The Good Place Season Three

The Brainy Bunch are back for a new season in Netflix’s ‘The Good Place’.

‘The Good Place’ follows demon architect Michael (Ted Danson), Janet Janet (D’Arcy Carden), Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell), Chidi Anagonye (William Jackson Harper), Tahani Al-Jamil (Jameela Jamil), and Jason Mendoza (Manny Jacinto) as they journey through the afterlife to become better people.

Now if you remember, season two finished off resetting everything that has happened so far and putting our four favourite humans back on earth to try setting them on a path to a better afterlife.

Michael and the Judge have agreed to save Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani and Jason at the moment of their original deaths in order to see if they can become better people with the knowledge they could have died.

This causes a small spike in the amount of good all four put into the world, they face their flaws to try to become better people… for about six months.

Things start going wrong as they always do in life; it never feels like the amount of good you have to give is enough for anyone, and if you aren’t getting noticed – what’s the point? After a while our four humans fall back into their ‘bad’ lifestyles and Michael can’t help but intervene.

After things go off the rails for the humans, Michael concludes that the only reason they started to get better in the afterlife, was because they were altogether for support. Michael gives them all a little nudge, and at soon they are all together again – a nice happy ending, right? Wrong!

With Michael and the Judge’s original plan failing, the gang try to find another solution to their inevitable eternal damnation, investigating just what The Good Place is, who has gotten in, and how did they get there.

Each episode this season always feels packed to the brim with lessons about philosophy and ethics, something the first two seasons have revealed as the main themes for the show. Chidi and Michael often guide the others through these lessons about morality and the reasons behind why something can be inherently bad or inherently good.

If you have enjoyed the struggles thus far of our friends as they search Earth, the afterlife and Janet for morality – you will be happy to know ‘The Good Place’ still has surprises for you.

 

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Words by Joel Tuckwell

 

Joel is a twenty-two year old with a passion for art and animation. He likes to think of new ways to do things and works with computers. One day he hopes to have a pet pig named Pudge.

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MOD

Where Art Meets Science and Technology

Have you ever wanted to visit an art gallery that shows the relationship between art, science, and technology? Well, fear no more for MOD is the place for you. Opened in 2018, MOD is an art gallery where you can view art based on subjects like augmented reality, astronomy, and robotics. Being a bit of a science nerd (astronomy in particular), I have been eager to visit MOD. Upon visiting it, I was enthralled and absorbed into its world of interactive wonders.

The first exhibit I visited was Prosthetic Reality (an Augmented Reality exhibition) in the Lecture Gallery on the ground floor. As you can see in the image below, it appears to a casual observer just an exhibit of pop art. However, if you have the EyeJack app (available on both iOS and Android devices) you can download the exhibition and it will be transformed. Using the AR feature, the artworks come to life with colour, animation, and sound. For example, one of these artworks tells a story of a Japanese town destroyed by a disaster. Its main picture is of the town before the disaster, but through EyeJack, it plays Japanese style music and shows it destroyed through animation. I discovered more of these set up across the museum, which was a surprising addition. It gave me motive to explore the entire gallery to find them all.

 

 

Another exhibit within the MOD I found interesting looked into genetically modified babies. Displayed in the Gould Interactive Gallery, this demonstrated what we may have to do to survive on Earth if we keep going the way we are. All these babies are displayed in wheel-around newborn beds from hospitals. One baby that really stood out to me had a head with strange gill-like curves on its sides. To me, it appeared as if a Ferengi and a Klingon from the Star Trek universe had a child. There was explanation on a nearby wall, this modification would be necessary to survive higher temperatures on Earth. It is a frightening possibility and seeing it in model form really got my creative mind running.

 

 

There was a small part of artificial intelligence and robotics near the genetic modification exhibit. You could stand in the middle of a room and an AI would supposedly learn and copy your movement. I tried this out, but could not comprehend how it worked, which was unfortunate. The idea behind it is really cool and I do recommend you to give it a go. Perhaps you will figure out how it works. Also, part of that exhibit was a model of a robotic head. Upon first glance, it looks exactly like a human head (with extremely realistic skin), but its eyes move and it speaks. It was like stepping into Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Seeing it alongside the movement exhibit made me realise it was part of the human-like features which AI and robots of the future may soon have.

Perhaps my favourite exhibit in the whole of MOD was the Our Sky exhibit in the Universal Gallery. A Science on a Sphere (currently the only one in Australia) sits in the middle of the room with screens on all the walls. With a computer board, you can cycle through the planets and moons in our Solar System which appear on the Science On a Sphere. As you can see below, Jupiter appears on it, but I could easily change it to Mars or Enceladus (a moon of Saturn). With the screens on the walls, you could surf the Solar System and check out the many different astronomical signs. Perhaps what really made this exhibit fantastic is the inclusion of science and astronomy from the First Australians. This is shown through video and sound, which play above the gallery. This addition gives a fresh, more Australian perspective on astronomy and science and has me eager to learn more about First Australian astronomy.

 

 

MOD is a fantastic place to check out the relationship between art, science, and technology. If you are a sci-fi fan or into science and technology I highly recommend you visit this place. You can find it on the western side of the Morphett Street bridge on North Terrace (north side) on UniSA’s City West campus. Entry is free and it is open six days a week (closed Mondays). More information can be found here.

 

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Words and photography by Cameron Lowe.