The Good Place: "What's My Motivation"

Being such a serialized comedy, The Good Place, is tasked with balancing its absurd humor with further developments in the plot. Sometimes it does both at the same time very well, but other times it seems to shift focus on an episode by epsode basis. Last week's episode did very little to move the overall story of the show forward, but it did feature some comedic character building moments, such as Jason and Janet's wedding or the bonding between "Fake" Eleanor and Tahani. "What's My Motivation" was far from absent of good comedic moments (particularly Michael interrogating Janet and Jason about their marriage), but for the most part this episode was all about setting up the events to come in the last two episodes of the season.

This episode picks up where last week's episode left off, with Tahani having devised a new plan to keep "Fake" Eleanor in The Good Place. Tahani's theory is that since "Fake" Eleanor has been trying to be a better person since arriving in The Good Place, perhaps they can start adding up the value of her actions in the afterlife, to prove that she actually does belong in The Good Place. "Fake" Eleanor goes along with the plan, trying to do nice things for the citizens of The Good Place, and repair her reputation in the community. Ultimately "Fake" Eleanor realizes the plan won't work, because the motivation behind all of her actions is self preservation, and therefore nothing she does can actually be considered altruistic in nature. Eventually Eleanor does the only thing that can truly make her worthy to live in The Good Place, which is deciding to sacrifice herself and voluntarily go to The Bad Place.

In the side stories, Michael discovers that Janet and Jason are married, after the two decided to take their relationship public. This leads to some pretty funny jokes between Michael's interrogation of Jason, and Jason's inability to understand that Janet isn't a real person, and Michael isn't her dad. Included in Jason's story is also a flashback to how Jason died. This part of the series is kind of wearing out its welcome. There are plenty of episodes where the flashbacks have given meaningful insight into situations and characters, but overall, they have become the least interesting part of the show. In episodes like last week's and this week's the flashbacks actually had the effect of making the characters featured in them look unrealistically cartoonish. In Jason's case, the show can sort of get away with that, but in Chidi's case last week, the flashback presented a version of Chidi that didn't feel true to the show.