ethnodat, Author at The Cracked Door

Revolutionizing Sitcoms: “The Good Place’s” Unique Window into Making Television

Michael from “The Good Place” looking smug

I recently rewatched “The Good Place” (spoiler warning), one of my favorite shows from the last ten years, and I noticed so much more about the show the second time around. I decided to write a miniseries analyzing different facets of the show – some complimentary, some critical – as a tribute to one of the most thoughtful and interesting sitcoms on mainstream US television. I hope you enjoy:

In this first reflection of The Good Place, I will describe how the sitcom covertly portrays slides in a discussion of the process of making a sitcom itself. Metatextual commentary and humor is “in” right now in popular US media, or at least during the years the show came out. This includes fourth wall breaks, discussions of the tropes of a show’s/movie’s genre within the work itself, shows about making shows, etc., but the Good Place had a clever way to embed some of the central tensions in writing a show into the story itself, allowing characters to reflect and confront them directly.

To understand how, we first must discuss how mainstream TV sitcoms get made. Usually, the writers have one or a small group of main characters. Each has a lovable or entertaining flaw that limits them in engaging and interesting ways. For example, Homer Simpson is an idiot; Michael Scott in The Office wants love and adoration, and George Costanza in Seinfeld worries about trivial matters. Out of this fundamental flaw emerge both endearing traits and other sub-flaws that produce a more fleshed out character (more details on this process here).

The show writers then create a world that constantly rubs up against this fundamental flaw that brings it out in dramatic and hilarious ways. The writers develop the conflict in each episode and the other cast of characters who inhabit the world (both major and minor) in ways that maximize that conflict with the main casts’ fundamental flaw (e.g. Michael’s family in Arrested Development seem almost hand-picked to bring out his judgmental yet enabling nature). This forms the show’s backbone, the basic structure that each episode replicates. Structurally, all other phenomena in the show (like witty one-liners) generally flow out of this premise.

The Good Place crafts this very structure into the premise of the story world itself. In the first season, the show takes a more conventional sitcom approach. The characters are in a world with tension that demonstrates their fundamental flaw:

1) Eleanor is in an afterlife she does not deserve, which inadvertently harms everyone else there. This high stakes environment highlights her fundamental flaw of self-centeredness.

2) Chidi becomes embroiled in helping her, forcing him to make complex philosophical decisions, which highlights his fundamental flaw of indecisiveness

3) Tahini is given an elite role in the Good Place but frequently has to push to demonstrate and maintain that role, which highlights her fundamental flaws of insecurity and elitism

4) Jason is given the role of a silent monk, conflicting with and thus highlighting his natural fundamental flaw of impulsiveness.

From the perspective of these characters and first-time viewers, these conflicts over how to stay in the Good Place (or at least avoid the Bad Place) while fixing the issues their presence produces are “real,” but by the end of the first season, that turns out to be a ruse. Instead, their flaws have caused them to be condemned in the Bad Place where demons have intentionally constructed this universe antagonize each character’s flaw and torture them for their entertainment.

One interpretation I have is that these demons embody the sitcom developers. The writers are the ones who take advantage of the characters’ flaws, constructing artificial scenarios that directly pull at those flaws, for the sake of entertainment. This becomes most explicit in the first part of the second season where Michael and his demons intentionally design each detail of their world to exploit their flaws. That is the process of writing a sitcom in a nutshell. The torturous world they build can be seen as a type of “live-in” TV set, composed of various sets (such as yoghurt cafes and a clown-based home decor) to annoy the characters and then create conflicts to antagonize these personality weaknesses.

Only, the characters eventually realize the artificiality of their world, concluding that this must actually be The Bad Place. This forces the demons to reset each’s memories and start over. This parallels sitcoms, especially episodic sitcoms where each episode is a stand-alone entity. Sitcoms, especially classic sitcoms from the era before streaming services of regular television networks, tend to involve no or little character change. Within each episode, the characters may or may not go through a series of character developments, making them a different person at the end of it, but between episodes, they are usually right back to who they started with the same flaws as before. This way the same types of conflicts can unfold in each new episode with different specific details.

