Heavy Lies the Crown – Rolling Stone



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The right place is back for his fourth and final season. A review of the premiere of the season, "An Arizona Girl, Part One", as soon as I get my daily dose of Timothy Olyphant …

The two previous years of The right place open with first hour. This makes sense for a show with so much history, especially when going from one season to another. MichaelThe first reboot took place at the start of Season 2 and the progressive assembly of the Soul Squad in the real world for the launch of Season 3 needed a lot of room to prepare and unfold properly. At the same time, the heavy workload imposed on these two hours prevents them from being among the best examples of their respective seasons.

As the title, "A Girl from Arizona, Part One," suggests, season four seemed to start the same way, but her first performance was to be split into two half-hour episodes. The good news is that we are going to spend a little longer with this last season. doubling the first, second and third seasons gave the impression of ending a week earlier than expected. But it also means that we spend the first two weeks in "scrape throat" mode, rather than solving this problem in one night.

Among the items on this week's agenda: Eleanor struggles to become the leader of the new neighborhood when things go wrong and she is facing pain Chidi do not remember her; meet new neighbors Linda and Brentand better understand how Shaun play with our beloved dum-dums; and Jason to fight Derek Derek's pursuit on "my girlfriend mom" Janet. It's a lot to cover, even in an episode where a good part of the action will affect the next week. Yet these not-all-30 minutes manage to give everyone a moment to shine. (Same Tahani, who does not have a sub-plot, is not only the first to see through Linda, but she draws many of the best aftershocks of the night, like comparing Linda at the time "I shared a Xanax with Peter Sarsgard. ")

Linda turns out to be a disguise worn by Chris, the shirtless sexy guy who tried unsuccessfully to pretend to be Eleanor's soul mate during the first reboot. But his frightened Norwegian attitude makes it a good comic film for the others until Chris quits too easily, to the chagrin of Shaun and the others. Judge. And Brent's provocative male mediocrity – "We're here with all the terms we need to learn," he groans as he learns that he can not call Janet a secretary. "Vice President of Helping! Captain Marvel! – made him the kind of guy that Shaun would like to go out with, and so the kind of guy that Eleanor would despise. (This is also a type of character from Ben Koldyke, who has already played well before, including in the Cross-Dressing sitcom It works!, a television room of Shamer's inner circle.)

The nicely immature rivalry of Derek with Jason reminds us that Good place has by far made the best use of Jason Mantzoukas from any of Mike Schur's shows. (Calibrated just as it is here, there are few humans that I find funnier.Do it be crazy in the wrong context, like on Brooklyn Nine-Nineand it wears out quickly.) But it's very useful to illustrate how the new experience puts Janet in a state of stress. She did all this herself and the amount of concentration needed to prevent the neighborhood from collapsing adds a layer of comic tension to any scene with Janet and the season as a whole. It's a good idea.

I'm agnostic to Eleanor and Chidi, thinking that sometimes it works wonders, while in others, it seems that the series skips too many steps and treats their true love as an inevitable finale. Chidi's memory being erased for the moment, we no longer have to worry about their romantic chemistry. But most of the story is that it hurts Eleanor to be with him when he does not know who she is or how they feel about each other – especially when Simone is also part of that. Simone, the atheist neuroscientist, is convinced that it is only a hallucination produced by her comatose spirit that is one of the many fires that Eleanor must extinguish. -girlfriend. (Also, Kirby Howell-Baptiste played mostly straight women in the Soul Squad last season, so it's nice to see that she can play as crazy as the original cast members when the opportunity arises. lends it.)

The episode ends on a muted note, with Bad Janet taking Chris on the train and Eleanor trying to defuse Shaun's last lame taunt by Michael. It's not really a cliffhanger, it's perhaps the most obvious sign that this episode and the following have been broadcast together. (And that's how people will end up consuming them in their lives after streaming.) Still, it's a promising start to the last phase of this unpredictable gem, even though I'm not sure what's going on. I can not wait to finish and dive into strange ideas. Schur and society have for us further on the line.

Some other thoughts:

* In case you missed it, I spent a few days on the game board this summer, which allowed me to discover what made the series so great and why all the world will miss it, a deleted scene with amusing anecdotes (including Ted Danson spoiling the big season A twist to impress John Krasinski), and a long conversation with Kristen Bell.

* Another highlight of Jason vs. Derek and the fact that the new neighborhood is in the mid-sized business district is the fact that we're getting even more Mindy St. Claire, who is not happy to have all these intruders at home, but is very Glad to see Jason press the murder button for his annoying ex-lover Derek. Because the series has used it sparingly until now, Mindy is among the highest average batting averages of all characters. The first returns suggest that she may well produce with a larger sample.

* Of course, the Bad Place theme song is jingle 1-877-KARS-4-KIDS. And I will never forgive the series for reminding me that this song exists. But the slogan of Bad Place is: "Dead eyes, eat hearts, I can not lose" – parodying the most famous sentence of Friday night lights – compensates mainly for this.

* When Eleanor had to pretend to be the architect during the final of last season, I suggested that without the extreme height difference of Bell and Danson, I would have been able to do so. waiting to see them swap their outfits before his first visit. Here, she finally wears a costume, but a tailor made to measure, feminine, without a bow tie. (Which I think is just from the point of view of history: One of the things that Danson and costume designer Kirston Mann told me is that Danson did not have really felt like having "had" Michael before handing him a bowtie during his first fitting.This is his special accessory, not Eleanor.)

* Finally, my wife and daughter recently started the series, and one thing that reminded me in my first episodes was that Chidi had briefly set up his own apartment elsewhere in the neighborhood. It's a strange thing, since most other "soulmates" such as Tahani and Jason have been living together since the beginning, and we barely saw him before he moved full-time with Eleanor. Here, however, we have a better glimpse of the place, which really looks like Chidi's dream house: basically, nothing but books, with the possibility of calling them by tunes like Thor's hammer.

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