WiC Watches: The Good Place season 4

THE GOOD PLACE — “A Chip Driver Mystery” Episode 406 — Pictured: Benjamin Koldyke as Brent Norwalk — (Photo by: Colleen Hayes/NBC)

Episode 406: “A Chip Driver Mystery”

At last, “A Chip Driver Mystery” is the Good Place episode I’d been waiting for all season. Enough with the intrigues and the kidnappings and Jason looking dope in a suit; I want to see if human beings are capable of improvement.

As it ends up, the answer is “maybe.” My favorite thing about The Good Place is how it deals with the minutia of morality. Brent Norwalk isn’t a dictator or a murderer, but he is a bad person, or at least, not quite a good one. He’s entitled and unthinking and offensive to people around him even he doesn’t intend to be, modeling characters in his awful (but hilarious) mystery novel after people in the neighborhood and describing them in thoughtless, tasteless terms. (“Tahani has an accent like the queen of England but without any of the old gross face parts.”) He’s bad, but he’s the kind of low-grade bad people deal with every day, the kind of bad so normalized many don’t even think of it as bad if they don’t have the proper context. The Good Place — or the Good Bad Place, or whatever they call where they are — is supposed to give him that context, but even then, are his habits too dug in? Can people change who they are if they change their environment?

I don’t see this show pulling a “hell wins” twist at the end, so I’m pretty sure the ultimate answer will be “yes,” but it’s in getting there that The Good Place finds meaning. That’s also how it interests me, because apparently I’m a boring foot of a person who requires my comedy come with moral life lessons. Happily, here we get both. The passages from Brent’s book — Six Feet Under Par, a title I immediately loved — had me guffawing throughout. “She had legs like Jessica Rabbit from that movie,” Brent writes of Scarlett Pakistan, the character inspired by Tahani. “Her long flowing locks smelled like the moon at twilight on a par 4.” NBC could release that book and I’d probably buy it.

But would that knock points off my afterlife score? “A Chip Driver Mystery” dives also into the ethical implications of ironic enjoyment. Is it appropriate to laugh at how utterly clueless Brent’s book is, as Tahani and Simone do, when he is, in his slow meandering way, improving bit by bit? Is there any duty to help him along? Or, as Simone argues, is there no obligation to tolerate his kind of disrespectful behavior? Is the moment when Tahani boils over and tells Brent exactly how ridiculous his book is a point for or against her? “Chip Driver is either a private eye or the quarterback for the Chicago Bears or the world’s strongest president. He cannot be all three!”

Like most philosophical questions, I don’t think there is one single answer to this, but Michael does outline a solid operating principle, which is more useful anyway. “What matters isn’t if people are good or bad. What matters is if they’re trying to be better today than they were yesterday.”

The Good Place is better than it was yesterday. See you tomorrow.

The Good Bullet Points

• I laughed at how Bad Janet’s fart lasts through the intro.
• I loved how Tahani was preparing herself for the “Hottest Savior of the Week” award even though Eleanor had clearly rigged it in her own favor. Hope springs eternal.
• Just two name drops from Tahani today: Elon Musk and Silvio Berlusconi. She was seated between them once at a party. The horror.
• “That’s how I got my nickname: the defendant.”
• Will we ever meet Dumb Shorts Kathy?