Recap / The Good Place S2E04 "Existential Crisis"

"Okay, I know what you're thinking. Birth is a curse, and existence is a prison. But don't think about that. Don't be sad, you guys."

"No, no. This is good. [Michael]'s having an existential crisis. It's a sort of anguish people go through when they contemplate the silent indifference of our empty universe. Look, the good news is, if he can work through this, it's the first step towards understanding human ethics."

— Chidi

When Chidi realizes that Michael's immortality prevents him from being able to engage with human ethics, he tells Michael to consider how it would really feel if he were to undergo the possibility of his existence ending through "retirement". Michael becomes paralyzed with horror when he grasps the concept of death, experiencing an existential crisis. Eleanor calls Chidi out for "breaking" Michael, but Chidi argues it gets Michael to truly understand the human perspective of things and asks her to consider her own formative experiences with the concept of death. Eleanor recalls an incident in her childhood when her pet dog died (which was her mother Donna's fault, as she'd left the dog locked in the car on a hot day, causing it to suffocate, and Donna callously told Eleanor not to get sad over it because she didn't want to deal with it) and the day of her father's funeral; she resents the fact that she never had a loving family that was there for her emotionally. To avoid arousing any suspicion from the other demons, Eleanor tells Michael ignore his existential dread by pushing it down.

Meanwhile, Tahani is tortured by having her birthday party for Gunnar overshadowed by an extravagant one planned by Vicky; Tahani is miserable despite knowing Vicky's plan and laments her character flaws that enable such superficial problems to affect her. At the same time, Michael arrives to the party, where it turns out Eleanor's advice has caused him to replace his existential crisis with a stereotypical midlife crisis, which includes him dressing up in flashy suits, driving a fancy sports car, getting a tattoo, and having Janet pose as his vacuous trophy wife. Chidi determines this is less psychologically productive.

At the end, Eleanor explains to Michael that sadness over death is intrinsic to humanity; humans are always "a little sad" since they know their lives will end someday. She then tells him that it's perfectly okay to feel miserable, and he needs to learn to express his misery and not just bottle it up since it'll "leak out" anyway eventually. Michael thanks her, and Chidi decides their studies can move forward. Jason praises Tahani and tells her she's a good person who throws amazing events, and they sleep together; both enjoy it, but Tahani wants to talk about it afterward while Jason is oblivious.

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Tropes:

