Season 1 Rewatch: 1x02 "Flying"

[sorchasilver]

Welcome to week 2 of our rewatch project. I'm posting this a little early as I'm very busy this week - unfortunately I won't get a chance to rewatch today but I'll catch up over the weekend. Thanks to everyone who joined in last week. Please watch the episode at a time of your choosing, then join the discussion in the comments.

Let's go flying!

Writer(s): Michael Schur (created by), Alan Yang
Director: Michael McDonald
Originally aired: September 19th, 2016

Synopsis:
Eleanor tries to prove to Chidi that she's worthy of his help; Tahani and Jianyu try to help Michael cope with a mysterious flaw in his neighborhood.

Memorable Quote:
Janet: Conjure an image that brings you pure joy. Some people think of their wedding day, or favorite vacation spot.
Eleanor: [concentrating hard] People puking on roller coasters... people puking on roller coasters...

Useful Links:
Episode Transcript
IMDb entry

Comments

[thatwasjustadream]

That's one of my favorite moments in this episode. 'Canyon full of poo....' ....lol.

But in a way, under the humor I think Michael's kind of playing them all here - he instigates Tahani's tendency to try to 'do something' to ease his woes, instead of just listening and comforting him. In doing that, she asks Jason for help - and we get that awesome moment of Jason silently comforting Michael, which is much closer to what he would have needed if him beating himself up had been for real.

And so Michael kind of tortures Tahani, who sees someone else connecting with/getting support from her soul mate when she feels so alone next to him.

PS - I really love Jason's gesture, there - it feels so genuine and good-hearted. I don't know if we'll every know what motivated him, but I do think it's our first glimpse into the guy's character. He seems to me to have the kindest soul of them all.

[spiralicious]

And so Michael kind of tortures Tahani, who sees someone else connecting with/getting support from her soul mate when she feels so alone next to him. Wow, I really hadn't thought of that, but you're right.

[ahbuggrit]

A great point - Michael has Jason trying not to get caught AND has Tahani frustrated over her lack of connection to her soulmate. Two birds, one stone

[spiralicious]

So simple and so brilliant

[ahbuggrit]

Knowing now that Michael is playing them makes the rewatch all the more fun. Poor Tahani... lol

Jason's gesture is interesting - it could be kind, it could also be him reacting in whatever way he thinks will prevent him from being found out (after he speaks, it's amazing he kept up his act as Jianyu for so long!) - like Eleanor, with him thinking he's not supposed to be in the good place, we can't quite trust his motives for being altruistic. I do think he probably does have the kindest soul, even if his actions can be dumb

[enemyofperfect]

I love your commentary on Michael torturing Tahani -- I was noticing that this time around too. And it kind of works on more than one level, because not only does Jason (at least appear to) connect with someone other than her, he's also accidentally one-upping her at her self-assigned role of comforting poor, worried Michael.

Jason really is such a sweetheart, isn't he? Give or take the molotov cocktail flinging and attempted bank robbery, I guess. But you're right, out of the four humans, he seems to have the easiest time just spontaneously reaching out to someone who needs it without making a whole big production out of it or asking what's in it for him.

[erinptah]

...okay, vent about Jason ahead.

He says later that the whole "touching Michael's heart" bit was just the first thing that occurred to him. And pretending to really be a monk serves his own general need for self-preservation. Michael was the one who assigned a bunch of profound and heartfelt meaning to it -- which, you're right, that was all calculated to make Tahani feel inadequate.

Sometimes Jason ends up making kind gestures...but seriously, this is the guy who screwed up a friend's DJing gig, and then, after the friend was upset that Jason had lost him the job, Jason responded by Molotov-cocktailing the guy's boat.

To me he seems really wrapped up in his own self-absorbed idea of whatever's going on at the time. If helping other people fits into that idea, great, he'll do it! If "they deserve to have their stuff firebombed" fits into that idea, he'll do that just as easily. With no particular remorse.

This is also why I don't find his relationship with Janet all that charming. It works because she's very capable of adapting herself to fit his idea of her ("there is nothing in my programming that specifically prevented this from happening"), in contrast to a human, who would have their own needs and boundaries and inner lives that might not fit neatly into Jasonworld. Every once in a while Janet has a trait she can't adapt ("not a girl", "not a robot"), and Jason just...doesn't absorb it. It's not just that he doesn't understand, it's that he doesn't care about trying to.

