaingful” or “positive” way out that would avoid addressing this.

Conclusion: Yes, I enjoyed this a lot, but in hindsight mainly because it didn’t disappoint me. A pleasant time, but I won’t be getting this on DVD. (In contrast, Gotham disappointed me in some ways but I might someday get it on DVD, if only so I can make sense of the whole crazy thing.)

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I’m going to see to it that Chidi’s wave speech makes it into kaylasmom’s memorial service this Saturday (one way or another).

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The show had plenty of mass appeal. “The Good Place” ran for four seasons. NBC wouldn’t have renewed the show three times if it had had only a small, niche audience. TGP would have gone on for even longer, if Schur (the show’s creator) hadn’t decided that the fourth season would be the last.

260

To a certain extent it felt to me like the show…grew up…along with the characters. S1 Eleanor was a white-trash dumpster fire of a person desperately scrabbling to keep herself from getting relegated to Hell. That she slowly became the person she pretended to be - as indeed did everyone else - was entirely the point of the show. Sure, Chaos Day was fun and giant sinkholes are exciting and all that, but unending chaos becomes as flat and tiresome as unending bliss. The show mirrored their journey to enlightenment, and ended when it ended.

I thought about this a lot, and I certainly agree that there were various things Michael *et alia *could have done to make people’s stays in the Good Place more meaningful and fulfilling and less tedious (funnily enough, I literally considered them putting in a cinema showing “Grave of the Fireflies” or at the very least “Old Yeller”; tempering their happiness with controlled bouts of sadness would make the happiness more endurable). But ultimately these would only be delaying the inevitable - no matter how much longer people stay, they would still be facing an eternity once they had exhausted every option, and the “arch” is really the only answer to that. And while I suppose the show could have squeezed in another episode of “Pimp My Heaven” it really wouldn’t have had any plot to it, so it’s not surprising they kept it simple.