The Good Place 4x12, "Patty"
Jan. 23rd, 2020 10:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
enemyofperfectMajor spoilers for tonight's episode follow; spoilery content note available here.
So that was... a take.
I loved maybe the first ten or fifteen minutes of this episode. Shenanigans, clever little signs to read, Chidi's nerdtastic Neoplatonic joke, the Good Place folks having no idea about anything, I was having so much fun!
And then Eleanor decided that what heaven really needed was no-strings euthanasia, and I... didn't feel so great about that.
Like, I'm not saying that infinite existence definitely would be rewarding for humans. I don't imagine it's something we have a lot of data about. If infinity's long enough to learn every language, read every book, and meet every person, then maybe it's too long. How would I know, really?
But from a human psychology/utopia design perspective, I feel like Team Cockroach ignored a lot of low-hanging fruit while they made their beeline for Actual Permadeath. Patty said that what saved Chidi was his friends: so do the other humans in the Good Place have their friends and family with them, or were they separated by the binary morality of the afterlife? Would it help to be reunited? The Good Place architects are canonically pretty clueless about how humans work: did anyone ever consider just not letting them fry their brains with orgasms that last centuries? Like, would capping that at around half an hour or so lead to any gains in overall contentment? And not to lean too hard on the worldbuilding of an admittedly very charming sitcom, but television and burritos seem to have been keeping Judge Gen pretty content for all these eons: is there no possible solution for the crushing ennui of leisure time hidden away in her immortal noggin somewhere?
I feel like these are questions worth asking when the best proposal anyone's floated yet is the promise of sweet annihilation.
Content note for discussion of suicidality ahead. Click here to skip.
I am a person who spent a good chunk of my life thinking about suicide on a not infrequent basis. It's pretty jarring for me to see it presented as a positive thing to just... casually walk out of existence someday.
Maybe that's kind of weird: I don't personally believe in any afterlife, and I'm not unduly disturbed by that fact! But maybe the way the show (perhaps necessarily) portrays the afterlife as basically just more life makes it hard for me to really believe in a distinction between the two -- that there's some fundamental difference between committing suicide in a world where you get one life and that's it, or walking through Michael's door in a world where the afterlife is basically just another party.
Again: I'm not saying I would definitely love to exist for infinity time. There are some real logistical issues there, I'm sure! But... the television series The Good Place exists on the planet Earth, where I am living. There's a context here outside the world of the show. And the thing about ceasing to exist is that you can't undo it: by definition, there's no you left to do the undoing.
(How does the old phrase go about a permanent solution to a temporary problem?)
So when I see a character joking about killing herself if her boyfriend doesn't stop hogging the covers, I feel... not great, for one. And I also feel like the show maybe doesn't realize that people like me are watching. Because -- absolutely, some of us who've marinated in the pit of depression, we joke about it. I would probably laugh at that joke in the right context, if it made sense to me as coming from someone who'd walked along the edge of that precipice, who knew what it meant.
And maybe the person who wrote that line does know. There are a lot of us, and maybe more in comedy than some other places. But the feeling of a joke coming from someone who understands was not the feeling I got from this rosy-tinted episode.
If I try to look past my disquiet and guess what the show was aiming for here, I would hazard that it's trying to distill down the promise of paradise -- or of embracing what time we, the viewers, have right here and now, on Earth -- to nothing more or less than time with the ones we love, and I can see why they might want to do that. But also... for the first time in the show's run to date, I'm feeling a little skeeved out by its insistence on the supreme importance of human connection.
Because I love my family and friends, but they aren't every single thing in my life. I also like books. I like cool science facts. I like chocolate with more chocolate. I like cats, and dogs, and I hear some really good thing about octopodes, too. So if the show is trying to say that human companionship is the only pleasure that will never pall... then I guess I disagree?
Other people are incredibly important. If I had to guess, I'd say that for most of us, they're essential. But they aren't literally everything. They're just a really big piece.
And of course, there's a comfort to be had in accepting and even celebrating our mortality, since it seems to be an inherent condition of our fragile little lives. Probably that's what this episode was aiming for, too, rather than the romanticization of suicide.
But at least as I write this right now, I can't say that it worked for me.
Context/content note: What happens in the episode is that Eleanor and the gang decide that the reason people can't enjoy the Good Place is that it's forever, so they install a door people can walk through if they want to stop existing at any point. General rejoicing follows.
