The Good Place - Season 2

While Maya Rudolph was great, because Maya Rudolph is always great, I think I let myself get over-hyped for the big reveal and ended up disappointed. Returning to Jamil's interview, is Maya Rudolph really someone you "shirt your pants" over? From the standpoint of working with her maybe, but from an audience perspective, just pull up Wikipedia and see all her single episode or limited role credits from 2014 to now. These kind of bit parts are what she does. I feel like I see her all the time.

She's terrific, but she's not a "get."

Anyways, that personal and inconsequential gripe aside, another great episode. Love the New Yorker gag and Jason's misery over playing against his beloved Jaguars in Madden.

He's Senegalese, so French is presumably his first language-- he's just speaking English because he's teaching at an Australian university.

My vague sense of "the rules" definitely makes me thinks it's not the real world (actually reversing their deaths just seems like messing around too far, plus there's no reason to think the judge couldn't just make a simulation).  So I'd bet on it not being "real".  However...

... there is the intriguing possibility that it is real and their deaths have been reversed, and since it's only for the time-limited purposes of assessing them the test is going to end, and since they really are alive again it's going to end by them all somehow dying again.  Which has a lot of dramatic potential.

(Edit: Thinking about it, it's maybe somewhat in support of the second notion that the judge was so against the idea, despite being perfectly happy to make mere simulations in the previous episode.)

Eh... Chidi doesn't have an accent in any of his flashbacks. I think this is a dead end.

Although, if this is a simulation, you do wonder what the ethics of fabricating an entire planet's worth of people for the sake of a moral argument would be.

So it's going to suck and be really pretentious?

Part of this is probably more due to the fact that I'm less interested in the show's metaphysical angle, and more interesting in what the show is saying about real world society.  Over the course of this season, I've become more and more convinced that the show is in fact critical of meritocratic societies as inherently unjust.  And I'm kind of hoping that they further go on to argue that the meritocratic afterlife of the show is inherently unjust and cannot simply be fixed through mere cosmetic reforms.  And personally, I think that the nature of the show's critique of meritocracy is more interesting than what it has to say about different faiths' conceptions of the afterlife (which is something that I don't personally think exists to begin with), as we currently live in an inherently meritocratic capitalist society where on some level both conservatives and liberals argue that the prosperous have earned and deserve their wealth while millions of others live below the poverty line, or lack health insurance, or cannot find work, or are homeless, etc., where in order to prove that they deserve welfare benefits poor people are forced to jump through needless frustrating and humiliating hoops, where only the brilliant and the talented are paid much mind in attempting to provide marginalized children the same sort of opportunities as children from families of means, where of the over ten million undocumented people residing in the country, the putative "liberal" reform to the situation is so harshly meritocratic that only those brought to the country as children and who prove themselves "worthy" by having a clean criminal record and attending college or joining the military are legally allowed to provide for themselves, and not have to face the prospect of deportation, just to give a few examples.  So I'm interested in whether the show's end game in regards to an unjust meritocracy is to treat a couple of minor tweaks and reforms as a cure-all, or to argue that said meritocracy is structurally unjust and must be completely replaced.