The Good Place review: Let’s watch Eleanor and Chidi fall in love

The Good Place takes a trip back through Eleanor’s tortured memories as she and Michael have a debate regarding free will

This week’s episode of The Good Place takes us back to the fake Good Place and to some moments we’ve desperately wanted to see.

Let’s recap…

Janet saved a complete record of the reboots before shutting down the neighborhood. And they’re in Janet’s VR device she created a few episodes back! Good to know they were thorough and smart before leaving it all behind.

We see Reboot 119. The one where Eleanor and Chidi say they love each other. We watch the moment where Chidi’s about to sneeze and Eleanor slips a Kleenex into his hand. Eleanor even gets Chidi hooked on popcorn shrimp!

We also see their confession of love at Mindy St. Clair’s — and not through her secret camera. Somehow it feels even more authentic when it’s not on a VHS.

But Eleanor’s takeaway from everything is that it was all a trick and she really is incapable of loving anyone else. It was all a ploy and none of it was real because of it!

”Put a bunch of attractive young people in stressful situations so they act like idiots and have sex with each other,” she explains. Everything’s been scripted. There’s no such thing as free will.

THE GOOD PLACE — “The Worst Possible Use of Free Will” Episode 308 — Pictured: Kristen Bell as Eleanor Shellstrop — (Photo by: Colleen Hayes/NBC)

She and Michael get into a debate about whether free will exists and it’s much deeper than you would imagine. Well, maybe not — Eleanor has studied ethics for the last year, it shouldn’t come as a surprise.

Eleanor goes down a Chidi hole after Michael proves that she has free will (showing her time after time how many times he’s thwarted his plans with her decisions). To get her to stop being so annoying, Michael dumps his iced tea over her head in one of the funnier bits of the episode. Mostly because, as the waitress says, it’s usually the younger woman throwing it at the older man.

As they pick up their friends at the airport, Eleanor apologizes to Michael and gives him a brilliant idea: Because they are probably the most free people in the world since they know the truth about the afterlife, they need to find someone who’s life is so great that they can influence the masses.

And Michael knows who!

Favorite moments

Tostitos presents a Public Library brought to you by Go Daddy!

What happened in reboot 444 to get Chidi in that purple space orb? And why will he never escape?!

Also apparently every place in Arizona is a stage for a porno once it closes. The library, the restaurant…

I think one of my personal favorite bits of this episode was Tahani’s centaur, Tahania, being an even more snobbish, condescending version of Tahani. It’s an incredibly perfect torture device.

Seeing Michael be evil again was also a treat. Ted Danson really works some magic playing all of the different sides of this character. Sometimes it’s hard to remember how evil Michael used to be just a season ago.

This episode of The Good Place ends with a glimpse back at the Bad Place HQ. Shawn has created an illegal door to Earth and he shoves Vicki through it to test it out. It works. This won’t go well.

Then again, when has anything on The Good Place really gone well?