They Remain knows that the past can never stay buried for long. The movie takes one of the most common of horror tropes—seen in everything from Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” to the hoary old “ancient Indian burial ground” made famous by Poltergeist—and twists it, until potentially awful supernatural consequences become…
“Hot diggity dog.”
First off, let’s hear it for the Judge. The fact that Eleanor, Chidi, Jason, and Tahani were going to throw themselves on the mercy of this weirdo universe’s all-seeing arbiter of Good and Bad Place placement set off a flurry of dream casting guessing games. And while the suggestions on my Twitter feed (Amy Poehler…
“Jortles!”
“The real Bad Place was the friends we made along the way?”
“Why is it always the ones you most expect?”
“The best news is, none of this is suspicious.”
So let’s get philosophical.
“He just smoked a big bowl of ennui.”
“But it’s hilarious. Of course, I mean sad.”
“Okay. Take two, folks.”
Look, no sentient being reads a review before watching the thing being reviewed and then complains about spoilers. Still, in the interest of not getting yelled at by a TV-loving rock or something… SPOILERS. Big ones.
“What’s My Motivation” is The Good Place in a rush. It’s tempting to call this episode a table-setter, as Eleanor, Jason, and Janet all seek an abrupt escape at the end of the episode, while Michael, Tahani, Chidi, and Real Eleanor are scrambling to help them. Sure, Michael’s help involves rebooting Janet in order to…
The Good Place left us (all the way back in November!) with a number of cliffhangers to worry about. There’s the coming of the dreaded Sean (or Shawn, Shaun, Siân—we don’t know), the arbiter of all disputes between the Good and Bad Places, who will determine Eleanor’s ultimate fate, and has Ted Danson’s Michael in a…
As bright and funny a center as Kristen Bell’s Eleanor (known hereafter as Fake Eleanor) has been to The Good Place, at times she has functioned more as foil for the good place’s sunny perfection. That’s the initial impression The Good Place gave, that Eleanor would function sort of like Rodney Dangerfield at the…
“There should be a medium place for people, like, who sort of sucked but in a fun, chill way,” complains Eleanor near the end of “Most Improved Player.” She’s got a point, although, as ever, Eleanor perhaps overstates her case. As we see in another flashback to the one long misdemeanor that was the life of Eleanor…
The Good Place is a good show that, tonight, takes the leap to a great one. Reliably inventive, weird, and funny, and possessed of a deep bench of talented actors, the show has charted its eccentric course with deceptive focus. If there’s been a knock on the proceedings in this most dysfunctional of eternal rewards,…
After ducking the issue for a few episodes, the fact that Eleanor has been tapped by Michael as co-investigator of her own secret finally takes center stage in “What We Owe To Each Other.” If The Good Place has has a central flaw in its first five episodes, it’s that everyone seems more or less sunnily resilient about…
“Category 55 Emergency Doomsday Crisis” begins in Chidi’s classroom, as he teaches his doubled-in-size student body of Eleanor and Jason/Jianyu about the concept of utilitarianism. Explaining it as acting so as to cause the “most good and pleasure and least pain and suffering,” he strikes a chord with the motivated…
The third episode on a high-concept show is a test. Especially after the first two installments of The Good Place more or less functioned as an hour-long pilot in setting up the show’s fro-yo-flavored afterlife, the third episode is where Kristen Bell’s Eleanor has to really start living in it. And there are some…
