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Just found and binged on the entirety of this show, and man alive I'm loving it. Figured out the twist in the first episode (I guess I played too much Diablo 2 as a kid), but I was just waiting for the shoe to drop and it was wonderful. The esoteric prism I can't help viewing the the entire series through is the old video game Afterlife, a SimHeaven/SimHell city builder by LucasArts*. In that game's terms, Michael's neighborhood is simply a badly-run/highly-inefficient one-tile punishment, and it's funnier for it. * The game that ruined the endgame for Diablo 2, because the supposedly-angelic-being was voiced by your demonic helper Jasper Wormsworth, so of course it was a demon the whole time...
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Oct 25, 2017 01:48
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About the what-would-good-people-do thing, I figure that since motive is factored in to good/bad punishments, the actually-good people aren't tempted to be Bad because "good things to avoid being considered bad" is considered a bad thing. Let the Good People in the Good Place do whatever, and they'll still be Good because they don't have the motivation to be Bad. Unrelated, how long after airing do new episodes go on the site / app? I have only the Fox stuff to go on (new Orville episodes come out not long after airdate), in this respect.
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Oct 27, 2017 01:35
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JethroMcB posted:The guest star I didn't know I wanted Shouldn't everyone want Jason Mantzoukas in every guest star role, in every possible condition of things? I can't wait for this to be on their website so I can watch it. I need my Zouks.
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Oct 27, 2017 02:10
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Unrelated to anything specific, I would love to see a Bad Place Neighborhood that's the antithesis of Michael's, in that it's supremely efficient. Wouldn't have to show anything graphic, just a dude sitting at desk with a tablet, monitoring featureless blocks that are optimally torturing billions of people inside. Someone who can't understand why the Boss lets Michael run a punishment that employs a couple hundred folks to force four - four - people into torturing themselves.
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Oct 27, 2017 02:55
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GobiasIndustries posted:So many bad opinions about Zouks in this thread, good lord Denied the Glory of the Zouk : -190000 per instance
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Oct 27, 2017 09:41
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You know, I was wondering something: do you think Chidi's lessons with Michael have actually helped him begin the creation of an ethical framework, or is it that Michael needed to learn his own ethical framework tailored to him? It seems like he didn't care until a personal ethical issue (killing Janet) sprung up.
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Oct 31, 2017 01:36
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Pope Guilty posted:I can't imagine that emotional attachments and unwillingness to harm others due to fondness, like Michael feels toward Janet, comes naturally to Bad Place people like Michael. I'm not very convinced of that, at least whole-hog. I get the impression that willingness to harm others in Bad Place culture is directed towards humans, but in terms of each other they have at least some sense of camaraderie. It wasn't until poo poo started going pear-shaped that demons began to question Michael's plans. I guess, like I alluded to earlier with my reference to Afterlife, I see the demons as basically employees of a greater structure. Torturing humans for eternity is their job; when they aren't doing that they are on smoke breaks and bullshit about their job being assholes.
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Oct 31, 2017 04:27
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pwn posted:Pineapple, sausage, mushroom, pepperoni imo Most everyone goes to The Bad Place for failing to adhere to basic Pizza Morality: thick or pan crust, pepperoni. Sausage only tolerable if you don't have throat-focused immune disorders that make you low-key nervous about sausage. Everything else is, like, - 20,000 points per bite.
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Nov 10, 2017 05:27
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I don't think our group of protagonists will make it into The Good Place, but will have improved enough to no longer warrant The Bad Place. Their continued existence, ignorantly stamping around with half-assed plan after half-assed plan, will embarrass the folks running both Places (maybe even disrupt things on some fundamental way as they do). They will ultimately be a group of people so impossibly meh that neither Place wants to ultimately deal with them. There's a reason why the last episode is called Somewhere Else, after all.
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Jan 14, 2018 10:40
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The_Doctor posted:Michael’s sacrifice was so sweet Oh my lord, this. Ted Danson is amazing; I love his near-breathless tone he took when he said "I solved the trolley problem". gently caress, now I have to rewatch it. Unrelated, but I've kinda had an epiphany (well, more of a refinement of understanding) about Chidi. In his own unique way, he's an example of modern call-out culture. Every ethical issue that made himself miserable made everyone else miserable, and why? Because even if he was really only talking about his ethical issues, they were shedding light on the ethical issues of everyone around him, ethical issues with legit backing behind them. Chidi was annoying, but Chidi was right. While he's in his own head about almond milk ruining the environment, every friend of his who heard that dithering had a low-key revelation that them drinking almond milk was hurting the environment too. Him complaining about his inability to lie because Lying Is Always Wrong has an effect on people because... well, 'lying is always wrong' is kinda a cornerstone of how we're taught. e: can Kristen Bell be in 40s-50s gear all the time. I'm, like, 24% more in love with her with those curls and those glasses. MisterBibs fucked around with this message at 03:48 on Jan 20, 2018 |
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Jan 20, 2018 03:44
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precision posted:This is speculation based on the episode title (the finale) and IMDB cast list. Do not read this! I wish I hadn't checked IMDB myself! I said it before, I think, but I strongly surmise that the titular Somewhere Else is where our heroes are thrown after one too many instances of them being flies in whatever ointment they land in. They can't help it, they can't stop doing it, so the solution to everyone's problem is literally to let them go... Somewhere Else.
