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Bobulus
Jan 28, 2007

Rewatched Pandemonium and the webisodes. Ready!

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Bobulus
Jan 28, 2007

Bad Place did quality work.

Bobulus
Jan 28, 2007

Holy shirt, Linda!

Bobulus
Jan 28, 2007

So, Linda is really good at suppressing her desires?????

Until she snaps????

Bobulus
Jan 28, 2007

Switching Michael!!!


Edit: they mentioned the Michael Suit in both the webisodes and the recap. He was offscreen. That's absolutely not Michael.

Bobulus
Jan 28, 2007

flatluigi posted:

also was there a thing people caught that implies the switch happened

Well, my take:

- Shaun gave up way too easily, which means the first plan was a fake-out. The whole goal was to get Michael out of the view of others.
- The boo-yah thing was weird, like, like a sign that it worked.

Probably Janet wasn't switched? Hard to say. The episode implied Janet was running everything so much that it would break if she left. Plus historically Bad Janets melt when they try to impersonate Good Janet.

Bobulus
Jan 28, 2007

I forgot to say last night, I was cracking up that the obelisk that the neutral-place accountant went into was the same one that Michael used in one of the early reboots as a means to torture the four.


I wonder how they'll snap Simone out of her atheist funk? It could easily be Chidi throwing a variation of Pascal's Wager at her, or maybe it'll be more comedic, like Jason will introduce her to something so far outside her knowledge base that her glitching brain couldn't possibly have invented it.

Bobulus fucked around with this message at 20:26 on Sep 27, 2019

Bobulus
Jan 28, 2007

Oh, geez, I'm slow on the uptake today. Linda's first request after waking up was to ask if there was a fitness center in the Good Place. Of course That One Demon wanted to go to the gym...

Bobulus
Jan 28, 2007

Emerson Cod posted:

Especially with Michael telling Bad Janet to give such a specific message, I think he was swapped out with the Bad Place doppelganger at some point in the last episode of Season 3. Possibly before showing Eleanor and Chidi that montage, which was nice but could be interpreted as torturing Eleanor. Same thing with his "breakdown" forcing her to take charge.

No, that doesn't make sense.

- Right before the breakdown, Shaun specifically taunts Michael over the phone, and shows him the Michael suit. So that's definitely Michael when he has the breakdown.
- Shaun's season 4 "Sneak in Chris the Demon" plan was really easily found out and involved him sending his worst actor. Plus he didn't seem broken up at all when it got found out. It only makes sense that he rigged that up for an excuse to have a Bad Place train in the new neighborhood

I'm not leaving out the possibility of a fakeout, but if a switch happened, it's gotta have been last episode on the train.


Anyway, here's my guesses for the next several episodes:
- "Michael" will make several flubs that seem well-intentioned, but gently caress over the protagonists. Maybe he tries to peek at the neutral-place accountant's tallies and gets caught, for example.
- This next episode will be mostly about snapping Simone out of her delusion. Thinking further on this, so far they've tried to keep her isolated from the others, but maybe what will do the trick is forcing her to interact with them. I mean, she thinks all this is her brain doing great stuff for her and/or malfunctioning. Eleanor can't be mean to her without her realizing this isn't the Good Place in the long-run. But if she's forced to put up with two incredibly shallow and self-centered people? Why would her brain conjure them?
- This might actually be what helps Brent figure out that he shouldn't just keep doing what he's doing, too? I mean, if Simone gets so annoyed that she kicks his rear end, maybe it'll finally get through his thick skull? Probably not, but I can dare to dream.

Bobulus
Jan 28, 2007

Senor Tron posted:

I don't think they will persuade Simone that it's not real. Rather I expect Chidi to make an argument that persuades her it doesn't matter if it's real or not so she may as well treat it as if it is.

This is also entirely possible, but I was thinking about what's different from the original experiment and this one, and a big one is that the original four interacted a lot. Obviously Chidi was instrumental in making Eleanor reconsider her views, but if Tahani and Jason hadn't been there to introduce new ethical problems for her, things would not have worked out quite so well.

In the new experiment, Eleanor has been trying hard to keep Simone isolated from the others, and we haven't seen the other two talk yet either. So my thought is that forcing them together (and having their obviously-not-perfect personalities be observed by each other) will be important.

Bobulus
Jan 28, 2007

I'm sticking with my 'replaced Michael' theory, but the odds have gone down from like 85% to like 65%.

