A review of this weeks The Good Place, A Girl From Arizona, Part Two, coming up just as soon as I leave H&M wearing more underpants than I had on when I came in
In my review of last weeks episode, I noted that it must have begun life as a one-hour story before being split in two, which meant wed spend the final seasons first two weeks in table-setting mode. Instead, this weeks Part Two immediately starts paying off many of the ideas established in the first half-hour some comedically, some dramatically in a really effective way that left me feeling frustrated we didnt get to see it all at once.
In particular, Eleanor and Michaels conversation on the fake This Was Your Life talk-show set which features the episodes titular phrase about who she is and where shes from was just tremendous. Ted Danson is most famous for comic roles, but he has a long and impressive resume of serious performances. And Bell, you may recall, first broke out in a mostly dramatic role. Theyre two quick-witted goofballs, but theyll rip out your heartstrings if youre not careful. Eleanor is so broken down and vulnerable from all thats gone wrong since she took over the neighborhood not just Chidi, but all of it while Michael is incredibly kind and eloquent in pointing out just how much more capable Eleanor is than she allows herself to think. Its among the loveliest scenes this show has ever given us on par with Michael telling Janet that he cant kill her because shes his friend and nicely steers us out of the calamity that occupied the season to this point, and into Eleanor finding ways to fix both Brent and Simone(*).
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(*) A subtle costuming touch: After Michaels pep talk, Eleanor ditches the suits and goes back to more casual sweaters and blouses. She tried dressing like Michael as well as acting like him, and then he reminded her that shes great just being her. So her clothes in the episodes second half reflect that.
Both prove especially tough nuts to crack, for very different reasons. Since Brents apparently here as Eleanors nemesis, it makes sense that she would try a variation of the same nightmare scenario that Michael unleashed on her at the start of the series, with everyone being dressed in Princeton colors instead of Michigans. But where con-woman Eleanor saw the monster stampede through the neighborhood as yet another sign that she was too bad to be there, Brents entitlement and ignorance regarding his many shortcomings only convinces him that he belongs in a better place than this one. Eleanors solution is both simple and full of potential minefields. By telling Brent vaguely about the point system, she gets him doing good deeds, but with a suspect motive that wont help him any. But, as she cleverly argues to Michael, once upon a time she was only trying to be good to avoid the Bad Place, and eventually the act became real. Brents probably going to need more repetition than she did, but its a start, at least.
To illustrate the point of how fundamentally good Eleanor has become, she performs a big piece of self-sacrifice to deal with the Simone problem: by telling Chidi that he and Simone are soul mates. What was once a way for Michael to torture his human guinea pigs is used here to encourage Chidi to reel Simone in from her belief that this is all a hallucination of her comatose mind. Chidis solution asking her to start treating everyone with kindness and respect, in the incredibly unlikely event that this situation is real is as much of a band-aid as what Eleanor does with Brent, but its also about building up muscle memory for good behavior. (And the joke about Chidis books flying to him from Part One has a hilarious payoff here when one of them beans him right in the noggin.)
When Part One ended on a muted note at the train station, I cited the lack of a cliffhanger as more evidence that NBC had split a one-hour episode in two after the fact. But Part Two is also free of the shows trademark surprise endings, instead concluding on the amusing note of Jason almost leaving Eleanor hanging for her dat ash! joke. This time, though, it doesnt feel off that theres not a clear To Be Continued element. Theres obviously a lot to be done in this current scenario (including figuring out what to do with Tahani nemesis John) before the show flips the script on us five or six more times. More importantly, though, the experience of this episode is so satisfying and would have been even more so had the two half-hours aired together that no last-second twist feels needed. When The Good Place is firing on all cylinders like it was this week, well come back, baited hook or not.
Some other thoughts:
* The Eleanor/Michael scene was the episodes best. But perhaps the most quintessentially Good Place moment came when Janet temporarily dumped Jason to focus on keeping the neighborhood together, then immediately followed that with the devastating news (from 2019 earth, but applicable at this moment because of Jeremy Bearimy) that the Jaguars cut Blake Bortles. What other show could take a dumb running gag about a terrible football player with a silly name, and use it not only as comic relief for an otherwise sad scene, but leave you genuinely wondering which piece of news hurts Jasons feelings more? (The saddest part is that the entire final season was filmed before Jacksonville fandom got to meet their new quarterback, mustachioed wonder and delightfully named Gardner Minshew.)
* Finally, as was the case last week, Tahani doesnt have much to do, but her scant screen time is choice, particularly as she explains to Jason that her own post-breakup routine involved champagne and Alanis Morissette: Not the singer, she notes with seeming humility, before adding, I would listen to her albums at my friend Adeles house.