The Good Place Season 3: My Prediction

by Goshman on August 25, 2018

If you’ve been reading for a while, you might note that TV is absolutely not the kind of thing I normally write about. In fact, for much of my life, I didn’t like TV. I may have even been one of those unbearable people who liked to tout that as a virtue, for which I am deeply sorry.

Thankfully, the ability to binge watch has radically changed my ability to absorb and appreciate TV as an artistic medium, and with the amazing stuff that’s out there lately, I’m quite glad for it. I’m watching a whole bunch of really great contemporary shows and also catching up on some of the oldies but goodies (Buffy, for example) that I missed because I was too busy reading books back in my youth. (What a nerd, right?)

Anyhoo, I think I have to say my favorite TV show of all time ever is The Good Place. The only media that I have consumed more often than I’ve watched the first season of this show would be the Harry Potter books, which I’ve been reading approximately once a year since around the time the 3rd book was being published. Forget binge watching – each time a Good Place episode came out last season, I would literally watch it, get to the end, and immediately start over at the beginning of the episode.

If you’re familiar with the show, you probably know that the twists are one of the key elements that make the show so dang good. At first I fell in love with it just because it was a really funny and smart exploration of moral philosophy, a subject on which I took a class one time in college, but I think what really got me was their ability to pull off an incredible twist. And the loveability of the characters. And the incredible acting, especially Mr. Harper’s scene-stealing facial expressions. And some really forking funny one-liners. But I digress. Let’s go back to the twists for a second.

Now, the general conversation around the twists has been that almost nobody has guessed either of them. In fact, it is rumored that some folks on the team like to scour the internet looking for predictions to see if anyone has gotten ahead of them, and that up until now, they haven’t found anyone who has.

Well, folks, I guessed both of the major twists. I knew halfway through season one where they were, and I knew what had to happen at the end of season 2, and now… well, now I’m going to tell you my prediction for season 3. For the first time, I am actually remembering to write it down before it airs so I can have bragging rights, at least among the three people who read this.

Okay, so, let’s get into it. But first:

HERE THERE BE SPOILERS. IF YOU HAVE NOT WATCHED SEASONS 1 AND 2 OF THE GOOD PLACE ALL THE WAY THROUGH, STOP READING NOW AND IMMEDIATELY GO FIND A TELEVISION AND A NETFLIX ACCOUNT. PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK. 

So, tonight I was re-watching Season 1 with two of my friends for what I believe is my 7th time, and I was noticing all of the great supporting characters who the main characters know during their time on Earth. I was thinking about how excited I am for some, hopefully including my favorite, Pillboi, to reappear in season 3 now that our heroes have been sent back to Earth.

As I was saying this out loud, my friend said, “but what about Janet and Michael?”

As you probably remember, at the end of Season 2, Janet & Michael are in a room watching the ticker tape tallying up the scores of the newly-returned-to-earth foursome. After six months, as Eleanor’s progress starts to slow, Michael decides to pop down to Earth and show up as a bartender in an incredibly gratifying scene where he gently nudges Eleanor back towards the path of good and gives her the clue that leads her to Chidi.

I have SO MANY FEELINGS about this and in particular the ways I was inspired by Michael’s point that it’s so much harder to be good alone (blah blah blah intersections with capitalism blah blah) but that’s not the point.

This is the point: what I realized from my friend’s question is that it won’t be very interesting for Michael to just show up and offer divine intervention every once in a while and mostly sit in a room the rest of the time. (Admittedly, I’d pay money to watch Ted Danson and D’Arcy Carden sit in a room looking at ticker tapes, but it’s probably not very good TV.)  Also, he mentions that he had to sneak away from the room with Janet and, although she assures him nobody noticed his departure, it seems like having this continuing would just get boring very quickly.

What would not get boring quickly? Well, Michael being caught and sent down to Earth as punishment would not get boring very quickly, that’s what.

