Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
And immediately after that, we're getting fart jokes.
Not the typical. Affair we've come to expect from
the Good Place, but they make. It work.
Eleanor is blaming the sound on her chair, which is fine, not
super funny or anything. But then Jason in all
earnestness says your chair smells bad.
Which I mean it. It almost feels lazy like.
When all else fails, throw to the idiot.
But I don't care. I loved.
(00:20):
It it made me laugh. Good old fashioned stupidity.
(00:42):
Welcome back to another episode of The Rank.
I'm John and today we're going to be doing another episode in
my The Good Place rewatch slash watch along and ranking.
Now, if you're enjoying these episodes or if you're just a fan
of the Good Place and enjoy consuming content about it,
please consider subscribing and we're following like the
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(01:03):
patron on our Patreon page at the patreon.com/the Rank
podcast, where you can get access to all of our archive
episodes now, today. We're ranking.
The third episode of the third season, The Good Place, titled
The Snow Plow, written by Joe Mandy and directed by Beth
McCarthy Miller. For the sitcoms that have
already been out for a long time, I'm not going to worry as
much about spoilers. So there's your spoiler alert.
There will be spoilers in this if you haven't already watched
(01:25):
the episode. So let's find out how this one
stacks up, starting with The Potent Notables.
This episode aired Thursday, October 11th, 2018 and went from
2.958 million viewers to 2.708 million viewers.
So it keeps losing viewership, which just makes no sense to me
at all. I don't understand what we were
thinking back then. I watched back when it was
coming out. What were you guys doing?
Superstore, The Good Places leadin Beat the Good Place with
(01:47):
3.012 million viewers. All right, so let's go to the
competition and went up against Grey's Anatomy on ABC, which got
6.719 million viewers, and YoungSheldon, which had 11.184
million viewers on CBS. And you know what?
I've never watched Young Sheldon, but I still feel like
really Young Sheldon over The Good Place.
Come on, come on, man. It also had Thursday Night
(02:07):
Football to compete with on Fox,which won the night with 14.703
million viewers. And in case you're wondering.
The Eagles beat the Giants 34 to13.
Yay. It did beat Supernatural again,
but it was the premiere of Supernatural season on the CWO
and it did a pretty respectable 1.492 million viewers.
Now on Chidi's Smart board underlocal news, the first story is
(02:28):
titled Representative Sackett, indicted on 231 counts of fraud.
The picture accompanying it is executive producer Morgan
Sackett. So one inside joke for them.
So Kirby Howell Baptiste, who plays Simone, talked about what
drew her to the role in the 1st place.
Well, one, I was a huge fan of the Good Place.
I watched since season 1. So you have Chiti who is very
freaked out by the things he doesn't understand and that
(02:50):
causes him great anxiety. And then they created this
character who is similar to him in so many ways, but also
completely opposite to him. And that the unknown doesn't
frighten her. The unknown actually excites
her. And and on our chemistry with
Chiti or William Jackson Harper,well, Will and I have really
good chemistry and it helped to know his character from watching
it as a viewer. Simone comes from a logical
place and he often comes from a philosophical place.
(03:12):
So that's where we butt heads. But working with Will's very,
very easy and I think that shows.
End Quote. It does show Kirby.
It does. So some more Tahani name
dropping tracking, which I enjoydoing.
Please leave a comment if you don't, because I think Antonio
is going to splay something in here to say that he doesn't.
You got me. But I guess I don't care.
(03:34):
I'm curious if Antonio has a pulse on the heartbeat of
America here. God Bless America.
I know, right? She in this one, she intimates
that she dated Tom Brady, which was fun, and that he wasn't her
type. So she said I'm with her good
friend Giselle, meaning Giselle Butch.
Yeah, we. Got it.
We always get it. OK, so to recap, she apparently
once played a drinking game withRyan Reynolds and Blank Lively
(03:55):
at their Macro biotic farm. She had at least a Bono, Taiko,
Waititi, Anna Hay, The Edge, TheQueen, The Rock, Thom York, Phil
the Swinton, Tiger Woods, Tim Cook, Tim Gunn and Tom Brady in
her contacts list. On her phone.
