Loveday Writing

We then cut to Tahani, Chidi, Michael, and the Real Eleanor in Michael’s office with Shawn. While the Bad Place send Bad Janet to present their argument, Michael is the first to argue in favour of Eleanor, however Shawn retreats into a cocoon when Michael gets too emotional.

Meanwhile, the train stops at a station in the middle of nowhere and as Janet’s powers don’t work, her, Eleanor and Jason walk until they find Mindy’s house, and Mindy gardening naked. While Mindy gets dressed, Janet, Jason and Eleanor watch the welcome video Mindy received in the Medium Place. The video has Beadie from the Good Place and Trevor welcoming her and explaining the compromise that both sides made which lead to Mindy getting her own neighbourhood.

While Jason and Janet try to figure out how to have sex, Mindy explains her situation further to Eleanor, revealing that she was a hotshot corporate lawyer in the 1980s and that she generally only cared about making money and doing cocaine. The night before she died she had an epiphany that she needed to do something good with her life and came up with plans for a charity. Although she was high when she came up with the idea, she followed through, withdrawing her life savings to start the charity, only to end up falling on to subway tracks and getting electrocuted by the third rail. Her sister found her plan and used her money to establish the “Mindy St. Claire Rescue Alliance” which has gone on to become the largest relief aid charity in the world.

Eleanor points out that after Mindy’s death the question was whether she should have received points for her intentions to establish the charity. Mindy tells her that she doesn’t know how long her case was pending but both sides had been fighting over her for a long time. When Mindy tells Eleanor that she needs to look out for herself, this leads to a flashback of Eleanor’s co-workers buying a cake for her on her birthday, only for Eleanor to reject it as she has brought her own cake and doesn’t want the obligation of having to buy a cake for someone else, saying that “I don’t owe you anything, you don’t owe me anything.”

Meanwhile Shawn tells Michael, Chidi, Tahani and the Real Eleanor that he will deal with the mistake of Jason later, and the group makes their arguments for Eleanor to stay to Shawn in a monotone but hilarious way. Shawn then informs the group that Eleanor hasn’t arrived at the Bad Place and he doesn’t know where she has gone. They then go to Eleanor’s house where Shawn shows them a list of Eleanor’s life memories and some of the bad deeds she has committed throughout her life. After watching a 24-year-old Eleanor crash a young woman’s quinceañera, Chidi tries to defend her one last time but Shawn has decided that Eleanor is a bad person and the progress she has made towards becoming a good person in the Good Place doesn’t offset her actions on Earth, and she deserves to be in the Bad Place.

When Michael asks Shawn how he intends to enforce his ruling when he has no idea where Eleanor and Jason are, Shawn engages a walkie-talkie protocol between the Bad and Good Janets. Shawn orders Jason and Eleanor to return to the Good Place neighbourhood in four hours or Tahani and Chidi will be sent to the Bad Place in their stead. Jason doesn’t want to leave and Mindy tells Eleanor to think practically in that if they stay with her, they won’t get tortured. But Eleanor says they can’t leave their friends behind.

When Jason, Janet and Eleanor get on the train (after Jason tries to blow it up with a Molotov cocktail to no effect), Janet refuses to start the train unless Jason approves. Eleanor tells Jason that she spent her whole life living like Mindy, but it took dying and being around good people to realise she was kind of a nightmare. When Jason asks why she was like that, a flashback reveals that her parents were selfish to the point that she had to become legally emancipated as a teenager to have a better life.

Back at Eleanor’s house, the deadline runs out and Shawn gives Tahani and Chidi fedoras to prepare for their trip to the Bad Place. Jason, Janet and Eleanor arrive moments later.

The episode ends with Shawn declaring that the Bad Place are owed two people and now he longer cares who goes and leaves the decision up to Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani and Jason, and they have 30 minutes to make a decision.

As I mentioned earlier, this episode is my favourite one of the season. This is mainly due to the introduction of Mindy. Up until this point, the series has always focused on the Good Place and the Bad Place (i.e. good and evil) and how people are regarded as good or bad. With this episode, the concept of grey areas in the system are explored with the fact that while Mindy was mostly a bad person, her final deed was not only good, but a massively good enough deed that it caused upheaval within the system, to the point that a compromise had to be made. Mindy is the closest thing to a neutral character in the show at this point in time.

I also felt that this was a good penultimate episode for the season, as the final moments of Shawn ultimately leaving the decision on who goes to the Bad Place up to the four protagonists is a good springboard to the finale. All four of them have wanted to avoid the Bad Place, now two of them going there is inevitable, which two of them it will be remains to be seen until the next episode and season finale.

