Yahoo News The Good Place's Janet is even more important than we realised
Note: this article contains spoilers from the latest episode of The Good Place.
When we last saw The Good Place before its final mid-season break, an impatient Judge planned to delete humanity and give the entire Earth a reboot. Bit harsh? Just turn on the news for a few minutes and see if you really believe humanity is worth saving.
Fortunately, Team Cockroach don't have access to the internet in their version of the afterlife, so they continued to fight the Judge's ruling this week with some possible solutions and a little help from Timothy Olyphant along the way.
In the end, Chidi dug deep through all of his philosophical teachings to come up with a plan that everyone could get on board with. Instead of disciplining people with punishments that don't fit the crime, he proposed that a new Good Place should essentially be like, well... The Good Place, in that humans should learn how to improve their moral compass through a number of trials in the afterlife.
Once they pass, people reach the good or 'Best Place', and if they fail, then they're rebooted with a little voice in their head which helps remind them of what needs to change in subsequent trials.
The Judge seemed pretty impressed by the plan, and not just because Olyphant was standing there with his well-fitted jeans on. However, it's not until Janet chimed in that Team Cockroach sealed the deal.
As D'Arcy Carden's character pointed out, Janet was "nothing more than a PalmPilot in a cool vest" when the show started. Across four seasons, "Getting rebooted over and over again made me a better not-a-person than I've ever been."
Janet's short-but-sweet monologue sealed the deal, convincing The Judge, and subsequently Shawn, that humans deserve the same opportunity to grow.
This isn't the first time that Janet has saved everyone. Remember back in season three when Eleanor, Tahani, Chidi, and Jason hid out in her void to escape Bad Place demons? D'Arcy Carden's subsequent Emmy snub proves we probably are in The Bad Place for real right now, but more importantly, that episode in particular was also a key turning point in Janet's own evolution.
Speaking to Vulture, series creator Michael Shur explained that:
"If the way to really have empathy for people is to walk a mile in their shoes, [Janet] did the inverse of that: a bunch of people walked in her body for a decent amount of time."
However, Janet had already started to develop her own sense of self long before that. While Eleanor initially fought against the confines of the experiment to secure their (Good) place in the afterlife, Janet was evolving even then, forging meaningful friendships that transcended her initial "programming" (for want of a better word).
The bizarre five-way love triangle or "five-dimensional blob" that she eventually found herself in would have been unthinkable when the show first started, so it's a credit to both the writers and Carden herself that Janet's evolution has been so believable.
You only have to compare new episodes of The Good Place with the first few to see precisely how far Janet has come, both in terms of narrative and Carden's own — often improvised — performance.
Eleanor might technically be the star of the show, but Janet represents its beating heart, proving that even with a supposedly "perfect" character, there's always room to grow and change, no matter how omniscient you might be.
And therein lies the core message of The Good Place. D'Arcy Carden's character embodies the solution that ultimately saves the afterlife, but more than that, she also gives us hope... Hope that we can continue to grow and maybe, just maybe, we can one day hold up to four humans in our void and conjure Timothy Olyphant in the blink of an eye too.
For four seasons, Janet has reminded us time and time again that she's not a girl. And she was right. Janet is so much more than that.
In the immortal words of Neutral Janet, "These are my last words … end of words."
The Good Place airs on NBC in the US, with episodes premiering a day later on Netflix in the UK. You can also catch it on E4.
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