Fansided

Jason Mendoza is The Good Place’s most delightful twist

By Shea Corrigan

THE GOOD PLACE -- "The Burrito" Episode 212 -- Pictured: Manny Jacinto as Jianyu -- (Photo by: Colleen Hayes/NBC)
THE GOOD PLACE -- "The Burrito" Episode 212 -- Pictured: Manny Jacinto as Jianyu -- (Photo by: Colleen Hayes/NBC) /
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The Good Place returns tonight for season 3 and the sweetness of Manny Jacinto’s Jason Mendoza remains one of the show’s best surprises.

The Good Place, NBC’s half-hour comedy about the afterlife, but now about actual life, and mostly about whether people can become better, does a great many things well. It’s incredibly well plotted and paced, with twists, new directions and depth that never feel cheap or overdone. It’s incredibly funny, with the best sight-gags and throwaway one-liners this side of that animated Netflix show about a horse. And it’s incredibly well cast. From Kristen Bell and Ted Danson, the nominal leads and certainly the highest profile names, to William Jackson Harper (Chidi) and Jameela Jamil (Tahani) and a killer range of guest stars (Maya Rudolph, Adam Scott), the show works as well as it does because the performances are as humanizing as they are hilarious.

There is one member of that ensemble, however, whose character’s depth (!) has become one of the show’s best surprises and that is bonafide Florida man, Jason Mendoza.

The character of Jason is introduced as, in a word, the worst. He is an aspiring EDM DJ and break dancer, he loves jalapeno poppers and Blake Bortles, he suffocated to death after doing a “bunch of whip-its” locked in a safe while attempting to rob a Mexican restaurant. He is truly, deeply dumb.

It would be easy to continue to play Jason exclusively for laughs in season 3 (the first three episodes of which were provided to critics) now that the characters are largely back to their pre-death behavior. And yes, The Good Place continues to mine the character for a good number of silly jokes. (Meeting Jason for the first time in the new timeline, Eleanor immediately guesses he’s from Florida.) But season 3 also wastes no time in reminding you what season 2 drove home through his story arc with Tahani: That he also very sweet and empathetic, his endless optimism is not born out of just idiocy (though it definitely mostly is), but is also genuinely well-meaning — even if the things he loves reflect humanity’s worst inventions and impulses.

Jason’s story requires a defter hand than Eleanor, Chidi or Tahani, all of who can become “good” with some notable change to their behavior. Jason, however, is largely in The Bad Place because of his personality. He is in The Bad Place because he’s the embodiment of the show’s sillier jokes about terrible taste as a moral failing. His Judge-Gen-given test is to win Madden playing as the Titans against the Jaguars and any interpretation of why he lost (he threw it out devotion because he loves the Jags more than his immortal soul or he really did fumble the kick-off and couldn’t win a video game for his immortal soul) can be chalked up to, well, he really is an idiot.

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While Eleanor, Chidi and Tahani genuinely do have significant room to grow with respect to their selfishness, indecisiveness and vanity, Jason doesn’t really get to change to the same degree. It would be out of character. And yet, Jacinto’s performance succeeds in making him the world’s most lovable doofus. (A concise case-in-gifs can be found here.) Through the beginning of season 3, he is, as one review describes, “a constant revelation in idiocy” but his relationships to other people, romantic or platonic, continue to give him depth far beyond the demands of a Florida dirtbag character sketch. And that’s one of The Good Place’s nicest twists.