Malcolm Gladwell and Cormac McCarthy wrote blurbs for her
book. She donated all her clothes to
Goodwill, which is what she called Prince William since he
married a commoner. Deepak Chopra and Will I Am
(04:16):
we're special guests on a cruise.
For her book, she uses Nicole Kidman's Cryogenic Anti Aging
Chamber while receiving a test. From the judge to see if she can
get to the good place, she. Walks by rooms that have all
that all have people she knows talking about her and these are
the names that we see on the doors that she walks by.
Blue Ivy Carter Northwest PrinceWilliam is Prince William of
Wales, Prince Harry and Prince Who then Johnny Wallace, Stephen
(04:37):
Hawking. Fergie was the Duchess of York,
Sarah Ferguson and Fergie Black Eyed Peas.
We don't see this, but she says that Freddie Mercury and Winston
Churchill were behind one of thedoors.
Also, Paul McCartney is her godfather.
She worked for Baz Luhrmann as his muse and apparently she did
a brief stint as an actress in which she stood around and had
Baz throw glitter on her. She says she's gotten pretty
good at lying because of hangingout with Johnny Depp, presumably
(04:59):
spending time with him in his bird sanctuary.
She says she's been there, she has a fake demon, says she
shoved hot dogs down John Wayne's throat, and Tahani's
robot says she's been to Elon Musk's underwater mansion.
Naturally, the real Tahani says she actually has been there.
She mentions that Kyra Sedgwick is a dear friend, she saw a
waiter give the wrong T to Russell Crowe, and she went
paragliding with Pimple, Middleton and Gibraltar.
(05:20):
She says that she was on James Franco's ironic trolley.
She's dated to Hemsworth brother, of course.
She says that she's dated one named Larry who is not a real
person. Also, she ends up dating him
again in this episode she's hidden from Javier Bardem and
Vanessaessa Redgrave panic room.She's snogged Ryan Gosling
multiple times. She mediated conflict between
her friends Scary Sport, Posh and Baby which are the Spice
Girls and the the mediation was between the Spice Girls and
(05:43):
Desmond Tutu. She has a lifelong French with
Barry Diller that started from Trust Falls, gave Mark
Zuckerberg advice about being good enough so that he would let
Eduardo Savarin go. Also she was the reason that
Mark dropped the from Facebook. But wait, there's more.
She's good friends with Taylor Swift, friends with Kanye and
best friends with Beyoncé. Princess Diana and Maggie Smith
are her godmothers. Malala Yousafzai and Kylie
(06:05):
Minogue wrote the foreword for her diary.
And she had Princess Stephanie of Monaco and Posh and Becks
with Dori and David Beckham at her 2006 fundraiser for stem
cell research in Barcelona. Took forever.
That's a lot of name dropping. So let's go to the episode
overview. We open the episode where we
left off the previous, as Good Place often does and is a
mechanism I really enjoy. It does feel like this show was
(06:27):
built for streaming, but it was on network TV, so go figure.
This episode is following the gang, but really it's about
Michael and Janet. We start off with them getting
harangued by the judge. Maya Rudolph was always fun.
And immediately after that, we're getting fart jokes.
Not the typical. Affair we've come to expect from
The Good Place, but they make itwork.
Eleanor is blaming the sound on her chair, which is fine, not
super funny or anything. But then Jason in all
(06:50):
earnestness says your chair smells bad.
Which I mean it almost feels lazy.
Like when all else fails, throw to the idiot.
But I don't care. I loved.
It it made me laugh. Good old fashioned stupidity.
I guess I'm just a mark. What we also get here is a lot
of elapsed time and the extent to which Michael and Janet have
tried to intervene. Michael is convinced that the
(07:10):
group must stay together, but till when?
Michael is this like for eternity in his mind.