In the Good Place, this becomes tedious overtime and ultimately fails. The demons become increasingly exasperated at the constant repetition of enacting the same type of story over and over. And the human characters eventually realize how this world is an artificial facade. This represents how nauseatingly repetitive sitcoms can feel overtime. Even though I did not watch enough media at the time to analyze this in-depth, but I tended to see a pattern in the 2010s of shows reflecting on the constant churn of repetitive content, and I think as streaming services enabled TV shows to become more serialized, encouraging greater degrees of character growth, several media explored the repetitiveness of classic sitcoms in particular. The Good Place seems to be an example of this.

As the “producer” of these hell episodes, the head demon Michael seems to represent the show’s progression the most. In a way, he is the main protagonist of the story, since he progresses the most throughout the show and does the most to shape the cosmos around him. Over the course of the show, he grows from a demon exploiting their weaknesses for torture to working with them to avoid his own “damnation” to genuinely caring about their wellbeing and ability to get into the Good Place to fighting to reshape the entire afterlife to be more fair and lifegiving for all humanity. Throughout the show, he is a visionary whose vision shapes the world of the show, whether envisioning a new way to torture humans or trying to change the entire afterlife.

All of this gave a platform for the characters to explicitly discuss the characters main flaws in the universe. In the beginning of the show, they did this by torturing them in hell, and as the show progresses and the plot centers on the characters getting into the Good Place, this shifts to them explicitly working through their flaws to become good. This happens in multiple cycles, ranging from the Judge’s tests to being sent back to earth to see whether they are different (a reuse of magical forgetting to make the characters go back to square one and have us see them work through their flaws again). Their character growth and reshaping of their afterlife world go hand-in-hand, paralleling them working through their flaws with changing their sitcom world and premise. Through these cyclic fits, relapses, and restarts, the main cast still make slow progress not only of their own characters but also of the very foundations of their world they inhabit.

How to Prepare Yourself When What You Want to Do with Your Life Keeps Changing

In life, if I have learned anything over the course of my life, it is that I cannot predict the person I will be in a few years. We all change overtime, often in unpredictable ways, and even though a core of me remains the same, my specific goals, passions, and interests always seem to redefine themselves over the years.

For example, I have held a career for over seven years that I didn’t even know existed a year or two before starting. Then, after thinking I would do that into the foreseeable future, I ended up pursuing a very different dream of traveling the world.

The same thing happens when you look back at your past. In the moment, you may experience a major life event one way – whether horrifying, frustrating, saddening, joyous – but years or decades later, when you look back at it, you will likely feel very differently about it.

That is one thing that gives me pause when considering quickly rushing into permanent actions that will lock me in for many years or decades. I don’t really know what my future self will think of it years down the line. So then, how can I be certain that I still desire what I am seeking at that moment?

So, how should someone respond to this uncertainty? I can think of three basic approaches: 1) maximizing one’s ability to act now, 2) planning long-term projects for future gain, or 3) preparing oneself to become as perfect as possible before venturing out into the world. I tend to choose the former: positioning myself so that my future self is best able to make a decision when he is ready to.

Thus, I have tended to choose careers, living options, financial decisions, etc. that combine benefiting my current short-term interests while increasing the options that my future self will have down the line. For example, I tend to pick the job that best pads my resume to increase my options later while giving me intellectual satisfaction and financial security in the immediate future.

If a person is a car, you could say I spend my effort optimizing the vehicle. Building myself up to the best of my abilities, in terms of personal fulfillment, skill-development, professional development, etc. This way, I am as souped up as best I can be so that I can later choose the route I want to go in, whatever it is that I will want to choose at that time.

To me, others who try to produce a certain route for their lives – like those with a five year plan – are like those who spend most of their time building a specific road in front of them. This can work well if that road ends up being the route they want to take, but to me, what route I think I will want to take rarely ends up being the one I actually want to take when I am older. Thus, if I focus on building a certain route, I end up getting stuck on that route in the future, or having all that work go to waste when I inevitably choose a different path later.

