Jason found happiness by suborning the robot AI—I really don't think they saw that coming.

But I read his fiddling with Janet's settings as being played straight—he got bored with standard issue Janet, but none of the mods really worked.

Showing that not only people, but minions of hell, can change in the afterlife.

What if this time, Eleanor gets the rocks to switch sides? And they really are all plotting against Michael?

… and so we wind up in Chidi's idea of heaven, where we get to run experiments on different moral philosophies.

One lingering question for me was why this neighborhood full of marvelously ethical people opted to go fly around rather than clean up garbage. The answer is because very few minions of hell were willing to commit to the bit to the extent Gunner and Antonio were.

It was a hot topic debated here, and I maintained that if Tahani did good works while hoping to be admired, the good works should outweigh the self-serving motivation. Her lowish score seemed to reflect that—fewer points than if she'd done it all because she had Real Eleanor's personality, but ripples still matter.

I sat on a commercial airline flight and thought "I can't take my boot off to check if my toenail tore just now—I'm on a commercial airline flight."

It's intriguing to ponder how many of the rules are 'real' and how many were added. But given the opening video for The Medium Place, I have to think Michael took the archetype of a Good Place neighborhood, and the moral structure of the Good Place, as his inspiration for the neighborhood. And that the descriptions of…

It really puts a new twist on Schur's setting up each episode to end on a small cliffhanger—you stayed focused on how this latest swerve would play out, and not on the coherence of the background setting.

Possible Bad Place miscalculation—no past hunky mailmen were able to keep Eleanor distracted for long.

A lot of people would welcome the huge Manhattan apartment and a job they never had to actually show up at, even if those things came with hijinks.

And yet Jason is someone they have a really hard time predicting.

I'm really wondering if Vicki is playing Chidi's soulmate again.

He fell in love with Janet because she was the only person in the entire Good Place who was nice to him. He had no buds to share his budhole with.

He did have a lot of flashbacks to moments when he deeply believed that he had to be real, be himself, even as outsiders could see that himself was a less than ideal choice of person to be.

Yes, rookies vs veterans turned into a conceit along the lines of Survivor's "Do people do better at intense physical and mental challenges when they are rested and fed, or starving and thirsty and down and… oh, hmm, not the noble underdog moral we wanted."

This is what Michael would say about the show.

So many things about successful storytelling are twisted by this. Is this rule or detail ridiculous? Yes, because it's funny. Oh, and also because it was designed by a minion of hell trying to create a facsimile or mockery or both of goodness, which makes it funny on new levels.

Mindy's motivation was sincere, and the effects were tangible. (But carried out by someone else.) Tahani fell down on the first part, and Chidi on the second. It's a neat encapsulation of the Christian parable about paying the workers the exact same whether they started at morning or evening, because it's all based on…