In the nineteenth century, Hokkaido was only recently fully colonized by the Japanese, and not considered a core part of Japan yet in public consciousness. 

“We feel like the article skipped several crucial steps between ‘unhappy marriage’ and ‘organized crime syndicate’[...]”

but perhaps there are unhappily married women who go out for a pack of cigarettes and come back an hour later with a stack of extortion money.

Guys, I seriously almost broke into fucking tears in that final scene. We need the kinds of people who will go all the way down into the depths of despair and come back to say, you know, maybe there’s no hope for me, but I want to help others not make my same mistakes. I seriously think this world would be a better…

According to today’s Good Place podcast episode, FNB and BNG are also Finding Nemo references. It’s Financing Nemo Bank and Buying Nemo Groceries. The writers thought it would be funny if all the Australian businesses changed their names in 2004 because they were so proud of Finding Nemo taking place in Australia.

If…

My immediate reaction is that this is my favorite episode so far or, at the very least, my absolute favorite episode for Chidi.

I just finished listening to the Good Place podcast of this episode and it had an amazing tidbit about:

Regarding PeepsGate.

“Jeremy Bearimy” has to be part of the 8% Doug Forcett didn’t get right back in the 70s

No, see, now you need to go full Good Place fandom with it and use that as a jumping off point for a theory about how it’s not really earth, it’s an earth earth simulation created by a demon who is pro-diabetes.

Listening to the podcast reveals that they are Buying Nemo Grocery and Financing Nemo Bank

I’m going to call it now, for the record: the end of the season will involve them dying again, and Micahel and Janet trying to intercept them before they get to the Bad Place, as Micahel suggests in desperation in this episode.

I’m starting to suspect there isn’t a good place and that when the gang overrides the system it ruins the game the gods have been playing with humans.

This was entirely Will Harper’s episode and man did he deliver.  Broken Chidi is my new favorite thing.

Finished my week-long binge of this full series last night. Here are a bunch of somewhat random criticisms, questions and praise:

Possibly I’m just too cynical, but I don’t understand the ‘no gaps=no invasion’ argument. I think that it fails to take into account the true level of evil insanity represented by the GNR. If the GNR leadership wanted to guarantee a high probability of their agents surviving transfer, I suspect what they would do is…

It belongs in the same episode (and show) because both of those scenes show the triumph of GNR. They are on the path to achieving their goals while the Resistance fails. Abendsens are captures and so is Juliana. The attack on the machine fails. The man Juliana though meant they’ll succeed dies and their only way in is…

The location is Manzanar, site of a former Japanese-American internment camp where Kido spent his youth.

I was so expecting Frank to travel that it was a shock when his head came off.

Die Nebenwelt does *not* mean “the next world” (in a temporal sense), it’s more like “the parallel world”, or “the world next to us” (in a sense of location).

Honestly, I can’t blame Childan. He’s just trying to carve the best possible living out of a miserable situation that’s completely out of his hands. He never wanted to make waves or join a seemingly futile and deadly resistance.