Tahani and Chidi are genuinely nice people, although their personal issues and neuroses have hamstrung their ability to act on it in effective ways. Eleanor isn't nice at the start, but there's a genuinely caring and empathetic person somewhere inside her that's clawing its way out. I'm not sure I see that in Jason. I'd be (pleasantly) surprised if he actually gets to a point of feeling responsible and remorseful about his callousness toward other people.

[enemyofperfect]

I think it's so interesting that you say this, because I've come to see Jason's role on the show as embodying innocence -- not in the older and arguably truer sense of not doing wrong or causing harm, but in the kind of interesting and possibly sketchy sense of children being innocent, or of humanity in general being fundamentally innocent in some way before we were corrupted by knowledge and sophistication.

And I think you provide some great examples of the way the show has complicated the idea that purity from complex motivations or deeper understanding of the world is some kind of moral ideal, because, I mean, Jason Mendoza: can be really heartfelt and kind, and can also just blow up somebody else's boat because he felt like it.

If you leave out all the layers of rationalizations and inhibitions and polarizing ideologies that define so much of what's forked up about human beings... you get somebody maybe a little more honest -- if only because it seems to be beyond him to keep up any deception more involved than "I don't talk, ever" -- but otherwise no easier to be around, because it's not like the basic impulses we're built on are any more perfect or infallible than the rest of us.

So on the one hand, I agree with you that there's a certain amorality to Jason, in that he'll just as easily do something supremely selfish (and/or dangerous) as something really sweet. But I don't see that as indifference to other people's concerns, so much as just a genuine inability to think of anything beyond whatever leaps to the forefront of his mind, and I feel like that complete absence of consideration or calculation is something the show's deliberately playing with.

With all that said, though, wow but I watched that whole Jason/Janet romance like a hawk, trying to figure out if she was acting out of anything other than cheerful compliance. And ultimately I think I've come down on a different side of that question than you may have, but I'm glad I wasn't the only person keeping close track of the nuances there!

[erinptah]

Ooh, I really like this analysis of Jason as a kind of debunking of the Christian "original sin" narrative. Being "uncorrupted" by Knowledge Of Good And Evil doesn't get you a free ride into the Good Place, it just means your behavior isn't checked by any sense of "this is a harmful thing and you shouldn't do it."

...and so now he's getting Chidi's lessons on How To Be Ethical, but I'm not sure those are going to reach the root of the problem, because there's a basic foundation that's missing. Like, maybe by now Jason could put "should I set my friend's stuff on fire?" through a flowchart and come up with "no, that is Immoral," but that's the kind of problem you should be able to work out without the flowchart! (And if you do it anyway, it's because you're angry and consciously want to hurt someone.)

(It's the opposite of Chidi's problem -- that guy has a foundation of caring and decency, but he puts it through so much overthinking and rationalizing that he can talk himself into doing the wrong thing because it was the only one he could get through the flowchart.)

You say you don't see it as indifference, but then you describe it as a "complete absence of consideration", and to my mind those are the same thing....

I do think Janet is genuinely enjoying herself, at least sometimes, and I don't ever remember thinking she was being actively hurt. What gets to me is that their dynamic only works so well because Janet is fundamentally non-human. Jason's failure to consider things isn't going to affect her in situations where she didn't have subroutines for those things in the first place.

It's like...if you were dating Superman, he would be completely unhurt if you punched him, right? If Lois tries to beat him up once in a while, it's good practice/exercise for her and might feel like a relaxing massage for him -- that's a cute interspecies bonding scenario. But it wouldn't be cute if you hit your date while failing (refusing?) to recognize that he was Superman. (Say, if you kept calling him a human even though he said "not a human" every time it came up.)

[enemyofperfect]

Haha, good catch -- Christianity's fingerprints really were all over my last comment, weren't they?

And oh my gosh, I love your summary of Chidi's own flowchart problem. He's so scrupulous and so willing to consider every possibility that he can convince himself of almost anything, poor guy!

I do disagree about whether someone "should" be able to figure out basic moral questions without a flowchart -- I guess it's more comfortable if the answer is so instinctive that they don't even have to think about it, but I think to me it's much more important whether someone arrives at a good answer, rather than how they do it. With that said, though, my confidence in Jason's ability to think his way through a flowchart is possibly not even as high as yours! So it'll be interesting to see how the show addresses his impulse control issues in the future, if at all.