On a smaller note, I would love to know how Marc Evan Jackson and D’Arcy Carden did the walkie-talkie protocol with a straight face.

Stray Observations:

-When Eleanor is at the supermarket check-out, she picks up a magazine and reads it. The magazine on the rack next to it has Tahani on the cover with the caption “Not just Kamilah’s sister” underneath the photo.

-The Medium Place train station sign reads “Neighbourhood N/A”.

-The train is part of the Trans-Eternal Railway.

-According to Shawn, Jason belongs in the Bad Place as he is from Florida.

-Some of the sexual positions Jason and Janet try are: the Merry Go Round, the Centipede, the Webcrawler and the Trombone.

-Mindy submitted a list of things she wanted to the Good Place and the Good Place provided them to her with the Bad Place making modifications, this included:

• The Good Place giving Mindy her favourite beer with the Bad Place ensuring it was always warm.
• The Good Place gave Mindy a jukebox with every song ever sung with the Bad Place ensuring they were every live version song sung by The Eagles. The Bad Place also included spoken word poetry by William Shatner.

-According to Beadie, life in the Medium Place is one of “eternal mediocrity.”

-Eleanor’s listed life events/memories that Shawn shows Tahani, Chidi, Michael and the Real Eleanor includes:

• Heckling of mall Santa (x9).
• Altercations with various youths selling various items for various fundraisers (x88).
• Salad bars sneezed on (x12).
• Lifetime ban from Build-A-Bear Workshop.
• Stole scarecrow from a fall Follies display, put it on passenger seat so she could use carpool lane.
• Got Health Department to give favourite restaurant a “B” rating so it would be less crowded.
• Scalped Epipens (x4).
• Roommate/dry cleaning incident.
• Dogs drunkenly adopted and then returned the next day (x2).
• Lied about age to eat off the kids menu.
• Cyberbullying of pregnant woman from spin class.
• Took selfie in bathroom at great aunt’s funeral.
• Started fire in mailbox to get mailman to take off shirt.
• Brief Instagram flirtation with Kid Rock.
• Sticking of gum in public places (x224).
• Showed a 9-year old child The Shining.
• Movie endings ruined (x25).
• Crashing and subsequent destruction of Vanessa Garcia’s quinceañera.
• Waiters screamed at (x22).
• Strangers flipped off (traffic) (x8).
• Strangers flipped off (misc. locations).

-The only books Mindy has in her house are Anne Rice vampire novels with water stains, and she has cut words out of most of them to make pornography. She also only has videos of Cannonball Run II and the Making of Cannonball Run II.

Best one liners and interactions:

• “So big plans this weekend?” “Yep. I’m gonna sit alone in my house watching wedding fails on YouTube, drinking margaritas through a Twizzlers straw until I pass out on top of my vibrator.” (Supermarket cashier-Eleanor)
• “Jason taught me about sexy things.” “Oh yeah? What things did he say were sexy?” “Lamborghinis, cool snakes, spinning rims, 20,000 followers on Instagram, girls with pigtails eating lollipops, latex pants, Carl’s Junior ads, and sex.” “Some of those are right.” (Janet-Eleanor-Janet)
• “I rule the fart inadmissible as evidence.” (Shawn on Bad Janet’s farting as part the Bad Place’s argument)
• “Hey are you pregnant?” “That’s not possible.” “Congrats.” (Trevor-Beadie-Trevor on Mindy’s welcome video)
• “So what’s up? What’s your deal? Are you single? What’s going on?” (Trevor to Beadie on Mindy’s welcome video)
• “That is the nicest and only thing anyone has said to me in 30 years (Mindy to Eleanor when Eleanor compliments her on her physique)
• “It’s a long story, I’m definitely going to need a drink or three.” “Definitely my kind of gal.” (Mindy-Eleanor)
• “Honestly not the type of rail I thought was gonna kill me. ‘Cause I love cocaine. Do you have any? I’m just…I shouldn’t…do you?” (Mindy to Eleanor on being electrocuted by a third rail, and cocaine)
• “…Being forced to wear a knock-off handbag and drink tap water.” “That’s what you think hell is?” (Tahani-Chidi)

Hints of the Season 1 Finale twist:

• All four of the protagonists have done bad things since they arrived at the Good Place.
• Tahani and Chidi are sent to the Bad Place in Eleanor’s and Jason’s stead.