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As the pressure to save humanity mounts, one of the few things that both Michael and Eleanor can really count on is that Michael will always be a dork and that Eleanor will always be there, helpfully opining on the precise level of dorkiness that he happens to be exhibiting at the time. Though neither of them consciously knows it, this dynamic is actually one of the very few constants in the swirling uncertainty that is the universe.
1. Disney Channel Original Movies
This one starts innocuously enough when Eleanor notices that Michael has taken to humming “Start of Something New” over and over.
“What’s that?”
“Just one of the songs from High School Musical, which is the most profound of all of the Disney original movies. I thought we could use it for inspiration during the experiment.” Michael doesn’t look at all as sheepish as Eleanor thinks he should look; in fact, it appears that he believes that he’s just uttered something completely reasonable.
“You’re kidding, right? What’s profound about Zac Efron running around in gym shorts with a basketball?” Are they actually having this particular conversation?
“Eleanor, Troy and Gabriella learned to have the courage to be who they actually were. Troy wasn’t just the basketball guy! Gabriella wasn’t just the freaky genius girl! It was . . . beautiful.” Michael sounds just about as earnest as Eleanor has ever heard him sound, which is to say more earnest than any human being who has ever walked around upright on Earth.
“And you really think that High School Musical can help us inspire Brent to stop being an ashhole? Or make Simone a little less judgmental? Or help John just stop being . . . mean?” Eleanor feels her eyes beginning to roll.
Michael shrugs. “I think we might want to schedule a Disney night, and just let everyone see for themselves. Who knows what might happen?” He starts humming again, and Eleanor discerns a barely-recognizable rendition of “We’re All In This Together.”
“Michael, Disney is just . . . well, stupid. And manipulative. And nothing that anyone over the age of twelve would ever be caught dead watching.” Eleanor actually can’t remember ever watching a Disney original movie, much less enjoying one.
“They’re missing out. Sure, the sequels to High School Musical weren’t great, but there’s so much more. Stepsister from Planet Weird! Camp Rock! The Wizards of Waverly Place: The Movie! What’s not to love?” Michael seems prepared to argue his point all day.
“So, so much, dude.” Eleanor shakes her head, marveling at the twists of life and death that have apparently led to the fate of the universe depending on her partnership with a reformed demon who happens to be obsessed with the most shameful aspects of humanity.
2. Ok, Boomer
Somehow—Eleanor isn’t really sure how, but then again, she isn’t sure about a lot of things in the Afterlife—memes from Earth have a tendency to make their way into the Neighborhood. Eleanor doesn’t usually pay much attention to them, but she can’t help noticing that Michael is saying “Ok, Boomer” all the time now. More importantly, he seems to have no idea when it’s actually appropriate to say it.
“So, listen—I really think we’re making some progress with Simone, but we have to keep an eye on her. Something might be up; she’s been giving me funny looks for the last week or so.” Eleanor is frowning at Simone’s picture on the strategy board, wondering if they were actually making progress with any of these humans.
“Ok, Boomer!” Michael says it cheerfully, seemingly unworried about anything that Eleanor is telling him.
Eleanor sighs. “Look, buddy—I’m not a Boomer. Not here, not on Earth, not anywhere. I’m a millennial.”
Michael snorts. “That’s ridiculous, Eleanor. A millennial is a demon who’s only been torturing people for a thousand years. With all the reboots, we’re getting pretty close to that in the Jeremy Bearimy timeline, but you’ve been the one being tortured a lot longer than you’ve been doing the torturing. Don’t worry; you’re not a millennial.”
Eleanor tries again. “I was a millennial on Earth. I was born in 1986—fork, no, 1982—so, yeah: millennial. An old millennial, sure, but definitely a millennial. ‘Ok, Boomer’ won’t fly with me.”
