jennegatron

The Good Place

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My interest had been waning on The Good Place Season 3, it didn't seem to have the same punch as the first two seasons (it was a 7/10 versus the first two seasons being 9/10) but that last episode has got me back on board and retroactively made the setup of the first 4 episodes more interesting.

 

I am impressed over and over again by the writing and vision of this show.

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I'm a little unclear on something (spoilers for at least S3E4, probably up to S3E6):

 

The judge said that the gang are now in an alternate timeline, right? Initially as a test to see if they had changed as people. But now they know the whole deal and they're going around trying to save other people. So, is this actually the only timeline? If not,  how do any of their actions and changes relate to the original timeline where those people remain unsaved?

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22 hours ago, Ben X said:

I'm a little unclear on something (spoilers for at least S3E4, probably up to S3E6):

 

 

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The judge said that the gang are now in an alternate timeline, right? Initially as a test to see if they had changed as people. But now they know the whole deal and they're going around trying to save other people. So, is this actually the only timeline? If not,  how do any of their actions and changes relate to the original timeline where those people remain unsaved?

 

My understanding of it was that there's only the one timeline and what the judge did was reset the earth back to the right before they died. This doesn't really seem like a show that's interested in getting into the details of time travel so I'm assuming they're deliberately keeping straightforward with vague details

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Yeah, I thought about it a little more after I posted and I think you're right. I guess when they said

"a new timeline" they meant a new version of the same one rather than a separate one. Seems a bit unfair to people who suddenly get a shittier version of their life in the new timeline thanks to the changes + butterfly effect, and also seems like a cosmically huge action to take just to do a test, but then I guess it fits with the show's ongoing motif of the afterlife system being completely fucked up.

 

Thanks!

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I wanted to find a Bruce Willis in Looper gif as a response, but Cleinhun was much nicer about it.

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Also, they can always play the joke card to get away with super weird or messed-up implications of any of their plot points.

 

Latest ep was cute! Maybe a little on the sappy side, but they've earned this. Obviously, it was no Donkey Doug, but...

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On 11/4/2018 at 7:18 AM, Cleinhun said:

 

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My understanding of it was that there's only the one timeline and what the judge did was reset the earth back to the right before they died. This doesn't really seem like a show that's interested in getting into the details of time travel so I'm assuming they're deliberately keeping straightforward with vague details

 

 

Spoiler

Or next season they produce 5 different new branched seasons, and air then randomly distributed by geographic area.

 

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The conclusion of the most recent season left me with this question:

no one has gotten into the good place in 500 years, which means that everyone has gone to the bad place EXCEPT for coke and sex fiend Mindy St. Claire going to the medium place. this means that the person with the highest point total in that time was Mindy and therefore the best person in that time. What implication does that have for the world? I'm fascinated by that idea. It's merely implied and never explicitly commented on in the show. I wonder if they acknowledge or grapple with the ramifications of that. Was that an intended conclusion we were supposed to come to?  

 

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That's all correct, but I think it was probably just an oversight on their part. It doesn't make a ton of sense if you think about it.

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I think what happened is that

 

she was the first really weird ambiguous case in that period, since her good consequences mostly happened posthumously. All humans (until the main cast) immediately go to either the good or bad place on death, so she also must have. But then some entity decided the case was weird enough to take her case to the Judge, and she got the medium place made for her instead.

 

So it's not so much that she was much better, but that she was weirder than anyone else in that period, weird enough to actually have her case considered manually rather than the automatic bad place dumping that everyone else got.

 

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Every part of this show is so deeply considered that I don't think that they didn't think about this, especially when the podcast revealed that

 

the writer's room has known since season 2 that no one has gotten into the good place in 500 years. I don't disagree that her case is weird and that's what mostly got her to the medium place. I think that they can say some interesting things about the fundamentals brokenness of this system of point totaling because of Mindy, and I hope they do.

 

 

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I have so much faith in the writing team that yeah things are for absolutely sure going to get real interesting relating to this. I'm most curious who/what actually brought her case up.

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1 hour ago, osmosisch said:

I have so much faith in the writing team that yeah things are for absolutely sure going to get real interesting relating to this. I'm most curious who/what actually brought her case up.

 

Yeah, there is possibly some manner of jurisdictional convenience in having the Middle Place exist that might have lead the Bad Place to allow or enable it.

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