Recap / The Good Place S2E02 "Dance Dance Resolution"

"...Which obviously never worked, because you're here, and you're back, so, good luck."

"I was a member of a sixty-person dance crew in Jacksonville. We were called "Dance Dance Resolution: We Resolve to Dance". One day, Donkey Doug and I got into a fight, because I'd framed his girlfriend for boogie board theft. So he started a new dance crew called "Hashtag Doug Life" and immediately challenged us to a dance-off. He said, "Meet us inside the abandoned orange juice factory at midnight." That night, as the clock struck twelve, me and my crew came together with a determination we had never shown before... and slashed all their tires. It was dope. The end. By Jason Mendoza."

— Jason

Michael reboots the neighborhood to try torturing Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, and Jason again. However, no matter what he does to modify it, Eleanor eventually figures out its true nature, over and over again (and during Attempt #649, Jason figured it out). Michael grows more frustrated as time goes on, even hitting rock bottom during Attempt #484 where he gorges himself on junk food and alcoholic drinks, but refuses to give up.

Michael launches Attempt #802. He goes outside to a neighborhood meeting, and nobody is there except Vicky, who says he's lost control of the experiment and the demons have gone on strike. Vicky complains that everyone is sick of the constant reboots, they often can't remember what their jobs are, and she herself is still upset about the size of her part. They have a list of demands, and Vicky says Michael will have to fit them into his system. Hers is to take over the next reboot and be a "main character". Michael is outraged, but Vicky threatens that if he doesn't comply with this, she will reveal the 800 reboots to Shawn.

Meanwhile, Eleanor is taking ethics lessons from Chidi again. She's bored and suggests they go outside, where they notice the town streets are empty. They notice a strange burning smell and follow it, finding a group of demons (including one lava monster named Todd who isn't wearing his human skin-suit) complaining about the constant reboots and of Michael's version of the Bad Place in general. Eleanor and Chidi are horrified to learn that they've literally been put through hell hundreds of times and got their memories erased and try to figure out what to do. They use Janet to escape and she takes them on the train to the Medium Place, where Mindy St. Claire greets them.

Mindy reveals that this is the sixteenth time Eleanor has come by here with Janet and some other human and is frustrated that they've forgotten to bring cocaine again. She explains that Eleanor, Janet and one or two of the other humans (usually Chidi, but sometimes Jason and/or Tahani) will come to the Medium Place to escape from Michael, but they would eventually end up going back to rescue whoever was left behind. Chidi says they need a plan, but everything he or Eleanor suggests is repeated back to them by Mindy. She pulls out a board consisting of a list of all the things they've tried before to defeat Michael, which include trying to seduce him, outright attacking him, or trying to psychologically screw with him.

Chidi and Eleanor try to go over their options. Chidi is discouraged and says it's pointless - they're trapped in an endless loop and they lose their memories every time they try to break out of it. Eleanor gets upset with him giving up and goes to complain about him to Mindy. Mindy is tired of her complaining, and says Eleanor and Chidi have it bad for each other. Eleanor denies this, but Mindy shows her a video she recorded from the sixth time they were at her home, showing Chidi and Eleanor in bed together professing their love for each other. Eleanor is stunned by this; from her perspective, they've only known each other for a few days and she considers Chidi to be an uptight and humorless dork but Mindy asserts there's a reason why they keep coming back to each other. Eleanor calls Janet and Chidi over to announce they're leaving and takes the tape back with her.

Michael is standing on a bridge, and Jason comes calling for anyone, so Michael takes him aside to bounce ideas off of, as he feels he's caught between a rock and a hard place - he's certain Vicky's plan would be a failure, but if he doesn't go along with them otherwise, she'll rat him out to Shawn. Jason then relays the story of how he and his old friend Donkey Doug were in a dance team, and then they got into a fight due to Jason framing Donkey Doug's girlfriend for stealing a boogie board, so Donkey Doug organized a rival dance team and challenged Jason's dance team to a dance-off, so Jason's team went there and slashed their tires. From something in there, Michael gets an idea.

Michael gets to Eleanor's house, where she, Chidi and Tahini are, and Jason joins them; Eleanor says they keep figuring out the puzzle of the "Good Place", so they're winning and he's losing. Michael says, actually, they're on the same page and he wants to team up with them.