It doesn’t stick, but then, Eleanor doesn’t exactly expect it to. Nobody, she thinks, nobody is more of a Boomer than Michael, at least nobody that she’s met in the Afterlife. Unfortunately, when she attempts to Ok, Boomer him right back after an especially long speech about the growing problem of climate change on Earth (ever since Chidi’s classes ethically activated him, Michael has gotten more obviously vocal about progressive political causes), Michael responds with an I’m rubber, you’re glue rejoinder that makes even less sense in the context than Ok, Boomer had in the first place, and Eleanor gives up.
3. Karaoke
The first time demons from the Bad Place visited the Neighborhood, Eleanor saw firsthand that demon karaoke just amounts to lip-syncing racist, sexist speeches. It didn’t thrill her, but frankly, all karaoke is so lame that it also didn’t appall her the way that it probably should have. But Michael’s discovery of human karaoke—and insistence that a karaoke night be added to the roster of activities during the experiment to encourage Simone, Brent, John, and Chidi’s feelings of bonding—straight-up horrifies her.
“We’re not doing that.” Eleanor means it, no matter how excited Michael is about the idea. “Do you honestly think we should all sing stupid pop songs in front of each other? I hate to break it to you, Michael, but you can’t sing. Like, at all.” He really can’t. You’d think that the human skin suit he had picked out could have come with a pair of higher-functioning ears.
Jason, predictably enough, pronounces a karaoke night “dope”; Tahani, somewhat less predictably, is warmer to the idea than Eleanor might have expected. (“Well, my good friend Ariana introduced me to it one night when we both had a tad too much to drink, and it was a hoot.”) No matter how many eyerolls Eleanor lobs at them all, somehow a week later she finds herself sitting at a table with the others, listening to Michael belt out a very shaky rendition of “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” from Toy Story.
“Come on up, Eleanor,” Michael says at the end of the song. “You know you want to give this a try.”
“I really, really don’t.” Eleanor, in point of fact, can think of very few things that she’d like less to do right now than standing up in front of everyone and trying to sing, up to and including all the possible forms of torture that are theoretically waiting for her in the Bad Place.
The lights on the stage start flashing, and suddenly Eleanor hears the opening chords from what sounds a lot like “One Way, Or Another.” Michael looks at her inquiringly, motioning for her to come and join him. She shakes her head, and he shrugs, singing the lyrics himself as everyone—even Brent!—laughs and applauds. Eleanor finds this particular song even more cringeworthy in karaoke form than it usually sounds. Who but Michael would ever be caught dead—or rather, caught immortal—singing it in public?
4. T-shirts
With only two months to go in the experiment, Eleanor notices that Michael has traded in his usual bow ties and suspenders for t-shirts. Even worse, he seems to be favoring t-shirts sporting the stupidest slogans that Eleanor has ever seen.
It starts with a classic “I’m With Stupid ---- > “ At first, Michael tries to be casual when he tries to stand to the right of each of them, as if hoping they won’t notice what he’s doing. Eleanor watches these maneuvers and sighs. Sometimes she honestly can’t believe that the fate of humanity might depend entirely on their ragtag team of goofballs.
“That’s not nearly as funny as you think that it is.” It might have sounded more credible, Eleanor thinks, if it weren’t for the fact that Jason is currently laughing uproariously, trying to stand as close to the arrow on Michael’s shirt as he can possibly get.
“Come on, Eleanor—t-shirts with slogans are one of the most human things that there is. People stop to read them, and then there’s that little moment of connection when they both find the same thing funny at the same time. Who doesn’t love that?” Michael has that maddeningly earnest expression again.
“They’re not funny; they’re lame, and they’ll always be lame. It’s bad enough to have to interact with people that you already know. Do you really want to give some stranger an excuse to start a conversation?” As soon as she says it, Eleanor knows that this, in fact, is exactly what Michael would want if he happened to be walking around on Earth.
She tries again. “Look, they just make you look—dumb. You’re not really a t-shirt guy.”
Michael looks at her a little loftily. “If you don’t like this t-shirt, there are plenty of other options.” He shows up the following day wearing a “Kiss Me, I’m a Demon” shirt, and then the day after that it’s “I’m Not As Think As You Drunk I Am.” Eleanor covers her eyes and groans, wondering briefly if she’s actually trapped in another version of Michael’s original torture experiment.
