This is the recap for the second part of The Good Place Season 3:
THERE WILL BE SPOILERS!
The Good Place is a rare show that can be totally silly and extremely emotional in the same episode.
We left off just as Janet pulled the four humans, Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, and Jason, into her void to protect them from Shawn and his gang of demons. This ended their lives on Earth (again), but it was the only way to protect them from an eternity of torture.
The void is an all-white, seemingly endless space where Janet resides when she isn’t helping anyone. It was never meant for humans, and there were some side effects. Most notably, all four humans are in a Janet body. For the sake of telling them apart, regular Janet puts them into clothes that they would wear in their regular bodies. It was fun to see D’Arcy Carden playing all four characters.
The four become “interdimensional fugitives” and have to hide out in Janet’s void while Michael and Janet seek out help at the Accounting Office. The Office is in the Neutral Zone, and it’s where the point total for every human on Earth is tallied. Michael has the feeling that The Bad Place has been somehow tampering with the points and keeping deserving people out of The Good Place. The Head Accountant shows them the file of Doug Forcet who, despite a lifetime devoted to good deeds, has zero chance of making it into The Good Place. In fact, no human has made it into The Good Place for 521 years. That means the person who got the closest was Medium Place resident, the cocaine-loving voyeur Mindy St.Clair. Michael becomes even more convinced that The Bad Place is interfering and is determined to help his friends (and all humans by extension).
Back in the void, the humans are trying to lay low. Tahani and Jason take a walk and find Janet’s memory screen. He thinks it’s a TV and asks to see cartoons. Instead, it shows him the time that Jason and Janet were married. Janet still loves Jason, but he has no memory of it.
Memory is a problem for Eleanor and Chidi, too. Michael had previously showed Eleanor the reboot where she and Chidi were in love. She had never allowed herself to be vulnerable before, and it really affected her. Chidi has no memory of that reboot and tries to explain that it wasn’t him that Eleanor fell in love with. It was “a Chidi,” but not the one in front of her now. This causes Eleanor to lose all sense of herself and repeatedly turn into random people. Chidi starts telling Eleanor everything that he knows about her, realizes he actually does love her, and kisses her.
This turns all four humans back into themselves, but it destabilizes the void to the point where Janet coughs them out right into the Accounting Office. With their cover blown, Michael decides that it’s up to him to save his friends and he steals “The Book of Dougs.” All six of them then jump into the mail tube to The Good Place, the real one this time.
They arrive in the Good Place Correspondence Center, which is sealed off from the rest of the realm. Michael seeks out the Committee to ask for their help. Eleanor is upset by the fact that they are so close to heaven but can’t get in. A newly-confident Chidi suggests that they have their first date. Jason feels bad that he saw Janet’s memories and “read her diary.” Tahani advises him to tell her the truth. Janet is feeling real emotions for the first time ever and is overwhelmed. Her tears are real now.
The Committee members are friendly, receptive, and completely useless. They compliment Michael over and over and think his concerns are valid. They won’t be of any help because they are so devoted to following the rules that they are willing to spend 1000 years forming an investigative team while humanity hangs in the balance. They’re the “good guys” they “can’t just do stuff”. Michael is at the end of his rope when Tahani expresses her regrets over the “unintended consequences” that arose from her attempts to help Jason and Janet, only to see things get worse. This helps Michael realize that the real problem is that being a good human is harder than it’s ever been, and he contacts The Judge.
The Judge agrees to meet them at the IHOP: the Inter-Dimensional Hole of Pancakes, the “crossroads of all dimensions, like Grand Central Station but for space and time.” It looks like the inside of a lava lamp with floating portals to every dimension. These are called “pancakes” by eternal beings, hence the name IHOP. The Judge is initially reluctant to hear them out, but an argument from Jason convinces her to go to Earth to check it out for herself.
The Judge sees that Earth is a mess and agrees to seek some sort of solution. Shawn is summoned to the negotiations. He argues that humans are garbage and should be tortured. Michael counters that these four humans all improved in his neighborhood. Chidi suggests that they repeat the experiment with four new humans, and Eleanor adds that they can run the experiment in The Medium Place. The rules are set, the new people “have to be the same level of badness” as the original ones (“no serial killers, dictators, none who managed a boy band”). Both Michael and Shawn hate the rules, so The Judge rules it a fair plan.
The Bad Place still finds ways to cheat, showing Michael that when they win they’re going to torture his friends wearing a Michael suit. This causes him to melt down just as the first new human arrives. Eleanor jumps in to pretend to be the architect, with Michael as her assistant (“a recent transfer from dog heaven”). The new people are part of the trap: the two that we meet before the season ends are known to the original four. First, a gossip columnist who wrote about Tahani when she was alive. The second is Simone, the neuroscientist that Chidi had been in a relationship with. If those demons killed her just for this purpose, I’ll be so mad.
Tahani puts in a real effort to be nice to John the gossip columnist, despite the things that he says. Chidi begs Michael to erase his memory because he knows that he’ll never be able to keep up the illusion that he doesn’t know Simone. The others reluctantly agree that it’s the best course of action, but they are heartbroken. Michael makes a movie of Chidi and Eleanor’s relationship so they can relive their memories one last time. Chidi assures Eleanor that everything will be fine and, when it’s over, they’ll hide out in the dot in the “I” of the Jeremy Bearimy forever.
After Chidi’s memories are erased, a distraught Eleanor seeks out Janet for “the answer”. Janet says if she could “answer how the universe works, it wouldn’t be special” and, “since nothing seems to make sense, when you find something that does, it’s euphoria”. At this point if your heart isn’t crushed, it’s made of stone. I can’t wait to see what happens next season.
To cheer you up after the wonderfully heartbreaking yet hopeful finale:
- Jason’s argument to The Judge about a member of his dance crew: “I would yell at Big Noodle because he was always late to rehearsal. One day the swamp under my house flooded. I needed a place to crash, so I slept at Big Noodle’s house. He had to juggle three jobs to take care of his four grandparents who all lived in the same bed like in Willy Wonka” …so you “can’t judge humans because you don’t know what we go through.”
- Jason encouraging Chidi to play “special Jacksonville-style pool”: there are no rules, and you make up your own score. It was the first time we got to see Chidi relaxed and enjoying himself.
- Michael’s aliases on Earth: Zak Pizazz, Charles Brainman, Gordon Indigo, Nathaniel Cookswell, reporter Michael Scoop and his photographer/sister Janet Scoop, and Special Agent Rick Justice and partner Lisa “Frenchie” Fuqua.
- In Janet’s memory, you can see where on the Jeremy Bearimy timeline her wedding to Jason is.
And if you’re wondering, “the worst possible use of free will” is to pick someone up from the airport. I’m going to be using my free will to watch Season 4 when it comes back September 26.
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