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Tropes:

• Accidental Misnaming: In Michael's various attempts to reboot the neighborhood, Eleanor calls Chidi "Chibi," "Chili," and "Cheeto."
• Aesop Amnesia: Since Michael can easily erase their memories, any Character Development the humans achieve gets undone.
  Chidi: We are experiencing karma, but we can't learn from our mistakes! It's an epistemological nightmare!
• Amnesia Loop: The four humans and Janet spend half the episode trapped in one of these as Michael wipes their memories every time he reboots the neighborhood, forcing them to rediscover the truth of their situation every single time.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: When Eleanor asks Janet in Attempt #3 for people in the Neighborhood who could help her become a better person, her ideas for career options fitting that criteria consist of teachers, life coaches, and Instagram fitness models.
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • Michael drunkenly rants into his recorder, similar to the other times we've seen him talk into it... except the camera expands to reveal he's mouthing this all off to Eleanor.
  • Jason's story about "Dance Dance Resolution" seems to be building up to his team coming together and beating Donkey Doug's rival dance crew through hard work and The Power of Friendship... before he then reveals that they just slashed the other team's tires.
• Bee Afraid: In one of the reboots, Chidi is being chased by a swarm of bees at the same time that Eleanor is figuring out the truth.
  Eleanor: Oh, this is the Bad Place!
  Chidi: (running from the bees) Bees! Bees! Bees! Bees!
• Belligerent Sexual Tension: Mindy considers Chidi and Eleanor's bickering to be this, as they've hooked up several times before.
• Blackmail: Vicky gets Michael to let her run the show by threatening to tell Shawn about the 802 do-overs.
• Brick Joke: Vicky brings back her mediocre Australian accent during her discussion with Michael when she starts blackmailing him.
• Continuity Nod:
  • During his Drowning My Sorrows moment, Michael dresses up in the "stress hoodie" he was wearing during his fake Heroic BSoD last season. Apparently, Michael actually does wear that hoodie whenever he feels stressed and he didn't just pull it out of nowhere to guilt-trip Eleanor.
  • Continuing on from the last episode, Gunnar wants to be able to bite the humans. At least he's apparently pared down his requests to nibbling on the humans while they sleep.
  • Mindy St. Claire returns when Eleanor, Chidi, and Janet escape in the "final" reboot to the Medium Place, and her addiction to cocaine is also mentioned.
  • Chidi yet again believes he was sent to the Bad Place because he kept drinking almond milk despite knowing it was bad for the environment.
  • Jason reveals that framing Donkey Doug's girlfriend for boogie board theft in order to save their dance crew, unsurprisingly, ended much less neatly than he'd previously claimed and temporarily cost him his friendship with Donkey Doug.
• Creator's Apathy: invoked In-Universe; by Attempt #802, the other demons in the Neighborhood have long since lost any passion or motivation to continue on due to the many reboots, to the point where they smoke in public, openly complain about Michael ignoring the Good Old Ways of how torture is performed in the rest of the Bad Place, and even walk around without their human "skin-suits", clearly identifying them as supernatural creatures. As the demon "Kamaria" herself points out, "Who cares if [the humans] see us? They're just gonna get rebooted anyway."
• Dashed Plot Line: Due to the insane number of reboots, breaking 800, the actual length of time this episode covers can easily be several hundred years. They said the longest cycle was 11 months, but we see at least a handful foiled within the first few hours.
• Denser and Wackier: In-Universe; as the reboots go on, they become increasingly absurd and bizarre as Michael clearly starts to run out of ideas and the other demons start to care less and less about their jobs. Special mention should go to Attempt #3, which features an Obviously Evil smoking obelisk covered in glowing red runes.
• Determined Defeatist: Michael realizes halfway through the reboot cycle that he is obviously never going to make his plan work, yet he still has to try literally hundreds of more times - mainly because he doesn't know what else he can do.
• Drowning My Sorrows: During Attempt #484, Michael is a mess and resorts to drinking as he bitterly rambles to himself about how Eleanor keeps figuring out the truth behind the "Good Place".
• Dumbass Has a Point:
  • In the reboot where Jason figures out they're really in the Bad Place, much of his reasoning makes a bizarre kind of sense:
    • They all keep fighting with each another (something which he finds odd in a group of friends)
    • None of the TV's get the "NFL Redzone" channel (as a big football fan, this is a big clue that this isn't his idea of heaven)
    • And finally, his "soulmate" doesn't know anything about Blake Bortles (his favorite football player).
  • Despite Michael considering everything that happened in his life to be stupid, Jason actually manages to give Michael a bit of good advice in his inane story about his dance crew.
• Eating the Eye Candy: When Eleanor first meets Tahani in Attempt #3 and the latter comments on her large bosom, Eleanor looks right at Tahani's breasts with visible interest.
• Enemy Mine: Michael realizes that the situation has gotten completely out of his control and the only thing that might save him is to team up with the humans.
