Sympathy for Janet on <i>The Good Place</i>
This article contains mild spoilers through Season 2 of The Good Place.
“I’m not a girl,” Janet, the friendly afterlife robot, tells Jason, her charmingly doltish dead boyfriend, in the second-season finale of The Good Place. “I’m also not just a Janet anymore. I don’t know what I am!”
Indeed. What is Janet, now? Among the twists in the season closer for Michael Schur’s breezily profound NBC sitcom about four imperfect humans navigating heaven and hell was—mild spoiler here—a romantic revelation: The inhuman Janet confessed she loved the human Jason. The sentiment itself wasn’t exactly surprising. The breakthrough was in Janet owning and proactively declaring her feelings—feelings that, it would seem, she shouldn’t be able to have.
In this, joins and in a wave of entertainment preoccupied with the potential humanity of machines. Of course, super-smart robots have been a concern from to to . But the particular issue of interest right now isn’t quite whether Skynet will overpower its creators (though that is a theme of ), nor the life-improving potential of AI (though an episode of delved into
