I wonder if Simone didn't improve because they wiped her memory. Maybe she didn't improve, because she was tampered with. Some of her identity (whatever was formed by her experiences with and memory of Team Cockroach on Earth and her relationship with Chidi) is gone.
I don't know. I just went away from the episode feeling like she got worse, but that she'd been altered, so I'm not sure how much I think that's her fault. She did get consumed by her quest for the truth though, and then finding a way to reveal that truth to her friends, and maybe that's a good, even if leaving Brent in the pit was bad.
Even though Brent didn't improve in a quantifiable way, recognizing he needs to is fricking huge, if he's graded on a Brent curve.
I don't know what to make of John. I'm not sure I've paid enough attention to him.
I have been thinking Chidi and Doug Forcett have things in common. They just reacted differently because their earthly circumstances were different.
Doug had this vision of what the truth of the afterlife would be, and he fretted about everything, and spent his life hung up on minutia.
Chidi studied ethics and fretted about everything, and spent his life afraid to make decisions.
Chidi's fear to make decisions wasn't, imo, all that different from Doug being afraid to do anything for himself (e.g. including drinking water, rather than purified urine). It was a slightly different manifestation of the same root problem -- fear.
This time out in the Medium Place, Chidi thought he was already in the Good Place. Unafraid of erring, without knowing how the afterlife works, he really rose to the top.
Jason, I think has come a long way, even though he wasn't part of the experiment, at least as far as it was presented. Eleanor and Tahani have further improved, too.
It's on in a few hours. Jim is in Nashville.
. . . aaaaaaaaargh, I can wait until he gets home tomorrow night. DON'T WANNA.
amyp, I feel you. TCG is at a meeting, and I can't watch it without him.
Thoughts about Simone, I have them!
When we first meet her, she is a friendly, kind person with awesome boundaries, who sees her relationship with Chidi as a terrific "optional extra" in what seems to be a fairly together life - after their breakup, she likely called some friends over for ice cream and "WTH was with him?", and then got on with things.
She approaches the afterlife as a neuroscientist: her first take is "My brain is dying, I'm clearly hallucinating", and she refuses to take anything seriously until Frozen Yogurt Day. After, Simone thinks "All right, let's kick back and follow the data", spends the next year doing just that . . . .
And comes to the realization that she is a subject in an experiment, one that has not had an IRB within sniffing distance of the place and doesn't seem to care much about informed consent.
(Side note: if/when Simone finds out that she's involved in this because Shaun was using her to get at Chidi, woman is gonna be lit.)
Simone is reasonably sure that the other three are also subjects, notices that the folks who seem to be running it are really amped about this whole countdown thing, comes to the (correct!) conclusion that the experiment is about to end and decides to leg it before finding out what the local equivalent of "Now we find out how the mice's brains have changed" is.
Yes, I wish Simone had helped Chidi pull Brent out of the pit! But I think that as far as she knew, she was running for her life, the man she'd been involved with had told her that he'd been manipulated into investing more in the relationship, and she wasn't willing to sacrifice her chance of getting out for someone who'd never acknowledged her as anything other than a background character in his story.
I'm glad we saw disco Janet. I lived the line about Chidi doing push ups to relieve anxiety because it was one of those little lines that wraps up something and makes sense for the character.
I still have questions about Jason though he just seems to have made a jump in..competence that doesn't seem to be explained well.
How many episodes are left? I'm not ready for the show to end. I mean I am glad they are ending it with a plan and on their terms but I really would love to see more of them just being...Chidi and Eleanor's relationship, Eleanor and Tahani just hanging out, Jason and Janet. Jason and Eleanor being dirtbags together.
I don't listen to podcasts, they just aren't my thing , but I am going to check out The Good Place podcast so I can have more of the show to enjoy.
Not sure how I want this to end except I want them to all be able to remain friends and see each other and Chidi and Eleanir and Janet and Jason have end up together.
I love Janet in all her glorious incarnations. That is all.
There are episodes of the podcast that are intro'd and outri'd by Michael and Neutral Janet, and NJ says something like "and now there is one less episode left" at the end and it makes me SO SAD every time
Was this the mid season finale?