You say you don't see it as indifference, but then you describe it as a "complete absence of consideration", and to my mind those are the same thing....

Ahh, language might be making this one tricky. We say that someone who's being selfish or unkind is "inconsiderate", but I meant consideration in the sense of "thinking about". And I guess technically you could say that I'm indifferent to things that literally never occur to me, in the sense that they never get a chance to affect my thoughts one way or another? But that's the state of mind I was thinking about for Jason: where instead of noticing all the factors but deciding he doesn't care about the ones that mean he shouldn't do whatever he wants, he never even registers most of them in the first place.

As for Janet enjoying herself, that's how I ended up reading her as well! But I take your point about Superman (and omg, I love the idea of him enjoying the firm massage!), and I completely agree that her psychology seems distinctively other than human -- and that people, including Jason, should respect her identity as she expresses it and use language that reflects that.

[erinptah]

In spite of the "everyone got a little bit right" premise, TGP is more obviously in conversation with Christianity than a lot of other religions, so it makes sense!

I know morality gets complicated and subjective very quickly, and there are a lot of cases where it's dangerous to say "obviously this is the Correct Answer, any right-thinking human would know that." And when we're talking about real-world situations, it's very easy for there to be problems with the Obvious Answers that aren't apparent until you spend some time investigating.

But deciding that nothing can possibly have an obvious moral answer is a short road to the Chidi Problem. And I feel like "should I set my friend's stuff on fire?" belongs in the narrow band of This One Is Actually Obvious.

instead of noticing all the factors but deciding he doesn't care about the ones that mean he shouldn't do whatever he wants, he never even registers most of them in the first place.

That's my read on it too -- it's not active malice. But it's not all down to "he's not the brightest bulb in the box," either. There's a level of callousness involved.

(I mean, consider "not a girl, not a robot" -- he's not even being asked to deduce or intuit that there's an issue, Janet's saying it directly. But it's not a problem in Jasonworld, therefore Jason feels no need to address it. Even with "okay, I have no idea what that means, but tell me more.")

[enemyofperfect]

But deciding that nothing can possibly have an obvious moral answer is a short road to the Chidi Problem. And I feel like "should I set my friend's stuff on fire?" belongs in the narrow band of This One Is Actually Obvious.

Hmm... I think the thing for me is that I can agree that there exist moral questions that have a single right answer (provided you accept certain basic premises about the rights of other people), without thinking that it follows that no remotely decent person should ever have to think it through carefully or have that answer explained to them. Which is a distinction I never put into words before just now, so hey, thank you for prompting to more closely examine my own beliefs here!

That's my read on it too -- it's not active malice. But it's not all down to "he's not the brightest bulb in the box," either. There's a level of callousness involved.

Ohh, so we do agree on the non-actively-malicious part, that's cool!

I think I'm going to have to agree to disagree about the callousness part -- not that I don't get what you're saying or that I think his behavior, e.g. towards Janet, is always fine, but to me he just so strongly resembles, I don't know: an adorable kitten who perceives that you complain when sharp claws and teeth enthusiastically attack your hand, but is so baffled as to why this could possibly be that the information never sticks. There's absolutely no obligation to like a living being that acts that way, though, and clearly Jason is a character who elicits a range of responses.

[thatwasjustadream]

This might be my favorite thread in the whole community so far. :) I do feel like he has a greater capacity for empathy, at times, than any of the others - none of the rest are very patient or accepting of faults when you think about it. But yes - torching someone's boat? Not cool, dude.

So our simple Jason isn't so simple. Hope the show lives on long enough for him to have some actual growth - pushing it to happen in S2 probably wouldn't have made sense, he's going to be a tough ship to turn around.

[enemyofperfect]

Oh, I think you really have something about acceptance being something that sets Jason apart. It's not that nothing ever upsets him, but there's definitely something about the way he approaches the world -- not without hopes, but kind of without expectations, I want to say?

And yeah, this whole thread has made me so interested in seeing where the show takes him! He could continue existing just as a foil to the others, but if instead he's just on an arc that's starting out slower than theirs -- in some ways, his journey could end up the most interesting of any of them.