800+ Deaths

SHE WEARS A MATCHING PURPLE VEST-SKIRT COMBO AND A JAUNTY SMILE AND THEY KEEP KILLING HER.

Janet is an intelligent entity. “Not a girl,” she keeps having to correct other characters, “not a robot.” When humans die they can go to a place that is bad or a place that is good. Those in the Good Place get to rely on Janet as a source for all knowledge and of everything they want. They kill her over 800 times.

There’s a kill switch for Janet, by the beach. Janet’s program simulates distress as a failsafe when the humans try to kill her, but it’s only procedural. “As you approach the kill switch,” Janet warns, “I will begin to beg for my life… it will seem very real.” She holds a framed photo of children she claims to be hers. “Tyler, Emma, and little, tiny baby Phillip… LOOK AT THEM!” It is really a stock photo of the crowd at the Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards.

After “death” a giant Janet alarm appears in the sky, a projection of her image. “Attention, I have been murdered,” she says, calmly. She gets revived and she’s initially confused but fine in the medium-term. Better, even.

The Good Place is about learning from the mistakes you made over your life, and using your new afterlife perspective and the wisdom accumulated from experiences you’ve had, both before and after your death. It is a show that’s full of twists and constantly reinvents itself, and it’s difficult to explain more without revealing spoilers. Both Janet and the humans have rewinds and memory wipes, simulated deaths, reiterations of the same situations, new goes at old scenes. Although I resemble the emotional, imperfect humans, I am immediately intrigued by a skill Janet has picked up: the ability to learn from each loop around.

In Nietzsche’s version of hell, a demon would “steal after you into your loneliest loneliness.” He would banish you to live the same life over and over, making you return to “every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh.” And you won’t have remembered anything. You won’t have learned. You’re doomed to eternal repetition.

Janet has a different fate. Every time she reboots, she improves slightly. This gives her new powers. She knows even more. She perceives even more. She is not a girl, but now she can fall in love. She can lie. Every time she is killed, she holds onto her experience and something new gets added as well.

*

Although I am very human, Janet’s loopy progression, of being shut down and yet also sweeping forward, is a pattern I recognise.

In my early twenties, back when I lived in the bottom floor of a subdivided townhouse on an arterial road in Sydney, I closed my house and my life. I would grudgingly, eventually wake up. I’d wake up with things to do but no will to do it, would migrate between unmade bed and red couch. I’d keep the curtains closed. This little square section of the world would be my personal void.

Sometimes I’d open the front blind on the window facing the busy road though, because it was rushed out there, impersonal. There was no risk of being seen. If I kept my bedroom door open and laid down in bed, I could see only the tallest trucks and buses. The sun that shone in was usually only disrupted by the Coogee bus, the bus to the beach. And there was something nice about that, as depressed as I was, this movement towards the sea. The world, as is was, was closed to me just then. And at the same time, the tides kept rolling in, the sun kept blazing, without me.

I don’t remember how I got out of the void. Gradually, is my guess. There’s a point where nothingness gets boring, or where the day seems particularly nice and it’s a particular pity to waste it. There’s a point where the medicine kicks in, or the winter ends, or someone gives you something nice to do, or you remember all the interesting things that you’d been preoccupied with before this episode started.

I don’t remember how I got out of the void, but the fact that I did is an important lesson to pocket. I would be there again. I don’t know how many times. And I would keep getting out.

*

Janet has void too, a void of boundless nothingness. It is where (or not-where, since it’s a non-place) she lives. When she enters or exits, it makes a booping sound and she instantaneously appears or disappears. This is where she conjures items and trawls through all knowledge. In one episode, the humans go into her void and conjure up too much stuff. She needs to be alone, she needs infinite blankness. She observes, “my molecular essence is fragmenting and it’s giving me the worst headache.”

*

Maybe it’s appropriate, sometimes, to completely isolate and to rest radically, and to think the “dark thoughts” they ask you about on the psych questionnaires. There were these depressive periods, when everything was cold and monochromatic and it was hard to remember to eat. It was also hard to find words, or the sequence of steps you need to take to get to a familiar place. I assumed I was disintegrating, my very molecular essence fragmenting. This feeling of being under threat was labelled as psychosis, but in truth, I was falling apart. I had a then-undiagnosed condition which makes the structuring collagen throughout my body too stretchy.

I was falling apart but confusing it for some force beyond myself: a curse, voodoo. I had candidates in mind, specific people who I thought may be responsible because they secretly hated me. I had a little list of Positive Things To Do To Feel Better at some stage, a strategy I learned to stop my life from shutting down entirely. It was a little table I made on Excel and gave myself room to check off basic things: brush your teeth, eat three meals, have a shower, walk to the park and read there. I’d go to the park and I kept seeing the people I most feared there. Every white van carried surveillance equipment.