Keep in mind, usually the bad place is good at faking this. Chris 'I'll be at the gym' the Demon is the exception, not the rule. Remember, Michal himself had the four and the audience fooled for the entire first season. It would be entirely in keeping with this show for there to be no huge dropped hints for another episode or two, since this was basically just setting up the new status quo.

(I also think it's slightly suspicious that he was all 'I'll never understand what it's like to be human' when we, like, had a whole episode about that in season 2. Not that Eleanor necessarily remembers that...)

Bobulus fucked around with this message at 18:49 on Oct 4, 2019

Bobulus
Jan 28, 2007

Toast Museum posted:

Chris is especially bad at it, but the demons are mostly not good at deception. The first attempt worked as well as it did because Michael had a fifteen-million-point plan. The moment that went out the window, most of the demons were terrible at winging it and would've preferred to fire up the ol' penis flattener and call it a day.

Shaun was killing it as the Judge first season, too. Assuming he's the one making the current plan, I can absolutely see a Fake Michael playing along really well.

Speaking of Michael's plans, episode 1 he was all 'let's run scenario 14-B on this guy', and we didn't see any of that this episode.

Bobulus
Jan 28, 2007

You know, the medium place kinda makes even less sense now that we know no one has made it into the good place in five hundred years. I don't care how good her charity idea was, Mindy had a higher point total than Doug?

Bobulus
Jan 28, 2007

Okay, maybe the "second Michael" idea is right. Maybe he asked Jason to open that jar.

Bobulus
Jan 28, 2007

You know what would be amazing? A Back to the Future 2 style episode where fake Michael has to run through the background of the first few episodes, hiding from real Michael and causing various chaos.

Bobulus
Jan 28, 2007

I lost antenna reception in the last minute. :(

Bobulus
Jan 28, 2007

BioThermo posted:

It was a shot of a hooded figure operating a handcar on the train tracks headed to the neighborhood.

Arist posted:

That HAD to be Real Michael right?????

Okay, silly idea: one of the hints we got from the actors preseason was that we would see Michael's real inhuman form.

So what if...

1) Bad Place replaces Michael and captures him.
2) Bad Place strips him of his human form as punishment.
3) Michael escapes and comes back under a cloak, has to convince Team Cockroach without his charming Ted Danson appearance.
4) Michael ends up wearing the Michael Suit for the rest of the season

Bobulus
Jan 28, 2007

MikeJF posted:

I gotta say, them just saying 'oh I gave Elenor and Tahani their full memories back' kinda felt really skipped-over. Like, we've never seen them with more than a single version of memories, even eleanor only got a few glimpses in season 3, and now they got the full three hundred years back offscreen? I was expecting that to be a big deal, them remembering themselves doing things over and over and over and assimilating all the versions. You'd think it'd have a huge effect on their behavior and who they are.

My gut feeling is that that was thrown in there so Chidi can recover his memories in the finale without it slowing down the plot.

Bobulus
Jan 28, 2007

It occurs to me that the fact that Bad Janet was neither marbleized nor returned to the Bad Place means that she probably still has some role to play in the story. Some people speculated her hooking up with Derek last week, and that seems possible, but it might instead be a Good Janet / Bad Janet power showdown at some point. Which would rule.

pwn posted:

I thought he was biting the martini glass

I believe they mentioned on the podcast that your interpretation was correct.

MikeJF posted:

Next week, on the good place: they scale up the Demon Exploderer a hundred times and solve all their problems forever, human-style. :jihad:

Then again, now that Shawn knows that a demon-exploder is possible, he'll probably start mass-producing them...

Bobulus
Jan 28, 2007

I'm really curious how they're going to do the rest of the season. Let's say they figure out a new system next episode, and we'll even assume everything is resolved before the finale and it's just a 'where are they now' ending. That still leaves a lot of airtime!

Bobulus
Jan 28, 2007

Hey, quick question. In the preview images for the season, we saw Eleanor dressed in a halloween costume version of a demon. Is my memory failing me, or have we not seen that yet in this season?

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Bobulus
Jan 28, 2007

BigBallChunkyTime posted:

I would love to know the setup behind Eleanor standing in a cactus field holding balloons.

Yes, yes, "torture," but what was the setup that got her there?

I imagine Michael would have given her some reason why she couldn't just let the balloons go. Like, maybe he claimed they contain something valuable that Eleanor has to smuggle across the Good Place to a waiting train or something. And then a marching band or something goes through town and she has to detour around it to the cactus field.

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