Discussing The Good Place

Here there be discourse. Main is @lemonsparklingwater

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Ok I’m gonna hold off on posting more here because wow I don’t have any more input until the end of the season? Maybe? I don’t know

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On the fairness of the tests

Specifically, Jason and Tahani’s tests.

First, as I wrote in an earlier post, it’s wholly possible that Jason is just fundamentally incapable of passing the test he was given. This automatically makes the test a flawed metric of his growth and goodness.

However, even if we presume Jason could have passed the test, he was set up to fail. He was led to an isolated room with only a video game console, already turned on and with the game set up and on the correct screen. Gen then proceeded to describe the specific details of the game (that Jason would have to play against the Jaguars, using the Tennessee Titans, etc). The test was clearly framed as being the video game. At no point was the option to decline to play even presented until the final judgement, and the presentation of the setup would lead any reasonable person to conclude that passing the test involved playing the game. Furthermore, the explicit forced use of a team Jason hates against his favorites adds specificity (and thus legitimacy). It allows Jason (and us as viewers) to construct a perfectly reasonable (if incorrect) understanding of the scenario, that winning would require Jason to defeat something he loves, and to focus on an objective and strategize rather than just fall back on old habits. He actually succeeds at this, and manages to pass the test in this way, even if he fails per Gen’s intentions.

Tahani’s test also seems questionable. It makes sense that she’s able to resist hearing the opinions of other famous social figures. But she does go into the room with her parents, presumably as a way to get closure and to try to improve her relationship with them. When they come back with the same focus on Kamilah they’ve always had, Tahani feels confident in cutting them off completely, and strides down the rest of the hallway sure of herself. This test seems unfair too. Many humans naturally seek out approval from those we perceive as authority figures, be they parents, teachers, coaches, etc. Tahani tried for her entire life to achieve that approval and was never able to get it (because it was never going to come, regardless of anything). The relationship she had with her parents is wildly different from that she had with her famous friends. The fact that the test seems to have wanted her to just cut her parents off completely and not even attempt to reconcile doesn’t seem, well, fair. It only makes sense if her parents are the same to her as her celebrity socialite friends, and they obviously are not. The end judgement is even questionable. Yes, Tahani failed to ignore all the doors, sure. But failing her on the test for wanting closure with her parents and saying that that action justifies her being in the Bad Place? It doesn’t seem appropriate.

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Random thought:

Bad Place actors are demons, so I’m gonna say Good Place actors are angels. So far halfway through season 3, we’ve met two characters who are agents of the Good Place. One is Janet, who at this point has gone on such a journey that it’s hard to even characterize her as from being anywhere except “the afterlife.” The other is a woman on the intro tape at Mindy St. Claire’s house. I believe her name is Beedee (Bidi? B.D.?). In any case, she’s the only real “angel” we’ve seen so far, and even then only on a recording. We have seen literally zero parts of the real Good Place, and only one of its workers/inhabitants.

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The nuance in The Good Place

One of my favorite things about The Good Place is the level of detail and nuance in the storytelling. An example of this can be seen in the first episode, when Eleanor goes to Tahani and Jason’s party.

She asks sarcastically “oh, how good are these people really?” And the show proceeds to show us three examples.

First, we meet Bambadjan, who “spent half his life in Saudi Arabia fighting for women’s rights and the other half in North Korea fighting for gay rights” (note: I might have gotten that backward, but the point stands. This is clearly supposed to be, to western viewers, an unambiguous, unassailable, good thing.) 

Next, we meet Cualli, who said “if the government won’t deal with those land mines, we will, and then we proceeded to dig up over 100 (1000?) unexploded land mines from around the orphanage.” Like Bambadjan’s good deeds, this is also pretty difficult to criticize, and the scale of the good deed is so large that it gains legitimacy by size.

Finally, we meet a third man whose name I don’t think is ever provided, and we get an odd one out. His good deed? Donating both of his kidneys to a stranger he met on a bus a few minutes before. Now, organ donation is a good act. However, this act is actually not good. First of all, it’s incredibly short-sighted. Setting aside the fact that we know this unnamed man is actually a Bad Place actor and taking the scene at face value, this man essentially committed suicide for the sake of a stranger. Unlike Bambadjan and Cualli’s backstories, this isn’t necessarily good. What if the strange man is a criminal? He’s just been granted a new lease on life, and presumably then more time to enact violence. Even if the stranger on the bus is a legitimately good person, giving up your own life for the sake of a complete stranger is a warped, Giving Tree-esque take on selflessness. Why not instead amplify the stranger’s medical needs on social media? Go to medical school to discover new technologies to facilitate organ cloning/donation/transplantation? Do literally anything which could have an impact beyond temporarily extending the life of one person at the expense of yourself? In fact, given that our organ donor’s family and friends had to grieve him as he made the decision to kill himself, it’s arguable that the emotional trauma created by donating both kidneys outweighed the good of prolonging a stranger’s life, thus making the action actually net negative, points wise.

However, this overlooks a key detail. The organ donor’s backstory isn’t that of a good person, it’s that of what a demon imagines a good person to be like. We see in the show that the Bad Place characters are openly contemptuous of anyone from or associated with the Good Place, so it makes sense that a Bad Place version of a good person would be someone so laughably stupid that they give up both kidneys to a complete stranger. It’s nuance like that which just enhances the show.

