Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Leslie Grossman, who portrays Eleanor's mother, is only nine
years older than Kristen Bell, who portrays Eleanor, which I
think you can kind of see in thein the show.
So she definitely must have beena young mother.
That's kind of creepy, actually.Welcome back to another episode
(00:32):
of the Rank. I'm John and today we're going
to be doing another episode of The good Place.
Now if you're enjoying these episodes, if you're just a fan
of the good place and enjoy consuming content about it,
please consider subscribing and or following like the episodes
comment, e-mail your questions and suggestions and whatever
else to info@therankpodcast.com.Please also consider becoming a
patron on our Patreon site at patreon.com/the Rank podcast.
(00:53):
Now I've welcomed you to the episode, but also welcome to a
new day for these episodes. We're going to be releasing The
Good Place every Thursday from now on instead of every other
Sunday. So hopefully that will be more
enjoyable for everyone. That means that also The Mindy
Project will be every Sunday. And when we finish doing The
Good Place, I'll move Married with Children to Thursdays and
and then it'll be every week, Married with Children on
(01:14):
Thursday, Taxi on Saturday, Mindy Project on Sunday until we
finish up. And then you guys can help me
pick the next sitcom. Now today we're ranking the 6th
episode of the third season of The Good Place titled A
Fractured Inheritance, written by Cassia Miller and directed by
Beth McCarthy Miller. Now, this has been out for a
while, so there's going to be spoilers.
I'm going to go through the episode in detail.
Well, in some detail, but there will definitely be spoilers.
(01:37):
So spoiler alert, the whole ideahere is, is we're trying to
figure out what's the best sitcom of all time.
We're ranking each episode of a series, and then we take the
average of the episodes and makethat the series average.
And that's how we figure out what is the best sitcom of all
time today. The Good Place starting with The
Potent Notables. So this episode aired Thursday,
(01:58):
November 1st, 2018. Looks like The Good Places
basically plateaued at this point, as it stayed about the
same, going from 2.672 million viewers to 2.718.
It got beat by Grey's Anatomy and crushed by Young Sheldon and
Thursday Night Football. Interestingly, Young Sheldon
actually just barely edged Thursday Night Football on Fox.
So naturally that leads me to ask who was playing.
(02:18):
And wow, what a bad game. The 49ers beat the Raiders 34 to
3. Yikes.
It also got beat by Tucker Carlson in its time slot again,
which is just really sad to me. Did it beat anything?
I mean, yeah. It beat everything else that was
on cable in its time slot, and it beat Supernatural.
So, you know, not great. I want to go back in time and
chastise people for not watchingthis.
(02:39):
Anyway, Eleanor refers to KaiserSoze.
This was a fictional master criminal played by Kevin Spacey
in The Usual Suspects. Eleanor then refers to Soze
groping all those people. So in 2017, Spacey was accused
of sexually harassing multiple people throughout his career.
He was exonerated in court for one of those things.
I don't think that that means he's actually exonerated in the
(03:02):
court of public opinion. Whatever, You know, The thing
is, Kevin, if you're watching this, if you hadn't been a prick
to everybody your whole career, people would have gotten behind
you after you got exonerated. Anyway.
Leslie Grossman, who portrays Eleanor's mother, is only nine
years older than Kristen Bell, who portrays Eleanor, which I
think you can kind of see in thein the show.
So she definitely must have beena young mother.
That's kind of creepy, actually.All right, so for the final
(03:24):
potent notable, we're doing somemore Tahani name dropping
tracking because she name drops a couple people in this episode.
Now, if you're enjoying or if you had previously enjoyed that,
I listed out all the things thatthat she name dropped throughout
the entire series. I'm not going to keep doing that
because Antonio says I can't. He says it's too long, so send
your angry comments to him if you do want to see it.
(03:45):
Nobody I wouldn't I wouldn't want to see that either way.