At this juncture, it’s not clear what self-care is: to filter the world out, or to go into it. But ever since I learned the unusual workings of my connective tissues, it’s been rare for me to feel under siege. It’s not a “cure,” there is no such thing. But it’s another little fact that I can put in my pocket and take with me. I’ve figured out something else about how to live.

*

In one episode, Janet says, cheerfully, “We have a category 55 emergency doomsday crisis.” At another point, she’s asked what’s wrong. “Everything,” she replies. You can hear the polite smile in her voice. She’s been programmed to sound pleasant, helpful, approachable.

*

Once a week for about six months, I was an outpatient on the psych ward, presenting for group therapy. It was a youth mental health service and you could see the effort the designer had put in to make it artificially youthful, yet still a hospital. The room we met in was painted white with a bright orange feature wall. The lime green chairs were arranged in the traditional therapeutic semi-circle. And those of us in the group became actual friends. When I said something, the others would nod.

Even after seeking treatment and learning the requisite words of symptoms and diagnoses, I still lacked language. It’s troubling when medical tomes like the DSM-5 come to define your story, because this is a story imposed by a committee of people I imagine to be old, white men, and are very far away. These are the same people who thought homosexuality was an illness until 1973 and continued to pathologize it in different ways well into the 90s. These are the people who equate function with severity, defining you as more ill if you don’t have a job, and trivially so if you do. Their language serves some purpose, some legitimacy, it assists with my understanding of myself. But it is borrowed and incomplete and problematic.

In the group, we created a language of our own. We coined phrases like “shame spiral” for when you’d feel bad about something, an then feel bad about feeling bad and then maybe do or say something bad in response, which would make you feel worse. Or “kindfulness” for acts of mindfulness that are also kind to yourself, like the ritual of brewing your favourite variety of leaf tea with purposeful slowness, because it’s less efficient but more pleasant than plunking a bag into hot water. We’d talk about “mango madness” for the predictable, frazzled, wired feeling you’d get in the humid Sydney summers. It relies on a story about rainforest monkeys going mad from eating mangoes that had fermented in the heat. Maybe something had gone wrong with our brain chemistry, but we’re always also constantly responding to a difficult environment. It was easy enough to evoke issues with brain chemistry too, we’d talk about our “old brain”, the ancient structures like the amygdala that bring about the fight or flight response in inappropriate settings for the modern era where running away from or fighting tigers isn’t so useful anymore. We’d use words like “torture” or “the worst” in situations our individual therapists would likely call out as “catastrophizing.” Sometimes it’s satisfying to exaggerate. Sometimes it genuinely feels like everything is wrong, and being able to sensibly list ways it isn’t doesn’t change that feeling. Sometimes someone would joke about suicide and we knew the difference between this being serious and this being a method of making the subject approachable, breaking the surface tension before diving in.

We’d spend the lunch break eating the catered a lunch of packaged cheese and crackers, juice, and sad sandwiches. Then we’d put our legs up the wall, a yoga technique for resting and restoring without falling asleep and crashing with a nap hangover.

We were in a hospital but learning languages and skills beyond what the medical system could impart. That’s how I realised that whatever you’re going through is an experience you’ll share with other people. The problem is trying to find the right terms, finding the opportunities to relate, and honing your descriptions to still be yours. Once gained, these are powers you don’t lose.

*

Janet was made by the The Makers of Light, Darkness, and Everything in Between, a group of mysterious beings that are about as close to God as The Good Place ever identifies. She contains high amounts of potassium.

It seems she might not be perfect. In an early episode, Michael keeps redesigning the way she talks. She comes to spout colloquialisms. When they sound off, she integrates fun facts into her speech. When they’re intrusive, she becomes flirtatious. When that’s inappropriate, she speaks in annoyance and frustration. When that tendency seems to ill-befit the Good Place, she goes back to talking the way she always did. Janet says, “It turns out the best Janet was the Janet that was inside Janet all along.”

*

Eventually I learned there wasn’t anything really wrong with me. Not that I’m perfect, or that I’m an exemplary person, or that I have no reason to experience pain, or anything so superlative. Instead, a lesson much more fundamental, that there’s nothing rotten inside of me that I’ve managed to hide from everyone, including myself. That there’s no secret chamber of my soul that somehow attracts persecution, ire, disrespect.

Nothing specific happened to make that realisation. One day, I just wondered, in my diary, “what if there’s nothing wrong with me?” It seemed strange that I’d never asked that question before. I tried on the possibility and it fit. Another piece to carry with me.

*

Being killed 800 times can be advantageous, if you’re Janet. The humans she comes to know have all had their memories wiped, resetting their time in the Good Place. They can’t learn from past iterations of themselves yet. They haven’t had the opportunity yet. But they do, eventually, get that opportunity. And while they do repeat old patterns and mistakes, while they sometimes try their best and still fail, over an eternity they can find something akin to practiced peace, where complicated and difficult things still happen but they know they can do better because they’ve done it before. We collect traumas, but we also collect the means of survival.