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On the subject of Jason Mendoza

We know that Jason is a “bad person”: he is impulsive, often acts without thinking, has committed actual crimes, and reacts to dangerous situations by throwing Molotov Cocktails. 

But let’s examine Jason’s background a bit. We know that Jason is canonically a survivor of childhood sexual assault. He says that Tahani is teaching him about history, art, and culture, and he gets to have sex with the teacher, just like in high school, except not illegal. Jason was a minor, so this constitutes statutory rape. 

Michael says that he tried to make everything in the fake good place as real seeming as possible to preserve the illusion. If we assume that almost everything is true, then we can assume that what Michael says about Jianyu is true. When Jason is revealed to be, well, Jason, and not Jianyu Li, Michael explains this as the two of them having the same IQ. However, Jianyu has the IQ of a seven year old. If this is true (which I think we can assume it is), then Jason is canonically intellectually disabled as well. If Jason is intellectually disabled, this could also entail issues with his neurological development or the physical structure of his brain. Perhaps the part of his brain which controls impulsivity is underdeveloped.

We also know that at least one of Jason’s parents, his father, “Donkey Doug”, routinely commits crimes, and it seems almost like Jason has had to be the parent in the relationship due to Donkey Doug’s own immaturity. 

There is a debate in developmental psychology over whether nature (a person’s genetics and inherent self) or nurture (the environment in which someone is raised) plays a bigger role in how someone develops. The general consensus seems to be that both nature and nurture influence development, and from what The Good Place has told us about Jason, he got the short end of the stick in both respects. Acting on this theory that Jason, from a neurological standpoint, is impulsive because of the way his brain developed, then his surrounding environment only served to reinforce those characteristics. Jason’s father committed robberies without thinking, with drugs not infrequently serving as a motivating factor and Jason’s teachers acted on their (immoral) impulses to have sex with him when he was in school. Everyone around him in a position of authority acts impulsively, often with disastrous consequences, so it is wholly possible that he acts the way he does because he just literally doesn’t know any better.

In this case, if Jason is cognitively disabled and surrounded by bad influences, is it fair to evaluate his actions using the formula in a way which does not take those factors into account? I don’t think so. I’m not sure that Jason would have ended up in the real Good Place if he were evaluated through a lens which understood the struggles of his background, but to evaluate Jason on the same scale as Chidi, a human being with no cognitive disabilities who (as far as we know) grew up with lots of friends, colleagues, and a supportive community, seems unfair from the jump.

Furthermore, if Jason cannot, from a neurological/physiological standpoint, restrain his impulsivity, then Gen (the Judge)’s test wasn’t fair, because it asked him to do something he physically lacks the capability to do. 

Overall, based on what we know about the character and the point system by which admission into one section of the afterlife or another is decided, it seems like Jason never really had a chance at getting into the good place. There were just too many physiological and societal factors which stood in his way, and he lacked the tools necessary to overcome them.

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Why is Tahani in the bad place?

The show explains why Tahani is in the bad place in S1E13; she only did her fundraising and philanthropy as an attempt to outshine her sister, the veritable renaissance woman Kamilah.

But we know, canonically, that Tahani wasn’t just some small-dollar fundraiser. She raised, over the course of her seemingly short life, 60 billion pounds, all of which she ensured went to charitable causes ranging from the Red Cross to stem cell research. That is, to state the obvious, an enormous sum of money, which certainly improved the lives of thousands if not millions of people across the globe.

Clearly the show has chosen its philosophical perspective, and it is not consequentialism, which, as Jason points out, means that the morality of an action is derived from its consequences. Tahani’s actions materially improved thousands of lives. This is the case whether she did so out of a selfish need to outshine her sister, or out of pure selfishness. If the point system which determines entry into the Good Place is based solely on actions, then Tahani should be there. Let’s also be honest here; it’s likely that at least some small percentage of Tahani’s fundraising was done because she actually wanted to support charitable causes in a way she knew would work.

We also know, canonically, that Tahani grew up in an emotionally abusive household. She was consistently told she was inadequate starting in childhood, and she still decided to live her life in such a way as to generate charitable funds for others. Her sister even joined in on the emotional abuse, telling Tahani “to be honest, I don’t really think of you.”

The universe perpetuates this abuse. Tahani is essentially punished for being jealous of the fact that her parents all but explicitly state that they care more about Kamilah than her, and we as the viewers are expected to accept this. Even what we see of Tahani in the early episodes, before she even knows her (fake) point standing in the neighborhood, show that she at least tries to be a good person. She organizes the neighborhood cleanup, she plans brunch parties to lift people’s spirits after the sinkhole, and she volunteers to help Michael find the problem in the neighborhood.

Overall, the justification for sending Tahani to the bad place doesn’t seem to be super strong, based on what we know about her and her life.

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This is a new sideblog where I’m going to post my thoughts on the NBC show The Good Place.

To be absolutely clear, I love the show, and I’ve watched every episode and I eagerly await new ones. When I love something, I like to analyze it and pick it apart, and that’s what I want to do here.

Please feel free to like, reply to, or reblog any of my posts, message me through the IM system, or through the ask box.

-Alex