Here are my very quick thoughts:

  1. Michael has been obsessed with humans since day one. How better to get to know them than to be forced to become one. This is actually foreshadowed quite heavily throughout the first two seasons.
  2. Gods/angels/etc. getting cast out of heaven/Mt. Olympus/whatever is a super common theme across various mythologies
  3. I think the bad place would absolutely perceive this as a punishment for Michael. It is not really out of line with their locking him in a room with a stack of New Yorkers punishment, and Shawn has already said that they don’t have time to deal with actually destroying him.
  4. There would be so many places for the plot to go from here, including continued efforts to get back to the good place, further explorations of what the group owes to one another, etc. etc. etc.
  5. The other options for Michael are to sit in a room with Janet all season, maybe interact with the Judge or other celestial beings, or just occasionally show up on Earth with various “nudges”, all of which would severely underutilize Mr. Danson and get old fast.
  6. Season 2 showed that this show isn’t afraid of an early season twist. I thought we were going to get a whole Season 2 of version two, post-reboot. In fact, I thought we were possibly going to get multiple seasons of parallel scenario sorts of things. But as we learned by the end of the third episode of the second season, it’s just not that kind of show. I’m absolutely banking on another early season twist this coming year.

From listening to the podcast, I don’t necessarily think Mike Schur had things planned out this far during the first season, so I won’t bore you by digging through all of the things in the first two seasons that would support this theory, but I do think the groundwork is there.

So, that’s my idea and I’m sticking to it… at least until the first episode airs on September 27th.

What do you think? Possible? Impossible? Leave a comment below and let me know what you think!

(Unless you’re Mike Schur and you want to offer me a job, in which case, my number is 516-885-8943. Call me.)

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I Haven’t Been Writing Lately

by Goshman on March 15, 2016

I haven’t been writing lately. At all.

Like, not just not-publishing but actually not-writing.

I’ve been on and off with my writing throughout my life, so by itself, not-writing is not a cause for alarm.

But for the past few months, there has been a consistent battle inside of me because there’s the part of me that wants to be writing and the part of me that doesn’t know how anymore.

Sure, my fingers still work. My brain is still thinking thoughts, and theoretically, I am technically capable of putting them on paper, or screen, but I haven’t been able to do the part where I synthesize the things I’m thinking and feeling into a coherent narrative… or any kind of narrative at all beyond disjointed words and half-formed sentences.

Part of this, definitely, is depression. That’s the part that’s easy to identify if not as easy to overcome.

But there’s another part which I hadn’t put my finger on until very recently.

I’ve known that both my inability to write and my strong need to write have stemmed from the nearly two-year process I’ve been going through of learning about myself and my identity. And there’s a lot of shame and blame that still comes up whenever I try to parse out where I am now.

Going from understanding myself as cis and straight to understanding that I’m actually quite queer, both in gender and sexual orientation, is a not insignificant change.

But the shame and blame isn’t about who I am or how I identify. It’s all about HOW THE FUCK DID I NOT KNOW.

It seems that my identity as a self-aware person is much more fragile than any of the other identities which have been discarded in the past few years. And it’s also the one that’s most closely linked to my writing.

Writing, particularly writing personal narrative, is always fraught. The pieces I’m most proud of are also often the same ones that leave me hiding under my covers crying into my journal and avoiding social media for days at a time.

Brené Brown calls this a vulnerability hangover. And like most things, being able to name it and recognize that other people also experience this has been a huge help for me.

So it’s not exactly the vulnerability hangover that I’m afraid of, although god knows all the things I want to write about gender and sexuality at the moment are sure to rank on the high end of the vulnerability scale. But the thing that has always been reassuring in all of this is that writing those things is a form of telling my truth. It’s a way for me to be seen and be known. And the reassurances I eventually get from others with whom my writing resonates helps me feel whole again, after I’ve broken myself apart and pasted the pieces onto a website for everyone to see.

And I don’t know what’s true anymore.

At the same time, my subject matter needs to feel raw to me or writing about it doesn’t hold any appeal. And right now gender, sexuality, sexual orientation, identity, and the many other areas with which those intersect feel hella raw to me. Maybe so raw that putting the pieces back together could prove to be too difficult.

And so I haven’t been doing it at all.

Maybe I’m overly romanticizing my writing. Maybe it’s more analytical and less visceral than I’m remembering it to be. I think it comes across that way by the time it’s been written down and edited, and re-edited, and re-written. I don’t remember.

That’s part of the problem. Everything is different now.

My body feels different. My clothes feel different. My preferences feel different. Sex feels different. Writing feels different. It. All. Feels. Different. Now.

Furthermore, I’m now painfully aware that there’s a big part of me that has been dedicated for most of the last 33 years to keeping a bunch of information about myself from myself. It’s like I look back and I see all the clues, and I see all the ways in which I wrote them off, convinced myself they didn’t matter, and went out of my way to assure myself that I was, in fact, the person that society had convinced me I was supposed to be. That feels like kind of a big oversight.

