The Good Place Chapters 14 & 15 – Everything Is Great!

My favourite new show last year was definitely The Good Place so I was THE MOST excited for tonight’s jumbo 2-episode season premiere! Last we saw our bunch, they had just figured out that they were in fact in the Bad place and been rebooted by Michael, but not before Eleanor shoved a note into Janet’s mouth.

We pick up right where we left off, each character meets Michael for the first time for the second time and gets introduced to their new surroundings. This time we also get to see the evil side of the other “humans” in the neighbourhood and all the strings Michael has to pull and all the planning that goes into making this whole thing believable for the earthlings.

Before they all come in, Michael holds a meeting with all the pseudo humans including our friend “Real Eleanor” whose name is actually Vicky. Vicky is hella pissed that in this version of the narrative, her character is not as important as it was last time. She got to break Chidi’s heart like a dozen times last time, she can’t JUST be Denise the pizza lady! Another pseudo-human is really concerned with being able to bite Eleanor & co. Michael tells Vicky to run with it and do whatever she wants, resulting in her being uber friendly to Chidi and developing a random limp at some point. But the biting is a definite no-no.

Now let’s talk about the humans’ new situations. We saw Eleanor’s soulmate at the end of last season – a hot buff mailman – and that she lives in the same house as before, but everyone else is in a whole different scenario, below is a quick description of each:

• Chidi

Because Michael knows that making decisions is the thing Chidi is worst at, he is told that there are two possible soulmates for him i The Good Place and that he must choose one.  One is obviously perfect for him and the other is a sort of cold and boring woman so he is about to admit that he likes the first one more when Michael comes back in and claims that he adjusted the algorithm and found his real soulmate, no choice making required. Of course, Michael picks the boring cold woman as his forever-bae, giving Chidi the beginnings of a stomach ache.

• Tahani

To torture Tahani, Michael pairs her up with a short man who has no need for material things in this version. We know that she’s very materialistic and only helped so many charities to one-up her sister and be famous so it’s hilarious to watch her pretending to be cool with this tiny house and this tiny man (the tiny man even insists the house is too big and Tahani is like are you nuts?!). She even wears cargo pants to the neighbourhood welcome party to dress down and match with her soulmate and it almost kills her.

• Jason

Jason is back as JianYu the buddhist monk but this time he is paired up with another “buddhist monk” who has also “taken a vow of silence” and will literally follow Jason around AT ALL TIMES! Jason tries and fails over and over again to ditch him. Also upon seeing Janet, homeboy basically falls in love with her all over again.

So basically throughout the episode, Eleanor is trying to find Chidi because of that note that she slipped into Janet before they got rebooted. At the same time, Michael is trying to sabotage her and get her to do a bunch of crazy things like last time, so they can build a “chaos sequence” and make her think that her being there is causing all these problems. #torture

He tells her to wear a “best person” sash at the party because she’s gathered the most points and to make a speech because she’s the best. He then tells everyone else to ply her with booze but she’s so nervous about speaking and still stressed from the secret she hasn’t been able to share with her soulmate AND wondering if a Chidi is a soup or a person.

Eventually she finds Chidi and quickly shares her random note with him. He’s dismissive at first and leaves her because he’s dealing with his own stuff (being in love with not his soulmate) but then later on when drunk Tahani’s jealousy and unhappiness boil over and she crashes Eleanor’s speech and sets fire to the mansion they’re in, Chidi realizes that the note was written on a page of one of his books! So he and Eleanor head to her place to think. Jason also sneaks out during the fire bonanza and has a heart to heart with Janet, telling her everything and hugging her, igniting her feelings – maybe.

Michael and the pseudo-humans regroup after the party to figure out their next move, realizing late in the game that they don’t know where any of their humans are and rushing out to find them before they find each other and figure it all out. He & Chidi’s soulmate find him with Eleanor. Then Tahani comes in to apologize and her soulmate rushes in with the same “I was worried sick about you” speech, followed by a now vocal Jason and Janet and his soulmate. The FabFour start to put the pieces together instantly, they’re not sure what’s happening, but they’ve figured out this isn’t The Good Place and that somehow they’ve been there before.

Michael is STUNNED that they’ve figured it out so quickly this time and relieved when he learns about the note because at least he knows it wasn’t all his doing that fucked up the 2.0 setting. Getting more and more annoying with this crew, he decides to reboot them one more time – after all, third times the charm. He tells all the hell people that Sean was totally down with this 3rd reboot but in fact Sean knows nothing about the reboot, he was told the chaos sequence was on track perfectly.

So in one episode, the gang figured it all out and next week we go back to square one in Michael’s evil plan. Don’t forget to tune in next Thursday at 8:30 on NBC, following Superstore and followed by the new Will & Grace reboot!