It may seem counterintuitive to constantly work on yourself like this, but my strategy is not to keep the car in the garage rather than taking it onto the road (that would be the third strategy above). That is not how short-term optimization for me works. I am already on the road, focusing on how to improve myself to be able to get to more places more efficiently as I travel. I know people who think they must stay in the garage until they are ready. Taking some time by yourself to prepare is helpful, but I have also seen many languish their entire lives in the garage, unwilling to venture out because they do not match their perfect image of how they should be. I am one at least who best prepares himself through trying things out in the real world.

This is how I handle it, and why I find it works better than the other approaches. You may have a different personality with different inclinations, but it can be helpful to think through what approach would work best for you.

A Year Traveling the World: A Reflection on 2024 and What to Expect in 2025

I hope for three things in 2025 as I travel around the world:

1) Find balance

This past year, I ended up discovering how I want to live my life (or this current chapter of my life at least), and this year, I need to learn how to live that life in a balanced, sustainable fashion. In 2024, my girlfriend and I decided to start to travel the world. 2024 served as its childhood to develop, refine, and mature how to travel the world.

Now, I suspect 2025 will see an adolescence and introduction to adulthood. During the “childhood” of 2024, I determined whether I enjoyed this life, which I do, but then also encountered practical problems in how to bring it about. Like, how should I balance adventuring and seeing new places with the desire to do creative projects and other things like keeping up with friends, daily chores, etc.? What kind of stuff am I most interested in creating or doing? How do my girlfriend and I juggle our respective needs and paces when traveling together?

In childhood (in Western beliefs around psychological development at least), one also focuses on general skill exploration and development. You explore the world and attend school where you are supposed to learn the most basic foundational skills for your society. Likewise, in 2024, I have been similarly focusing a lot of my time on my own general skill development without knowing it.

Then in Western psychology, adolescence is the time when individuals most wrestle with their identities and emotionally how they will resolve the issues that come their way. One reason teenagers have so many mood swings is because they are encountering adult stressors for the first time and are initially developing their emotional techniques for how to respond. As they get older, these emotional techniques become ingrained as the patterns for how they will react when they encounter similar stressors, and thus they do not need to adjudicate between as many potential emotional responses as when they were a teenager.

Similarly, by the end of 2024, I seem to have encountered some of the big issues I will face traveling the world while also trying to do creative work), and I suspect I will use the beginning of 2025 to wrestle with how to best juggle all my priorities and how to overcome these potential problems. For example, I felt like I was not sufficiently in the moment and did not ingratiate form as much cross-cultural connections as I would have liked. Instead, I got too caught up and stressed out by the many many items I put on my to do list. I will likely test out different approaches, some of which will help and some won’t, determining over time what works best for me.This I consider my adolescent period for traveling the world.

As I finalize figuring that out, I predict my lifestyle will eventually transition sometime later in 2025 into a “young adult period” where I start to find my groove. How long will the adolescent period take? I predict I will be done and have a sense of balance by the first half of the year, with a decent likelihood I will be done by March or April, but I really don’t know. That may be way too optimistic, like maybe this adolescence will take the whole year, and if I read this in the future, I may chuckle at my own naivety. But I am still going to tentatively go with it.

2) Create something I am proud of

I would like to develop something insightful and useful for the world in 2025. In 2024, I focused on my own exploring, learning, and experience: being able to see interesting and great places in the world, having my own adventures, and learning about the world. But as I work through my adolescent stage and hit my stride, I would like to take those skills to good use and produce something interesting, insightful, and potentially useful to others.

I will still explore new parts of the world (don’t get me wrong), but I would like to spend more energy trying to produce something as well. Right now, my thoughts are writing a book or starting a podcast series, but I have a nearly endless list of other minor or less thought out ideas. I predict I will set my ambitions too high like I always do at first, but I will ultimately produce something that I am proud of.

Life amidst the Cosmic Clash between Chaos and Tyranny

(This is a second version of this original short story, with a different emphasis.)

When the world was formed, there were two evil forces. One was Chaos who represented destruction and anarchy, and the other Tyranny who wanted order and control.

They clashed. Tyranny had the entire universe confined into a small, dense point, but Chaos pushed the particles of the universe apart, causing everything to explode in a hot, fast bang. Tyranny tried to bring everything back together into an order or system, through forces like gravity, electromagnetism, and so on. She would design intricate formations ranging from small atoms to big galaxies, but Chaos would cause them slowly to rip apart.

