TV

D’Arcy Carden Just Gave Us The Best Episode Yet Of ‘The Good Place’

The only thing better than one Janet is when everyone is Janet.

by Patrick Lenton  10 December 2018
The Good Place Season 3 recap Janets

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Isn’t it GREAT when you love and respect something or someone and they live up to your expectations and you get to wallow in the sunshiney feeling of validation? Well, that’s what the latest episode of The Good Place Season 3 just gave us: sweet, sweet validation. I LOVE to say I told you so.

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The episode, aptly and succinctly titled ‘Janet(s)’, could simply be described as a Tour De France by actress D’Arcy Carden, who we already knew was pretty amazing.

In it, she basically plays all the main characters, as well as herself and a bunch of other Janets — and it’s breathtakingly hilarious and clever. Honestly.

But while that probably would have been enough to wow everyone on its own, the swarm of Janets wasn’t just a cute gimmick — it was a narrative tool that helped push (and shove) the characters and the plot to the place they have been slowly meandering towards all season, and the payoff is absolutely worth it.

Combined with some of their usual gently excellent jokes, some beautiful guest stars, and a gorgeous new twist, this episode has to be considered amongst the best of the entire show.

Janet(s)

So, after last episode’s big martial-arts extravaganza, Janet transports Michael, Eleanor, Tahani, Chidi and Jason into her void — and there are unexpected consequences. Honestly, the show is at its best when it uses that line to guide it: “and there are unexpected consequences”.

The consequences are that all the humans turn into Janets as well.

What this gives us, apart from a cool visual gag, is some of the best comedy acting — mostly from D’Arcy Carden — that we’ve seen on our screens this year. She does beautiful imitations of each of the humans, perfectly mimicking the sing-song quality and doofus-like slouch of Jason, the brash bluster of Eleanor, the churning anxiety of Chidi and the poised confusion of Tahani.

Even before they help us out by giving them all outfits for differentiation, you KNOW the characters that D’Arcy is depicting, sometimes from a simple arched eyebrow. She’s just that good.

The dialogue is particularly on point in this episode too, with Janet immediately flagging who she’s playing with very recognisable lines, which is a testament to both the strength of the character development and writing in this show.

“Billy Joel! I Found it on Etsy! There was nowhere to park! Did you fill up the Brita?” says Jason/Janet, imitating things that white people say.

And this is the thing — they could have left it at just the BASIC level of one actress playing everything, but probably my favourite part of the show is when Eleanor uses the “we all look like Janet” ruse to try to trick Chidi into talking about his feelings for her, so D’Arcy Carden imitates Eleanor imitating Jason.

“Back in Jacksonville there was this guy in my 80 person dance crew named Stank Toby,” she says, convincingly.

AND THEN imitates Jason imitating Eleanor, which gifts us with probably my biggest laugh from the episode:

“I’m Arizona shrimp horny!”

In This House We Stan D’Arcy Carden And Other Youth Speak

I’m just so grateful that The Good Place recognises what a searing ball of talent and delight D’Arcy Carden is, and uses her for such a weird and wonderful end goal.

Outside of playing Janet (and Bad Janet and Neutral Janet), you might also have seen D’Arcy on HBO’s Barry, or even from her pretty excellent recurring role on Broad City. She’s also one of the world’s best improvisers, having studied and performed for years at New York’s UCB theatre.

She’s a regular on podcasts like Comedy Bang Bang and I highly recommend listening to her on the delightful Off Book, the improvised musical podcast in which her episodes are a genuine highlight.

Anyway, it’s no accident that she’s PERFECT for this episode — she’s almost uniquely qualified.

The Good Place Knows What It’s Doing

The cool thing is that this episode has been planned since season 2. As show creator Mike Schur says in this interview with The Mary Sue:

“The idea was immediately, Janet takes everybody into her void, and they’re all Janets. Part of the process was we started rehearsing very early, because we got the actual cast to do the scenes, we filmed it so D’Arcy could watch their mannerisms and stuff.”

The ambitious concept took a lot of inspiration from the performances of Tatiana Maslany in the extremely clone-heavy show Orphan Black.

In the same interview, Carden says she watched the tapes and listened to the audio about “a million times, like daily” in order to prep for the role, and also had to contend with some pretty hilarious arcane VFX.

“There was a long pole with a literal pair of lips, plastic lips on it exactly at my lip height, and it was on a lazy susan that was controlled by some dude, so I had to sort of hug air and kiss these lips and we’d start spinning and I couldn’t smile or laugh. Kissing was one of the funniest, wildest parts, and then I had to kiss Kristen [Bell], but it had to match exactly the head tilt … every inch had to match up … it was like surgery almost.”

“Holy Motherforking Shirtballs. We’re In The Good Place!”

The multiplications of Janets set so many things into motion — such as forcing the frustratingly recalcitrant Chidi to finally resolve the creeping romantic tension between him and Eleanor, which really needed to happen.

It also, quietly, reconfirmed the actual greatest love story in The Good Place: Janet and Jason. That one heartbreakingly cute scene where they discover the MySpace style shrine to Jason in Janet’s void shows us that their love is still waiting to be resolved and it will hopefully be beautiful when it happens. Janet is becoming more human every day, and the reality of their love more plausible.

It also finally confirmed the whole point of season 3 — the the point system governing entry to The Good Place is broken. The early part of the series was weirdly open-ended, with the humans running around Earth desperately trying to game the system.

But the problem is that we KNEW it couldn’t last, because we weren’t going to watch them die of old age and re-attempt entry to heaven. It’s a shame we couldn’t have gotten to “Don’t Let the Good Life Pass You By” earlier — the episode where they meet Doug Forcett and begin to suspect the system is broken — because it confirmed that the season has had an end goal.

But now that we’ve gotten here, it once again completely shifts all the stakes in the game. It’s a classic The Good Place twist, which is less flashy than the other twists, but potentially farther reaching.

And with only three more episodes of Season 3 to go, and a confirmed fourth season coming, the fact that they are now, ACTUALLY and properly in The Good Place is so exciting. You can bet there will be more of those “unexpected consequences” they do so well.

The Good Place is currently streaming on Netflix, but unfortunately we won’t get the rest of Season 3 until January :(

Patrick Lenton is the Entertainment Editor at Junkee. He tweets @patricklenton.