5. Star Trek
The worst of all, as far as Eleanor is concerned, is when Michael discovers Star Trek and spends altogether too much time watching one series after another before mainlining through the movies. All her life (and apparently even after her death), Eleanor has considered Trekkies to be the most mockable creatures of all. She’s a good person now, or at the very least, she knows that she’s a better person, but still, something about Michael’s fascination with Data makes her remember ripping a set of rubber Spock ears off a particularly dweeby sixth-grade classmate with more fondness than would strictly be approved within the tenets of Kantian ethics.
To her moral credit, this time Eleanor tries to refrain from saying anything even after several days of this. But when Michael asks Janet to rustle up How to Speak Klingon: Essential Phrases for the Intergalactic Traveler and The Klingon Dictionary, she really has no choice except to intervene.
“You know that you sound . . . ridiculous, don’t you?” Eleanor tries not to listen to the guttural sounds of Klingon, but it’s hard to ignore them. Michael has apparently mastered it effortlessly—not surprising for a superior being—but even one iota of a second spent on that particular task is wasted energy.
“I’ve learned every language on Earth—what’s one more? And I think it flows a whole lot better than Swahili. Heghlu'meH QaQ jajvam.” Michael is lifting an eyebrow at Eleanor, looking more like Spock than Worf as he does so.
Eleanor sighs. “And what does that mean?”
“Today is a good day to die.” Michael looks smug.
“Well, we’re all dead already, so that’s not exactly useful information, is it? And if we don’t find a way to make this experiment work, being dead is going to be the least of our problems.” Sometimes Eleanor wonders if Michael’s obsessions will ultimately be what ends up blowing the universe to bits.
“Don’t worry—we’ve got this. Qapla’! That’s ‘success,’ ” Michael explains, off of Eleanor’s exasperated look.
She looks at him and sighs. “Somehow, I doubt that.” She bites her tongue as Michael mutters bIjatlh ‘e’ yImev under his breath. Eleanor doesn’t know that this phrase translates loosely to “shut up,” which is probably just as well.
0. Christmas
One night after an experiment strategy session that had ended on a less-than-satisfactory note, Eleanor sees Michael looking unusually pensive. “Anything up with you?”
Michael shrugs. “Did you ever see It’s A Wonderful Life? You know, that movie where every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings?”
Offhand, Eleanor can’t actually say whether she’s seen it or not—she’s generally allergic to all things Christmas, but it sounds familiar enough that she can’t quite tell whether she’s picked up the basic gist through cultural osmosis or actual screentime. “I think so. Maybe.” She wonders where this is going, and why Michael seems so uncharacteristically down. There is plenty to be discouraged about, of course, but no more than usual, and Michael is usually exasperatingly cheerful no matter how bad things are getting.
“Some of the views humans have about the Afterlife are just, well, absurd. Angels and wings . . . if only it were that simple. If it were, the universe might not be in the mess that it’s in right now, with this broken point system that seems to be getting more broken all the time.” Michael stops and sighs, and Eleanor is suddenly struck by just how much he seems to care about all of them—all of humanity, really. They’ve all come a long way from their days of being cockroaches.
“We’re making progress; I mean, Brent actually said something nice when he bumped into Chidi the other day—at least, he mumbled something that might have been something that sounded like ‘excuse me.’ That’s not nothing.” Eleanor thinks that this role reversal probably isn’t working out too well: Michael is much more suited to acting as a cheerleader than she is, but at least one of them has to do it.
Michael gives her an amused look. “I think that what he actually said was ‘rmph.’”
“At least he didn’t say forking ‘rmph.’” Eleanor is pleased when Michael laughs.
“Hey, Michael—why were you watching It’s A Wonderful Life, anyway? I mean, there’s no Christmas or any other holiday in the Afterlife, is there?” Eleanor isn’t especially curious about any of this, but she suddenly feels a need to keep the conversation going while Michael is looking just a little bit less glum.