• Epic Fail: Attempt #108 represented a really bad failure for Michael, as Eleanor walked into his office while he was recording his thoughts and figured out she was in the Bad Place before her orientation even began! He also regards Attempt #659 — the one reboot where Jason pieced it together — an especially painful failure.
  Michael: (aghast) Jason figured it out? Jason?! (looks sick) This is a real low point. Yeah, this one hurts. Ow.
  • There's also another unknown reboot where (going by the placement of chairs she and the rest of the Neighborhood are sitting in) it seems that Eleanor figured out the twist literally in the midst of her orientation.
• Eternal Recurrence: Chidi calls their situation a "warped version" of this and name drops Nietzsche himself.
• "Eureka!" Moment:
  • This episode gives us a montage of these as Michael keeps putting the humans into different scenarios and yet each time, Eleanor figures out that they're actually in the Bad Place. Even Jason figured it out once. That one really hurt Michael.
  • Notably, Michael gets his own at the end of the episode after listening to Jason's bizarre story about his dance team, with him realizing that he can't survive on his own, and so needs to perform an Enemy Mine with the humans to get out from under Vicky's blackmail since all of the other demons are fed up with the experiment and he has no other potential allies.
• Failure Montage: Virtually the entire episode's first act is a montage of the various attempts Michael has made at torturing the humans, and how the humans figured it out that time. Michael's pride is in shreds by the end.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: When Mindy was first introduced, she was shown to be walking around naked because she was completely alone until then and wasn't expecting anyone to be coming by. When Eleanor, Chidi, and Janet see her here, she's fully clothed, meaning she's been expecting them to come back. She also doesn't look remotely surprised to see them, hinting that this has happened numerous times before.
• Flat "What": Eleanor is confused when Michael immediately agrees with her that the humans have a lot more power than the situation suggests and then directly offers to work with them.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: All the different resets have different themed signs for the neighborhood's restaurants. There is also the poster of all the plans the main four have tried, including "Stab with large knife," "Find Doug Forcett," and "Try to stuff Michael back into his magic lamp".
• Funny Background Event: Given the little amount of time each reboot is given, most montages have something funny going on only in the background. Some examples are:
  • Chidi getting frightened by an angry pig while at a farm with Eleanor and later getting chased by a swarm of bees.
  • During the attempt where Jason figured it out, Michael really went overboard and just decked Eleanor's entire wall in clown paintings. Additionally, Michael's expression becomes one of slowly dawning horror as Jason's "Eureka!" Moment continues on during this reboot.
• "Groundhog Day" Loop: The constant reboots functionally serve as this, with Eleanor realizing over and over again that they're in the Bad Place and only the demons and Mindy St. Claire (more or less) remembering the reboots' events.
• Homage: invoked According to Word of God, the episode was largely written as one to both Groundhog Day and Edge of Tomorrow in terms of how it utilized the "Groundhog Day" Loop — particularly in the concept of how the first act can be "on repeat," but the "trick" from a writing perspective is to then have the time loop go Off the Rails to incite drama.
• Humiliation Conga: Michael is subjected to one in this episode, as the humans keep on realizing they're in the Bad Place... at least 800 times.
• I Have a Family: As part of the reboot montage we see Michael approaching the button that reboots Janet and activating the "beg for her life" failsafe. In one clip she asks him who will look after her pet birds, and in another, she claims to be pregnant with his baby.
• I Made Copies: Eleanor takes the tape of her and Chidi having sex and confessing their love. Mindy says, "Oh no, it's my only copy, don't," in a sarcastic tone that clearly means it isn't.
• Irony: In many ways, Michael is tortured more than his human subjects through his increasing panic and desperation to make their psychological torment of one another actually work.
• Kick the Dog: Vicky specifically mocks Michael for not being able to pull off bow ties. Amusingly, this seems to be one of the few things that legitimately offends him.
• Memory Gambit: Defied - as the second attempt was undermined with a note Eleanor delivered to herself through Janet, Michael is on to the trick and makes sure Eleanor can't repeat it again while going through with his third attempt. But this cycles back to why it didn't work in the first attempt, as moving too fast on the literal torture clues them in on this not being The Good Place and both Michael and the demon cast members start getting sloppy on the details. When they go to Mindy for the eleventh time, she actually started keeping track of what has happened to them and the many different plans they devised that didn't work.
• "No. Just… No" Reaction: Eleanor's reveal in Attempt #11 starts with this, as she states that no version of Heaven would ever have a three-hour spoken word Jazz concert just for her.
• Noodle Incident: Several reboots from the Failure Montage are this, such as the one where everyone is inexplicably hiding from a levitating clown and the one with Chidi being chased by bees. Many of the plans written on Mindy St. Claire's board also qualify.
• Off the Rails: The main foursome consistently manages to figure out the deception, resulting in Michael becoming desperate to keep things together and the other demons becoming exasperated with having to go through the process again.