• An Aesop: Everyone is fundamentally saddened and scared of death to some degree. However, that's natural, and it's okay to feel anxiety about your existence possibly ending one day. The important thing is to recognize that and learn to express your pain in a healthy manner so you can move on with your life and not be mired in denial or hopelessness.
• The Anti-Nihilist: The lesson Eleanor gives Michael is that even if all humans are terrified of death to some degree, they don't always let it define them and can instead let their actions define who they are.
  Eleanor: You're experiencing what it's like to be human. All humans are aware of death, so we're all a little bit sad all the time. That's the deal with being human.
  Michael: [bitterly] Sounds like a crappy deal.
  Eleanor: [gives him a sad smile] It is. [...] And in the words of a very wise Bed, Bath, and Beyond employee I once knew: Go ahead and cry all you want. But you're gonna have to pay for that toilet plunger.
• Bathos: The flashback showing Eleanor's emotional breakdown after seeing the family pack of toothbrushes in the Bed Bath and Beyond. The scene is genuinely sad in that it shows Eleanor not only going through an existential crisis but finally processing her grief over her father's death... but it's also hilarious in how she cries into a toilet plunger instead of the family-size pack of tissues offered by the Bed Bath and Beyond employee.
• Comically Missing the Point: When Eleanor comes across a family-size toothbrush holder for the first time, she thinks it's for individuals who are so geeky they own four toothbrushes and use all of them.
• Continuity Nod:
  • The flying suits from Season 1's "Flying" reappear here as an activity to accomplish at Gunnar's birthday party (with the idea being that it lets someone "fly like an eagle").
  • Unicorns were previously mentioned to exist in the Good Place in the previous season when Trevor seems to be negotiating for Eleanor's supposed return to the Bad Place. Here, a unicorn is at Gunnar's animal-themed birthday party.
• Dead Baby Comedy: Eleanor believes that demons like Michael eat babies, and so when trying to cheer him up during his existential crisis, offers to get him a "cool ranch baby" to eat.
• Did Not Think This Through: Chidi's plan is to make Michael confront the idea of mortality so he can gain a human perspective and therefore move from there into an human understanding of ethics. Unfortunately, neither he nor Eleanor realized that demons in the Bad Place do not have any opportunities for leisure like humans do on Earth; from what Michael explains to them, all torturers are Married to the Job and thus he doesn't have any other anchors to use to distract him from feeling miserable. It's not until Eleanor gives him some good advice based around their Enemy Mine relationship that Michael is able to pull himself back together by the episode's end.
• Dissonant Serenity: Played for Laughs; when Michael is literally curled up in the fetal position from his first ever existential crisis, Chidi is incredibly upbeat and cheery since this means progress towards teaching Michael actual human ethics.
• Distinction Without a Difference: Eleanor tries to describe her idea for a type of pants with "one big pant-leg for both your legs". When Chidi points out that she's just describing a skirt, a frustrated Eleanor tries to argue her idea as being different before giving up.
• Dog Got Sent to a Farm: In a flashback, Eleanor's mother starts with this fable but half-way through she gives up and admits that the family dog just died.
• Eskimos Aren't Real: Eleanor's mother says that Guam isn't a real place.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Gunnar's supposed identity on Earth was as an animal rights activist. The theme of his birthday party is thus animals... but where the demons have themed it around animals in some admittedly awesome but clearly unethical ways (i.e., a "Build-A-Real-Bear Workshop" that involves a clearly abused bear pitifully roaring while trapped in iron chains).
• Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!: Jason only realizes how badly Tahani's feelings were hurt by the rival birthday party when he's right in the middle of gushing about how well it's going.
• False Reassurance: When Jason thinks that Michael has snorted printer toner (he's actually going through an existential crisis), he tries to comfort him by telling him "You still have about seventy percent of your brain left!"
• Fantastic Fireworks: The fireworks at Tahani's rival party spell out the letters "Happy Birthday Gunnar".
• Foreshadowing:
  • Chidi complains to Eleanor that the main problem stopping Michael from properly learning human ethics is that he's immortal, and therefore ethics basically don't mean anything to him. As the series goes on, the Fatal Flaw of the afterlife system is revealed to be that it's run entirely by eternal spirits who have absolutely no grasp of human nature due to their immortality, and the Soul Squad have to convince them of the folly of their ways through showing that Humans Are Flawed.
  • Michael freaking out when he understand the human concept of death in this episode and how he's starting to learn what it's like to be human foreshadows both himself and Janet learning to embrace and act humanity (to the point where Michael himself becomes a human in the Series Finale).
• Friendship Moment:
  • Eleanor helping Michael get out of his existential crisis.
  • Jason lifting up Tahani's spirits after she is left emotionally crushed at the rival party.
• The "Fun" in "Funeral": Eleanor's mother Donna shows up with a drink to Eleanor's father Doug's funeral, trash-talks him, and hits on Eleanor's boyfriend Sam.
• Funny Background Event: When Donna is crashing her ex-husband's funeral, Eleanor's then-boyfriend Sam has an increasingly disturbed/worried expression on the face; It's clear that he's thinking the whole time "This explains so much."
• Generation Xerox: We get to see Eleanor's mother Donna for the second time, and her attitude is a near perfect match of current-day Eleanor's. She initially tells Eleanor that her dog has gone to a farm far far away in Guam, but she fesses up that he died from overheating in the car and that his corpse is now in a duffel bag under the deck all while deflecting any major emotional consequence Eleanor may have from this news, instead caring more about her co-worker asking her to do something she didn't know and stuffing Max's body in her favorite duffel bag.
• Girly Run: "Jeanette" does it perfectly.
• Gone Horribly Right: Chidi attempts to invoke a sense of finite existence in Michael so that he will start to see ethics as a more relevant concept. Upon telling him that he risks the possibility of being retired, which is the closest thing an entity like Michael can come to an end, Michael undergoes a major existential crisis and essentially freezes, leaving it up to Eleanor to get him out of his nihilistic funk. At the very least Chidi managed to make Michael appreciate consequences a bit more.
• Gretzky Has the Ball: Invoked. As part of his midlife crisis, Michael asks Janet to say things like, "How many quarterbacks are in a home run?"