So that was... a take.
I loved maybe the first ten or fifteen minutes of this episode. Shenanigans, clever little signs to read, Chidi's nerdtastic Neoplatonic joke, the Good Place folks having no idea about anything, I was having so much fun!
And then Eleanor decided that what heaven really needed was no-strings euthanasia, and I... didn't feel so great about that.
Like, I'm not saying that infinite existence definitely would be rewarding for humans. I don't imagine it's something we have a lot of data about. If infinity's long enough to learn every language, read every book, and meet every person, then maybe it's too long. How would I know, really?
But from a human psychology/utopia design perspective, I feel like Team Cockroach ignored a lot of low-hanging fruit while they made their beeline for Actual Permadeath. Patty said that what saved Chidi was his friends: so do the other humans in the Good Place have their friends and family with them, or were they separated by the binary morality of the afterlife? Would it help to be reunited? The Good Place architects are canonically pretty clueless about how humans work: did anyone ever consider just not letting them fry their brains with orgasms that last centuries? Like, would capping that at around half an hour or so lead to any gains in overall contentment? And not to lean too hard on the worldbuilding of an admittedly very charming sitcom, but television and burritos seem to have been keeping Judge Gen pretty content for all these eons: is there no possible solution for the crushing ennui of leisure time hidden away in her immortal noggin somewhere?
I feel like these are questions worth asking when the best proposal anyone's floated yet is the promise of sweet annihilation.
Content note for discussion of suicidality ahead. Click here to skip.
I am a person who spent a good chunk of my life thinking about suicide on a not infrequent basis. It's pretty jarring for me to see it presented as a positive thing to just... casually walk out of existence someday.
Maybe that's kind of weird: I don't personally believe in any afterlife, and I'm not unduly disturbed by that fact! But maybe the way the show (perhaps necessarily) portrays the afterlife as basically just more life makes it hard for me to really believe in a distinction between the two -- that there's some fundamental difference between committing suicide in a world where you get one life and that's it, or walking through Michael's door in a world where the afterlife is basically just another party.
Again: I'm not saying I would definitely love to exist for infinity time. There are some real logistical issues there, I'm sure! But... the television series The Good Place exists on the planet Earth, where I am living. There's a context here outside the world of the show. And the thing about ceasing to exist is that you can't undo it: by definition, there's no you left to do the undoing.
(How does the old phrase go about a permanent solution to a temporary problem?)
So when I see a character joking about killing herself if her boyfriend doesn't stop hogging the covers, I feel... not great, for one. And I also feel like the show maybe doesn't realize that people like me are watching. Because -- absolutely, some of us who've marinated in the pit of depression, we joke about it. I would probably laugh at that joke in the right context, if it made sense to me as coming from someone who'd walked along the edge of that precipice, who knew what it meant.
And maybe the person who wrote that line does know. There are a lot of us, and maybe more in comedy than some other places. But the feeling of a joke coming from someone who understands was not the feeling I got from this rosy-tinted episode.
If I try to look past my disquiet and guess what the show was aiming for here, I would hazard that it's trying to distill down the promise of paradise -- or of embracing what time we, the viewers, have right here and now, on Earth -- to nothing more or less than time with the ones we love, and I can see why they might want to do that. But also... for the first time in the show's run to date, I'm feeling a little skeeved out by its insistence on the supreme importance of human connection.
Because I love my family and friends, but they aren't every single thing in my life. I also like books. I like cool science facts. I like chocolate with more chocolate. I like cats, and dogs, and I hear some really good thing about octopodes, too. So if the show is trying to say that human companionship is the only pleasure that will never pall... then I guess I disagree?
Other people are incredibly important. If I had to guess, I'd say that for most of us, they're essential. But they aren't literally everything. They're just a really big piece.
And of course, there's a comfort to be had in accepting and even celebrating our mortality, since it seems to be an inherent condition of our fragile little lives. Probably that's what this episode was aiming for, too, rather than the romanticization of suicide.
But at least as I write this right now, I can't say that it worked for me.
Context/content note: What happens in the episode is that Eleanor and the gang decide that the reason people can't enjoy the Good Place is that it's forever, so they install a door people can walk through if they want to stop existing at any point. General rejoicing follows.