• Overly Preprepared Gag: It's quite mind-boggling to realize how much effort must have gone into creating the dozens of blink-and-you'll-miss-it gags in this episode.
• Post-Stress Overeating: In addition to drinking, Michael does this during Attempt #484. He complains about all the weight going to his thighs.
• Pun-Based Title: Take a wild guess. It's the name of Jason's dance crew.
• Right Behind Me: One of the failed attempts has Eleanor tell Janet that Chidi sucks while he's standing behind them and can hear everything she says.
• Running Gag:
  • Eleanor never pronounces Chidi's name correctly every time she first meets him in each reboot.
  • After he learns yet again that he's in the Bad Place, Chidi believes that he was sent to the Bad Place for drinking almond milk while alive despite knowing about the negative environmental impact.
  • During the initial montage of Michael's attempts, Janet keeps having her "panicking and begging for her life" reaction as he goes to reboot her.
  • Mindy's addiction to cocaine also comes back and is mentioned.
• Scary Stinging Swarm: During one of the reboots, Chidi is in the background being chased by a swarm of bees while Eleanor is in the foreground figuring out yet again that they're actually in the Bad Place.
• Seen It All: Mindy, whose memory isn't being wiped with the reboots, is no longer surprised when the humans and Janet show up at her house. If anything, she's just frustrated that they never remember to bring her cocaine.
• Shipper on Deck: Mindy has become one for Chidi and Eleanor.
• Ship Tease: This episode lays it on thick for Eleanor and Chidi, who've hooked up in various previous reboots and even confessed their love for each other once. Played for Laughs in Attempt #218, where Eleanor and Tahani are made into each other's soulmate.
• Shout-Out:
  • Eleanor initially calls Janet "busty Alexa" when she's trying to summon her in Attempt #3 before she remembers Janet's name.
  • Furthermore, during one of her automatic attempts to beg for her life, Janet tells Michael that she had just gotten tickets to Hamilton.
    Janet: ...and there's a rumor that Daveed Diggs is coming back!
  • Among the list of failed plans that the humans have previously tried against Michael (or at least those that have been recorded by Mindy) include "Find Ray Donovan but an angel", "Indecent Proposal [Michael]", and "Shawshank our way out".
• Smart Ball: In one reboot, everything lines up so that Jason is the one to first put the pieces together and realize they're in the Bad Place. Michael is, understandably, annoyed at this revelation.
• Spotting the Thread: No matter what Michael tries to do to keep them oblivious, the humans keep figuring out the truth. At one point, he managed to tip off Jason first because he didn't accommodate him and his idea of heaven.
• Sunk Cost Fallacy: During his Drowning His Sorrows rant, Michael blurts out how he's been lying to Shawn about how successful the second attempt at the experiment was (by this point he's on v.484) but is no longer in a position where he can admit the truth, despite how dangerous this is for him, because he's now in too deep.
• Take That!:
  • Eleanor does not have flattering opinions on clam chowder, referring to it as both "a savory latte with bugs in it" and "hot ocean milk with dead animal croutons".
  • Michael tries to encourage Vicky to stay on his side by claiming that if they're able to make the whole scenario work, she might even get the "Jared [Fogle] from Subway account" in terms of designing future torture scenarios.
  • Amusingly subverted; Tahani claims she was Taylor Swift's best friend, but Tahani herself had a better best friend. However, instead of this being a dig at Taylor Swift, Eleanor instead uses Tahani's statement as evidence of her really belonging in the Bad Place.
• Time-Compression Montage: An episode-long example, compressing hundreds of years' worth of action into the regular 22 minutes.
• Title Drop: Jason's sixty-person dance crew on Earth is revealed to have been called "Dance Dance Resolution."
• Totally Radical: Spoofed in Attempt #11, where Michael (who was participating in a jazz concert) angrily rants in a weird string of pseudo-Roaring Twenties-style lingo after Eleanor figures out yet again that she's not in the Good Place.
• Villain Protagonist: The first half of the episode is told from Michael's perspective. There really isn't any other option considering he's the only main cast member who's not having his mind erased every few months.
• Wham Line:
  • Mindy bluntly informing Eleanor, Chidi, and Janet that this is the sixteenth time they've shown up in the Medium Place quickly highlights just how expansive and trapped both the humans and Michael are in their Eternal Recurrence stalemate.
  • Michael telling the humans at the end of the episode "I wanna team up with you guys."
• Wisdom from the Gutter: Michael laments his problems to Jason simply because he has no one else to talk to. He clearly does not expect Jason to be any help, considering Michael knows everything that happened in his life and it was all stupid, yet Jason actually is able to provide a story that inspires Michael to try a new solution to his problem.
• The Worf Effect: Inverted. To show how the humans keep beating Michael, one reboot has Jason figure it out. Michael even lampshades that this is a particularly humiliating failure.
  Michael: This is a real low point. Yeah, this one hurts. Ow.
• "Too Young to Die" Lamentation: Jason wails about this during the reboot where they're presented with an obelisk that will transport them to the Bad Place.
  Jason: I'm too young to die! And too old to eat off the kids' menu! What a stupid age I am!

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