Michael looks uncomfortable. “That’s kind of a long story.”
Eleanor grins. “We’ve got nothing but time, dude.” That’s not exactly true, but in some ways it’s completely true. They do have eternity, for as long as eternity happens to last for them. In some ways, Eleanor muses, it’s no different for them here than it is for the humans who happen to be officially alive.
“Well, the first thing that you have to know is that Christmas is actually a department of Bad Place torture. The Bad Place perfected the holiday that is now celebrated on Earth—or rather, the mega-holiday that lasts from Thanksgiving through New Year’s.” Michael looks a little ashamed as he explains this.
It all makes perfect sense to Eleanor, who had grown up with parents fighting even more on holidays than they usually did, who had always loathed all office parties, who had never seen the point of being forced to by presents for people she didn’t like or to pretend to like whatever it was that anyone happened to buy her as an afterthought. “I knew it!”
Michael nods. “The demon in charge of the Christmas department is named Krampus, and he’s really the worst. But I have to hand it to him, he also was a genius of thinking about ways to use Christmas to torture humans. If you get sent to that department of the Bad Place, it’s always Christmas, there’s nothing to wear except the ugliest Christmas sweaters, you have ten people to buy gifts for that you’ve never met and know nothing about, and all TV channels are only showing Hallmark movies about women who go back to their small town at Christmas to enter a contest or save the family business. And to top it off, you gain ten pounds a day without liking anything that you eat.”
Eleanor shudders. “That sounds about right.”
“Before I was an apprentice architect, I was actually an apprentice to Krampus. But . . . it didn’t work out.” Michael doesn’t look at Eleanor as he says this.
“What happened?” Eleanor notices that Michael is looking more and more embarrassed.
“Well, it turns out that . . . I liked Christmas. I liked all of it: the decorations, the gifts that don’t work out and the ones that do, the cookies, the piped-in music everywhere you go, and even all of those Hallmark Christmas movies. There’s something so human about this holiday that everyone secretly hates but pretends to like, and then sometimes end up liking despite every reason not to. I thought it was . . . nice. I kept that to myself, of course, but secretly liking Christmas also meant that I was a disaster at thinking about good ways to use it for torture. After Krampus fired me, I was lucky to find a place as an apprentice Architect.” Michael looks lost in thought.
“You still like all that crap, don’t you? Christmas, I mean.” Eleanor feels a prickle of something that might have been fondness if that weren’t so ridiculous.
Michael nods. “Yeah, I do. I mean, Ebenezer Scrooge is sort of me, more or less. He learned to like humans in the end. It’s a pretty great story.”
Eleanor has always found it absurdly corny, but right now she gets what Michael means. There is something a little heartening about a bad guy turning into a good guy, even though it almost never happens. Still, it sometimes does, Eleanor thinks as she studies Michael. “We could have a Christmas thing here, you know. Maybe it would help the experiment.” Eleanor is a bit shocked at the words that have just come out of her mouth.
Michael, who is staring at her, clearly can’t believe it either. “You mean . . . what do you mean?”
Eleanor plunges in. “The whole deal. Gifts. A cookie swap. A tree. Decorations. We can have it in the whole neighborhood and have a big dinner that’s just us, and Brent, Chidi, John, and Simone.”
“You mean . . . like a family Christmas?” Michael is looking brighter and brighter.
Eleanor shrugs and nods. Why not? This odd little makeshift family certainly beats the one that she had when she was alive by a mile.
“And can we have Secret Santas? You know, where there’s a price limit that nobody follows, and everyone tries to figure out who has their name so they can drop hints?” Michael has clearly spent a fair bit of time thinking about Christmas. In fact, Eleanor can’t quite believe that he had been as much of a failure dreaming up holiday torture for Krampus as he purports to have been.
Still, for some reason, Eleanor can’t summon an eyeroll, can’t even remember how it feels to want to roll her eyes. Just this one time, she lets herself be carried away with the sheer force of Michael’s dorkiness. “Sure, buddy. We can do that.”
Michael beams.