• Hand Wave: The premise of the episode is Michael experiencing fear of death for the first time, even though he explicitly cannot die and what he really has to worry about is eternal suffering (in other words, he's so much not going to die that it's a problem!). Chidi somehow manages to shift the issue from the latter to the former by saying that it's kind of the same and then moving on before Michael (and hopefully the audience) has time to question it.
• Heel Realization: Tahani is made particularly miserable by the demons' Party Scheduling Gambit because it makes her realize just how shallow and arrogant she really is that she's letting it affect her so badly.
• Hollywood Midlife Crisis: Parodied. Michael develops one after Eleanor told him to ignore his existential dread by pushing it down. It even includes a Mid Life Crisis Car, getting a tattoo (It's Chinese for "Japan".) and Janet posing as his Trophy Wife "Jeanette".
• Humanity Ensues: A minor case, with the immortal Michael suffering from a major existential crisis when he's forced to contemplate the mortal concepts of death and finality. As Eleanor herself points out, he's acting very human in terms of his denial and fear.
• Immortality Immorality: Chidi realizes that Michael has trouble understanding ethics because immortals basically face no consequences for their actions.
  Chidi: If you live forever, then ethics don't matter to you because, basically, there's no consequences for your actions. You tell a lie, who cares? Wait a few trillion years, the guilt will fade. Before I can teach Michael to be good, I have to force him to think about what we used to think about: that life has an end, and therefore our actions have meaning.
• Immortals Fear Death: Michael becomes horrified at the thought of his existence ending, causing him to go into a catatonic state for a while.
• Implausible Deniability: Donna tries to pass herself off as Eleanor's sister and not her mother... while she's attending her own ex-husband's funeral. Amusingly, Donna herself quickly lampshades that her excuse doesn't work.
• Inelegant Blubbering: Eleanor falls into hysterical sobbing during the flashback to her existential crisis in the Bed Bath & Beyond.
• Innocently Insensitive: Jason doesn't realize how he hurts Tahani's feelings by praising the other party for being way better than hers until the proverbial last moment.
• Instantly Proven Wrong: A smug Tahani proudly boasts that she would be "sorely mistaken" if the rival birthday party for Gunnar could be better than hers. When brought there and she gets to see the fireworks, a "Build-An-Actual-Bear Workshop", and a ball pit with the balls replaced with Precious Puppies?
  Tahani: (visibly dismayed) I was sorely mistaken.
• Interchangeable Asian Cultures: Spoofed when during his Hollywood Mid-Life Crisis, Michael gets a Chinese tattoo that says "Japan" on his arm.
• I Think You Broke Him: Chidi "breaks" Michael by giving him his existential crisis.
• Jerkass: It bears repeating that Eleanor's parents were horrible in every way imaginable. Specifically, we see more of her mother Donna in action here. In the first flashback, she callously told Eleanor (who couldn't have been older than five to eight years old at the time) not to cry over the death of her pet dog (which was Donna's fault because she left the poor animal locked in the car on a hot day) because it would ruin Donna's own day. In the second flashback, she's shown drunkenly crashing Doug's funeral to gloat about how she outlived him while hitting on Eleanor's boyfriend.
• Kick the Dog: Donna literally killed Eleanor's dog due to neglect. She then brushes away Eleanor's understandable questions about the situation to demand wine and for her daughter to not be sad. Eleanor was a kid, probably no older than even seven or eight.
• Like Mother, Like Daughter: Donna Shellstrop in flashbacks acts exactly like pre-Character Development Eleanor, being unabashedly self-centered and making flippant excuses for horribly neglecting a dog she was responsible for.
• Malaproper: Eleanor mistakes "velociraptor" for "valedictorian".
• Nice Guy: Greg, the Bed Bath and Beyond employee from Eleanor's flashback is incredibly friendly and supportive of her during her emotional breakdown, gently telling her that she can cry as long as she wants (though she will have to buy the plunger that she just cried into).
• Noodle Incident:
  • Tahani excitedly tells Janet that the décor for her version of Gunnar's birthday party will be themed after her 2007 fundraiser for the Red Cross in Zurich.
  • When a dazed Michael is led to Tahani's party by Eleanor and Chidi, Jason initially thinks that Michael snorted printer toner like one of his past friends did back in Jacksonville.
• Not So Above It All: The not-a-team-player, Hard-Drinking Party Girl Eleanor was actually deeply injured by her parents failing to do their job. Her existential crisis was sparked not by death, but by seeing a family-sized toothbrush holder and realizing that there are happy families out there that would need something like that.
• Party Scheduling Gambit: The demons' plan to torture Tahani is to have her throw a party for Gunnar's birthday, but then none of them will show up because they've planned a separate, better party. Despite being aware of it, Tahani is actually greatly affected.
• Pet the Dog: Keeping in mind that Michael is still an unrepentant demon at this point in the series, him sincerely thanking Eleanor for helping pull him out of his existential crisis is quite possibly the first genuinely kind act he has done for a human in... well, ever.
• Precious Puppy: Gunnar's party has a ball pit full of puppies for the guests.
• Running Gag: Eleanor's mother Donna is shown to be only drinking from her wine glasses with a plastic straw.
• Shout-Out:
  • Michael grabs the sides of his face and wails while first contemplating the empty existence of the universe, making him look very similar to Edvard Munch's famous painting The Scream.
  • During the flashback to her childhood where her mom tells her that the family dog died, a young Eleanor is watching a cartoon that was basically a combination of both ThunderCats and Voltron called "Thunderbats".
• Stepford Smiler: Michael temporarily becomes one on Eleanor's (poor) advice to repress his existential dread at the party.
  Michael: Okay, I know what you're thinking: Birth is a curse and existence is a prison. But don't think about that! Don't be sad, you guys!
• Straw Nihilist: Played for Black Comedy during Michael's initial existential crisis.
  Michael: [in an utterly emotionless tone of voice] Parties are mere distractions from the relentlessness of entropy. We're all just corpses who haven't yet begun to decay.
• Surreal Humor: Eleanor uses a toilet plunger to cry into instead of the box of tissues literally being offered right to her face.
• Troubled Fetal Position: Micheal curls up in a ball on the couch with his head in Chidi's lap while first contemplating the universe's cruel indifference.
• Wham Shot: Jason and Tahani waking up in bed together the next morning.
• You Are Better Than You Think You Are: Jason tells Tahani this after she leaves the party crying. He tells her to be nicer to herself, because she does throw good parties and has a lot of virtues going for her.

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