Another way they intervene is that they blocked Tahani from
banging Jason, which when she did that before it seemed to go
fine, so I'm I'm not sure why itwas necessary to stop it from
happening. And they lead her right into the
arms of Larry Hemsworth. Well back into I suppose.
The joke here is that the guy isvery handsome and fit but has
(07:31):
insanely low self esteem becausehe's still the other Hemsworth
brother, which it's pretty funny.
It's good to the joke works well.
They let a year go by and lo andbehold, Janet and Michael have
found a way to get the Group A whole bunch of fancy equipment
somehow and Tahani has gotten engaged to Larry.
I assume the the reason the dynamic there works is that they
both have complexes about the attention their siblings get,
(07:51):
but this engagement effectively ends the study group, which
sends Eleanor on a tailspin. Michael convinces her to be
vulnerable, but she gets. Shot.
Down and spins out some more, but there's clearly real growth
happening for everyone here and for some reason Michael
especially is just not seeing it.
Michael gets it in his head thathe and Janet should go back to
the judges borders and reset thetimeline.
(08:11):
Do it all over again, but do it right and get them all together
immediately, not a year later. It takes a little bit, but he
convinces Janet and they open the door to the other world, I
guess. And just as they're about to
step through it, Eleanor, Chidi,Tahani and Jason show up and are
like, what? The fork?
So that's the whole episode. Let's go to the rank A wank.
(08:33):
The rank is where I rank the episode based on five
categories, story, acting, dialogue, episode coherence, and
character relatability. And I rank it on a scale of one
to five, one being the worst, five being the best.
And then I add a point for everylaugh out loud that I have,
which is the laugh counter. And that gets added to the
score. So the first category is story,
which I gave a 3 1/2. So the story is the end of the
study group. Seen from the perspective of a
(08:53):
fugitive, Michael and Janet, that's a pretty good story.
It's not great. It's it's a little broad.
Still enjoyable though. So let's go to acting, which I
gave A5. Acting is top notch as always,
and the guest star they got to play, Larry Hemsworth, was a lot
of fun. That was kind of a hard role to
play and the guy seemingly nailed it.
So the next category is dialogue, which I also gave A5.
You'll see when we get to the laugh counter, but my goodness
(09:14):
are the are these writers good? Even with dumb fart jokes, they
find a way to make it a feeling.Let's go to episode coherence,
the next category, which I gave a 3.
It's a little. All over the place.
Here, in terms of the growth of the characters and the coherence
of them to the series, it's essentially A5.
But there are some things here that don't really seem to
cohere. Like how did Janet and Michael
buy anything for them? How do they procure computers
(09:34):
for them? How are they able to purchase
the lottery scratch off ticket that is a winner and allows
Eleanor to stay? What are they doing with their
time? They literally spend all their
time watching the study group from the journalism office.
How do they know what's going onwith any of them outside the
study group? It just felt a little cobbled
together and I don't think it helps that they tried to advance
through a full year in one episode.
(09:56):
So let's go to character relatability, which I gave a 3
1/2. I think when they do this huge
time passage, it makes it harderto relate to what's going on.
I think that we know them all really well, but it still makes
it harder to buy their group camaraderie.
I just think they're trusting the audience to just appreciate
what has already happened. But what we also know is that
this is a really different situation.
I don't know. It's, it's not necessarily bad,
(10:17):
it's just not as good as the relatability usually is in this
show. I mean, I still find everyone
relatable. It's just not as much as I would
have liked to. But that leads us to the laugh
counter, which was a 19. So that's a pretty significant
laugh counter and puts the episode total at a 39, which
means it's the holy and this puts the series average to a
38.7, which is also in the Holy Grail.
(10:40):
So 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 ourwebsite at the rank with John
and zach.com. Remember to subscribe, review
and comment. Please consider supporting us on
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where you can get access to all of our archived episodes.
And I'll leave you with this. Why did Mindy Saint Clair show
up in this episode? Why is that?
(11:00):
Because she heard snowplow and assumed they were talking about
her. It's getting worse.
(11:24):
Acting is top Nigel top butt pity padu PA pao.
He is malfunctioning.