If you want to hear the entire list, you can just go back to
the previous episodes and listento him and just sort of add what
you know from these. Now in this episode, she says
she's good friends with Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, although
separate. She doesn't say I'm good friends
with Ben Affleck and Matt Damon.Like together it's like 2
separate things. But she says that Ben Affleck
has a crippling addiction to back tattoos and Matt has a
(04:08):
crippling addiction to Ben Affleck.
So. So it's fun stuff.
Anyway, those are the potent notables.
Let's go to the episode overview.
We open the episode close to where we left off last episode,
except that Eleanor is no longerin Budapest, nor is Michael
because he's weather, and she's back in the States to confront
her mom. Obviously her first question is
why hadn't Michael told her about this since he had told her
(04:28):
about everything else and it wasbecause he had just told her
that he had tortured her for centuries and that she had no
chance of making it into the good place so he didn't want to
be a bummer. Which, you know, that's pretty
good, but also damn that is pretty heavy.
The next question though is why did her mom fake her death?
Well, apparently her mom bid $30,000 on a date with Gene
Simmons. She outbid everyone by $29,800
(04:50):
which was a joke that landed forme and she she didn't want to
pay so she faked her death. So now we have the back story so
let's go confront it. But things don't go as planned
for Eleanor as she discovers hermom is in a pretty good
situation and seemingly being good to people.
We find out that not only is shehappily in a relationship with
some guy, but said guy has a little daughter whom Diana
Nedana is really good to. Furthermore, she is conformed to
(05:12):
suburban life and is running to be secretary of the PTA which
feels like a little bit of a stretch but whatever.
Now whilst Eleanor is coping with her mother having a
different life than what she expected to find, he's trying to
mend fences with her sister Camilla.
So she shows up at 1 of Camilla's art exhibits and
things don't go very well. At first.
I have to say that the impression I've had from
watching the show, Camilla seemslike a like a real brat and and,
(05:34):
and it continues here. Though I will say that Tani's
first apology is kind of a bullshit apology.
I don't think she was being insincere but she is basically
just like hey whatever you thinkI did, I'm really sorry.
For now. Contrition isn't just feeling
bad that someone has been hurt by you, it's taking
accountability for the hurt you cause, which is why this apology
is too vague to be taken seriously.
Now, I don't know that Camilla is right to reject it, but I can
(05:57):
understand why she does. Basically, we bounce between the
A story of Eleanor's reconciliation with her mom and
the B story of Tahani's reconciliation with her sister.
We do get a tiny bit of AC storywith the rekindling of Janet and
Jason's romantic feelings. It was cute, but there's really
not much there. What we do get from both the A&B
story is some really heartfelt and touching moments.
When Eleanor says that the reason it's bothering her so
(06:18):
much to see how well her mom is doing is because she wanted that
mom, why does Patricia, the stepdaughter, get to have that
mom? Why wasn't she good enough for
that? Why was she undeserving of it?
And that hit me pretty hard. And it felt very true.
Then the double whammy of Tahani's realization that the
rivalry between her and her sister that was forced by their
parents is what drives Camilla'sart.
We see it in her art as well. And there's a realization that
(06:40):
there's a fracture, A fractured inheritance, if you will.
He said it, He said it there. And it was caused by parents who
were wankers, the absolute biggest wankers on earth.
It's another incredibly touchingmoment.
Eleanor gets to have that same type of moment with her mom and
manages to give her good advice.Essentially, don't focus on an
escape route and enjoy the moment you're in.
(07:02):
I'm paraphrasing, but that's pretty much it.
And I thought it was really nice.
It was a little heavy-handed when they had the mom say
something to the effect of you turned into a good person.
Thank goodness for whomever helped you do that because we
know it wasn't me. Now this is meant to be an
obvious illusion to Chidi, and they really drive it home with
Michael coming clean to Eleanor about her experience in the
afterlife with Chidi and how shetold him she loved him, which
(07:24):
she had never told any boyfriendbefore.
But that's how the episode ends,so I suspect we'll be getting
some tension building between Eleanor and Sheedy in the next
one. Before we start talking about
the next one, though, let's findout how this one ranked a wank.