There’s definitely a kinder, gentler interpretation here, which is that I was lacking the frameworks I needed to fully understand these parts of myself. I didn’t have the right words; I didn’t have the right examples. I couldn’t fully grok any of it until I had enough of the pieces to put together, and I’ve only received the critical pieces in the last few years, most of which had to do with understanding non-binary gender identities.

Both explanations are true. Maybe even equally so. And there’s a part of me that has to believe that the self-deception was in some way something my subconscious thought I needed to be safe, even when I’m still furious at my own ability to do that to myself.

Writing, for me, has always been a way of creating or distilling meaning from the weird thoughts in my head; forcing myself to lay my thoughts out on “paper” in a way that will make at least a modicum of sense to other people helps me organize my brain and build coherency out of things that are more experiential or personal.

But this kind of work requires a level of faith; a belief, however tiny, that what comes out at the end will make sense, will resonate with someone, and will be worth the sometimes painful deconstruction that happens in the process.

I appear to have lost that faith.

Or maybe this piece is proof that I’ve found it again. I’m not sure.

I do know that I can’t move forward if all I can’t get out from under the criticism and self-loathing and the constant refrain of, “you were wrong. You were wrong. You were wrong.”

And while writing this particular piece, the one you’re reading right now, feels important, the question of how or whether I fucked up in some drastic way is not actually an interesting one.

There are plenty of interesting questions here though: ones about the role of socialization in shaping our identities, the real and perceived lack of safety in intersectional marginalized identities, the relevance and limitations of frameworks in helping us understand our own identities, and at least half a dozen other things that occur in the first moment of considering the possibilities.

But I can’t access any of these higher levels of thought when I get wrapped up in shame and confusion. And sometimes, like Brené Brown says, the best way out from shame is vulnerability. So at the very least, this article is my attempt to lean into that.

I’m not going to say I’m back. I’m not going to say I’m fixed. I’m not going to promise to write any of those things I mentioned a few paragraphs ago.

But I wrote this. So that counts, right?

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Egg Sandwiches, Domesticity, and Gender

November 2, 2015

Earlier this week, I was at a writer’s retreat, and one of the other women let us know on the first night that she had made these egg-things which were in the fridge. If we wanted a protein-ful breakfast, we should just help ourselves to one from the fridge, put it on an English muffin, […]

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Please Don’t Fuck Me: How Not to Be an Ally to Fat Folks

September 15, 2015
Thumbnail image for Please Don’t Fuck Me: How Not to Be an Ally to Fat Folks

As a fat person, coming to terms with my own physical and sexual attractiveness may well be one of the hardest bits of self-work I’ve had to do. In college, the first time my first boyfriend mentioned the idea of sex, I remember standing in the doorway of my room looking confusedly at him and […]

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On Purple Elephants, Aromanticism, and Why My Last Post Was NBD

September 9, 2015

For the past few years, I’ve been questioning the idea of romance and whether or not it’s a thing that actually exists. This may sound weird to some, but it has never been entirely clear to me that it isn’t just a cultural fabrication. I know what friendship is, I know what partnership is, I […]

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Why I Wish I Was a Lesbian

August 31, 2015

(Dear family, I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: you may well read things in this blog that you wish you didn’t know about me. If you read anything here you don’t like, that is on you. I may or may not be willing to discuss these things in other contexts with you. I […]

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You Have No Power Over Me – On Shame, Empowerment and Telling Stories

June 12, 2015

Last night, I was at a body positive underwear party (hosted by the amazing Pleasure Pie), and one of the exercises we did was to pair up with someone and tell them our life story in six minutes or less with a focus on how we have viewed our bodies. Once upon a time, an […]

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Kindergarten for Muscles

April 18, 2015

I talk about parkour a lot, and I worry that somehow people think this means that I’m actually good at it, when in fact I’m often the slowest and weakest in the class and spend a significant portion of my time feeling frustrated as I try to master new skills. However, one of the things […]

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Fat Kids Can’t Jump

November 29, 2014

In grade school, we used to have to do this thing called the President’s Physical Fitness Test. This was generally sprung on us with no warning, twice a year, and we would suddenly have to demonstrate and be evaluated on our ability to do sit-ups, push-ups, pull-ups, a standing broad jump, and a run. Please […]

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I Did a Thing

September 26, 2014

Eleven weeks ago, I tried my first parkour class. Seven weeks ago, I decided to sign up for a weekend long parkour event happening in Boston. I also made a commitment to myself that I would go to three classes a week between then and the event. I would give my training my all and […]

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