This post discusses plot elements from the most recent episode of The Good Place, which aired last night. If you haven’t watched the episode yet, don’t read this. Any and all comments to the effect of “Hey! Spoiler!” will result in a deduction of points from your Good Place/Bad Place score.
In the giddily entertaining third episode of The Good Place’s second season, “Dance Dance Resolution,” our obliviously damned heroes discover that they’ve been through Michael’s afterlife ruse more than 800 times, all of which end with Eleanor (and one time Jason) correctly surmising that they’re in The Bad Place. In some of those instances, but not all of them, Eleanor and Chidi have sought refuge in The Medium Place, the secluded, personal San Junipero of Mindy St. Claire, the coke-fueled ’80s lady who avoided her own trip to The Bad Place thanks to the charity she founded shortly before croaking. And during each of those trips—if you can’t tell by the title, “Dance Dance Resolution” loves itself some repetition and patterns—they’ve hatched schemes to escape The Bad Place for good. Not a one of those schemes has prevented Michael from wiping their memory and rebooting his innovative boondoggle, but they do work as effective punchlines—both the ones Kristen Bell reads out loud, and the ones you have to read on the back of Mindy’s faux-Patrick Nagel print.
Behold, Eleanor and Chidi (and, based on the panda one, probably Jason’s) complete list of Bad Place escape plans, transcribed after the screengrab.
- “Physically attack Michael”
- “Stab with small knife”
- “Find Michael’s boss, blackmail, drug him”
- “Seduce Michael”
- “Throw Tahani under the bus”
- “Stab with large knife”
- “Make Michael think he’s the one in [The Bad Place]”
- “Indecent Proposal him”
- “Shawshank our way out”
- “Try to stuff Michael back into his magic lamp”: Probably another Jason idea.
- “Find Ray Donovan, but an angel”: Ditto
- “Catch that magic panda, use her powers”
- “Eleanor [illegible] in”
- “Find Doug Forcett”
We’ve reached out to the writer of “Dance Dance Resolution,” Megan Amram, to clear up what that one in the lower left-hand corner is, and will update if she responds. (Last night, Amram posted an abridged list of all the food puns that worked their way into the background of the episode.) In other developments, now we know who the fork is watching Ray Donovan!