(no subject)

[seekingferret]

As we go into the final episodes of The Good Place starting next week, it is increasing bothering me that Mindy St. Claire is the only person in the last 500 years who hasn't gone to The Bad Place. This feels like a mistake in the world-building somehow, not a deliberate condemnation of the Points System. Why would The Good Place argue that she should go with them if it hasn't spoken up for anyone else? Surely there must be some non-coke fiends who did more good for the world than she did.

It feels like they thought up the idea of the Medium Place before they had the idea of nobody having gone to the Good Place in 500 years, and they didn't work out a way to make the two ideas mesh together; It might've been better if they'd decided that the existence of The Medium Place were part of Michael's Gambit rather than a real part of the afterlife ecosystem.

Of course, watch in two episodes we get a surprise revelation that renders this objection moot and proves they've been thinking about this all along. :P

Comments

[jack]

Yeah, that bothered me too. I think they have been forced to plan it one season at a time, despite the many things I love, the details of the afterlife don't seem to have been made up in advance especially much

[seekingferret]

It's very hard to criticize The Good Place for this sort of thing because of how twisty a show it is... During the first season, I was complaining about things about the idea of the Good and Bad Places as represented there that got mooted by the season-ending revelation, so I never know when I spot a consistency problem if I'm spotting a clue or an oversight.

[seekingferret]

Maybe the Mindy St. Claire is exceptional thing works if the Points System is some sort of Time Weighted Average, so newer acts are worth more, and because Mindy set in motion something massively points-earning in the exact moment before she died, those points were maximized enough to put herself over the total needed to make The Good Place.

[jack]

Yeah, I think that does hold up. I figure if the flaw in the system means points ebb away but you don't end up on negative infinity, it means you CAN make progress, but not if you consume anything. So Mindy got through that gap.

And yeah, they MIGHT be planning around that, but I think they would have reiterated that premise this season if it was supposed to be a live mystery.

And, that's still not quite right. There are people who die saving a lot of people. Did none of them make it? Or people not plugged in to the global economy. Maybe there's a limit on both directions, like the point decay means the good stuff has to come in after a week but less than a month or something?

[hannah]

What if she's too good for the Bad Place, and too bad for the Good Place, so nobody wanted her at all?

[seekingferret]

That would make sense in a system where some people went to the Good Place and some people went to the Bad Place, but as it's revealed in "Janet(s)", nobody has gone to the Good Place in 500 years. And as it's revealed in "Mindy St. Claire", nobody has gone to the Medium Place except for Mindy. So everyone else who's died in the past 500 years has gone to the Bad Place. Given that, what's so exceptional about Mindy St. Claire, what makes her too good for the Bad Place?

[conuly]

But it's clear that the folks running the Bad Place don't care if the people there belong there.

[gwyn]

Yeah, that's bugged me a lot. As a Mindy fan of the highest order, I feel like nothing makes sense, and they wrote themselves in a corner. But I do know from the podcast that there are a couple people besides Shur who check this stuff and are the keepers of the continuity, so here's hoping they've worked on the issue for the back four.

[seekingferret]

We'll see! But I feel like, if it were intentional, given that most of this season has been set in the Medium Place, that there really ought to have been a moment in the show where someone said "Wait a minute, Mindy St. Claire is the only person in 500 years who hasn't gone to the Bad Place? What the fork!?"