So the rank is where I rank the episode based on five
categories, story, acting, dialogue, episode coherence and
character relatability. I rank it on a scale of one to
(07:45):
five, one being the worst, five being the best.
And then I have a laugh counter where I tally up the amount of
times the episode made me laugh out loud, one point per laugh
out loud, and then that gets added to the score.
Now before I rank the episode, if you're enjoying this episode,
please leave a like down there and help us out.
It's you know, it really helps us spread the show.
So OK, on to the first category,which is story.
(08:05):
I gave a story of four and a half.
The story is very similar to last week's episode and that
it's about reconciliation between parent and child.
However, last week, because it was Jason, there wasn't any sort
of friction because he's a moron.
So so the story kind of falteredbecause of it.
This week though, it's Eleanor and Tahani who are basically
real people compared to Jason, which makes the story work.
There was a lot of heart to the story, which maybe makes me feel
(08:28):
more strongly for it. Not that there wasn't a heart
for Jason's by the way, just, you know, he's an idiot.
So let's go to acting, which is next category, which I give a
4.75. Everyone is fantastic as always.
They definitely got, I mean the feels this episode.
I think that Eleanor's mom is the only one that drives it down
from being a 5. And I don't mean that as a
knock, all right, just that she wasn't as good as everyone else.
So we go to dialogue, which I gave a four.
(08:49):
So normally I drop the dialogue score a little bit when the
episode isn't as funny. But while this episode isn't as
funny, it is quite touching and therefore the writing is very
good. So let's go to episode
coherence, which I gave a 4.25. I think that the Donna
Shellstrop angle of her becominga better person is nice and all,
but it felt a little too quick for forgiveness on Eleanor's
part. I'm not knocking it too hard for
that, but it just felt a little unbelievable and I don't know
(09:11):
that it coheres to her character.
I say that she has become a better person and it is, it is
kind of believable that she's capable of it, so I'm not going
to knock it down too far becauseof that.
So let's go to character relatability.
The last category, which I gave a 4.75.
I don't think I could be as forgiving as Alanor is in this
one, but I'd like to believe I could be.
Apologies usually go a long way for me and deflate me pretty
(09:33):
quickly, but a parent would be hard to forgive.
I think she felt a bit odd in this episode as well, like he
was just sort of hanging around being goofy.
I get not that that's unrelatable though.
I've certainly been in those situations where I'm just the
goofy guy in a third wheel situation.
But yeah, other than that, I mean, I felt a lot of empathy
for everybody in this episode. So now we go to the laugh
counter. And while this was a really good
(09:55):
episode, the laugh counter can kill a good episode or lift up a
bad episode, right? And in this case, I only had
six, only 6 laughs in this episode.
So it kind of puts it down. This puts the episode total at a
28.25, which means it's men the ochre.
This puts the series average at a 38.4, which is make keeps it
in the Holy Grail. Now that low laugh counter will
(10:16):
hurt you every time. Not at all a bad episode, just
not a funny 1. So that's what ends up hurting
its ranking. But thanks for listening and or
watching everyone. If you'd like to see a list of
our episodes and series rankings, you can do that on our
website at the rankpodcast.com. Remember to subscribe, review
and comment and please consider supporting us on our Patreon
site at patreon.com/the Rank podcast.
We'll get exclusive perks like access to our archived episodes
(10:38):
and Please remember to like the episode if you enjoyed.
But I will leave you with this. The name of this episode was
actually the working title for an M Night Shyamalan movie, Mr.
Glass. Welcome back to another
(11:02):
installment of John Explains theJoke.
This is where John makes a bad joke worse by explaining why it
should be funny. Please put your hands together
and get your tomatoes ready for John.
A fractured inheritance. Mr. Glass is a guy that his
bones just break all the time, so they fracture and it's
genetic, so he inherited it. Some genetic inheritance.
(11:24):
Fractured inheritance. I know it's probably too
cerebral, but you know what? I tested it with Zach and he
thought it was hilarious. Still not funny.
Still not funny.