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Jan 20, 2018 05:54
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I knew Jason would fail the minute he cut off the Judge's speech. e: I'm kinda getting to the point someone else mentioned, that Jason is just too dumb to be tried for his sins. It's not even "hey let's amplify Trait X on Character Y" at play, he's consistently been stupid. MisterBibs fucked around with this message at 01:43 on Jan 27, 2018 |
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Jan 27, 2018 01:37
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Timeless Appeal posted:I get that, but honestly my take away is that Chidi, Tahani, and Jason did grow. Yes, Chidi spends a lot of time selecting the hat, but eighty minutes is pretty good for him. Yes, Tahani opens the door, but she also finds catharsis and acceptance of herself by doing so. Yes, Jason shows poor impulse control, but he does preserver through something he does not enjoy for the benefit of his friends. It might be too cynical for the show to actually go through with, but I feel like the last episode shows just how superficial their growth really is. Eighty minutes on deciding on a hat shows that Chidi is still badly indecisive. Tahani opening the door means she still cares about what others think of her. Jason still does whatever the gently caress he wants whenever he wants. Put all of them in the same situations again, with them knowing what they have to do to pass the test, and they'd make still the same choice. In terms of storytelling, people love the idea of one redemptive act wiping all of the red ink off their ledger. poo poo, most of us here are rooting for these people, after all. We're all thinking about different ways and routes that the story could go that results in them not being put in the place that they were initially placed in. We're looking for a justification or way to get them out of the Bad Place, because we refuse to accept that the Bad Place might just be where they fundamentally belong. If this were a old video game that causes hypersomnia, we'd be trying to find a way to get The Nameless One from walking down the steps to the Blood War. Thing is, the judge's actions in this episode seem to lean towards the notion that in this universe's milieu, a drop of cleaning fluid on a caked-in stain still results in a caked-in stain. MisterBibs fucked around with this message at 20:52 on Jan 27, 2018 |
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Jan 27, 2018 20:38
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MiddleOne posted:what they all have in common is that they are still unable, even when in full knowledge of their flaws, to be better. Thinking about this, I find it pretty interesting that Fake Chidi does that outs himself as Fake is basically what Real Chidi would have to do: take a deep breath and ignore ethics for one drat minute.
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Jan 27, 2018 23:04
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E: ^^^ Way to steal my thunder. -100pts.  Chidi having some unmentioned anxiety or mental illness reads to me as, I dunno how best to define it, lazy? It feels like a cheap 'out' for his central gimmick as a character, and beyond that it's not as funny if he's got some underlying biological issue. There's enough depressing backstory stuff about environmental factors on this show. Chidi is funny because he's an indecisive dude who took a career path that is so ivory tower that everything he learned made him near-literally too smart to function in real human society. Another one of the interesting wrinkles with Chidi is that he's aware of all the little things that put people in the Bad Place, whereas the other three have natural human blindspots to things. He's corrected that the reason why he's there isn't in the Bad Place because he used almond milk, but everyone who used almond milk did get points deducted. MisterBibs fucked around with this message at 03:45 on Jan 28, 2018 |
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Jan 28, 2018 03:37
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Supercar Gautier posted:Chidi "turning out" to have a mental illness wouldn't be some twist or surprise; it's already evident in the way that his stress over minutiae has devastated his social life, weighed on his general well-being, and hurt those around him. You gotta be metatextual on this. Unless they say he's got a mental illness down the line, he doesn't now. Nothing is 'evident' until the creator puts it in the script. Right now, it's pareidolia to see him having mental illness. Stressing out over the trivialities of life because he's got a mental illness? Not funny. Stressing out over the trivialities of life because whatever natural indecisiveness the dude had was amplified by 3000% because of his inherently-contradictory career (promises The Truth, simply offers many possible, contradictory Truths)? Funny. I don't want to re-watch this episode down the line and go "Aw man, I was laughing at a dude with mental illness this whole time". I'm much more comfortable with laughing at the dude who should've gone into some other field, because his career in ethics made him unable to pick a goddamned hat for eighty minutes. MisterBibs fucked around with this message at 04:17 on Jan 28, 2018 |
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Jan 28, 2018 03:54
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Only Good Place adjacent, but I stumbled upon a page that listed all of the Rewards and Punishments from the 1996 game Afterlife, and I knew there was at least one like this. I'll edit or post more if I find them: Faux Heaven  Many of the Slothful Damned believe that they deserve to be in Heaven, little realizing that their lazy ways have earned them a place in Hell. For these self-deluded fools, Hell hath created these cheesy replicas of Heaven. They're just like the real Heaven...except that they suck. Illuminatiland  One of a handful of "phony Heavens" that dot the landscape of Hell, Illuminatiland is one of the most nefarious. It seems just like Heaven to the incarcerated, but after a while they begin to suspect that things "just aren't right." They begin to notice conspiracies operating just out of the corners of their eyes, and shadows lurking where none were present before. When the Damned try to tell their friends about "the Big Lie," they're initially receptive, then are mysteriously co-opted by the mysterious "Men in Black." Eventually, the Damned collapse into gibbering paranoia, spouting theories so insane that even Oliver Stone would dismiss them as "too wacky." e: poo poo, I thought there were more than just the two... MisterBibs fucked around with this message at 00:51 on Feb 17, 2018 |
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Feb 17, 2018 00:23
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^ It was only difficult until you had enough penny income from souls to start auto-balancing stuff. You were in the (general) clear after that. Just keep Bats Out Of Hell running constantly (because bat-pooped-on structures are put out Bad Vibes which is ideal for hell), never build the first Hell reward structure, and your only impediment is that Heaven will become a nightmare because 1996 didn't have the technology to model traffic very well. And convince the planet that reincarnation is bullshit, because gently caress those anti-alignment buildings. hangedman1984 posted:I spent SOOO much time playing that game back in the day.  Between it and Diablo 2, the first reveal of The Good Place was practically spoiled for me going into it. You could've had Ted Danson's name be Jasper. MisterBibs fucked around with this message at 02:34 on Feb 18, 2018 |
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Feb 18, 2018 02:27
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