Their fight raged for billions of years. Tyranny started to learn that every structure she built, no matter how strong, seemed to eventually fall apart. She realized two things that human scientists would discover far into the future: Entropy (or Chaos) always increases in the universe and that any structured, dynamic system no matter how perfectly built can easily splinter into chaos overtime given very small aspects of how they were initially built that she could not control. In enough time, Chaos always seemed destined to win in the end.

She had an idea. What if she could build structures that would continue to reproduce themselves overtime? When she tried to build a single system, it would never last forever. Something would always make it fall apart eventually. But, she decided to build structures that could replicate themselves but with slight modifications each time in response to mild intrusions of Chaos (which she called “circumstances”)? Even if the original version disintegrated a long time ago, the newest lifeforms would have adapted and survived. This seemed like the best strategy to build order that can survive the coming chaos and slowly take over the universe. She called these replicating entities Life.

Starting on a planet, these got better and better at replicating, becoming a network with other life that expanded across the whole planet. In time, maybe it could expand across the entire universe. As her life started competing more intensely in this environment, some started developing the ability to understand some of the plays in her playbook and write their own. They also started creating information and other systems that seemed to exhibit a type of life of its own.

As this is happening, she saw one fundamental weakness: these things are reliant on matter, and eventually even their matter might descend into Chaos. She struggles to think. Will life be able to transcend even the matter of the universe, or will Chaos eventually still have her way in the end?

What Are Emotions, and What Do They Tell Us About Ourselves?

Many are critical of emotions, seeing feelings as something that stifles them, as something they must overcome with reason and rationality, but that is foolish in the long run. We should be aware of our emotions because they teach us crucial lessons about ourselves and our needs.

Emotions are one of our internal mechanisms to orient us towards what we need. Thus, they are crucial. Even though sometimes emotions can be overwhelming or lead people to make decisions in the moment that turn out to be poor ones, we should not ignore or suppress our emotions.

Instead, we should seek to understand what they are telling us about what we need. Anxiety is a sign that we consider whatever we are anticipating as important. Worry and fear area signs that we are concerned about our wellbeing. Anger is a sign that we feel an injustice has threatened ourselves or others we care about.

At the end of the day, they are signals. Signals that can turn out to be correct or incorrect. Sometimes we are angry at something that we discover is not a real injustice, and sometimes, what we fear turns out not to be much of a concern. But often they are not wrong: our minds can be very good at assessing what is important.

Either way, it’s important to process the emotion, understand why you feel it, and then determine the best response to having the emotion. Through this, we can synchronize our emotions with our rational thinking. Using our reason to think about whether our emotion’s assessments are missing important information, and in turn, determining whether our rational self is ignoring something our emotions are picking up on.

A successful marriage between the two is a healthier way to respond to our emotions than suppression and a better way to use the tools in our psychological toolset to engage the world and live a good life.

The Dance of Water: Finding Beauty in the Tumult

The first time I whitewater-rafted was in a park called Ohiopyle at around 12 years old. Located in southwestern Pennsylvania we rafted along a famous stretch of the Youghiogheny River. My mother, father, brother, and I all shared a raft.

When the first rapids we had no clue what we were doing. Our boat rammed right into something. It knocked my father straight off the raft. I went flying out too, but before I could fall out of the boat, my mom’s body slammed into my legs on the boat, pinning them. Instead, I dangled over the edge, with my legs trapped on the boat and my chest and head hanging over the edge.

This was one of the most interesting experiences of my entire life. I hung there passively with no control over where I went or what I did as the boat careened down the water.

Waves would form around my face, in a circular vortex starting up from my chest and curving my face. They would form a cylindrical corridor like science fiction depictions of the inside of a wormhole. Within, I would marvel at the crystalline-like structures of water all around me.

Then suddenly the wave would collapse. My head hopelessly dunked in the water. My existence precariously converted into a blinding stream of bubbles and gagging as the water pummeled my face, and I thrashed amidst the current.

Then just as suddenly as it ended, another crystalline wave would form. This would go in cycles: the beautiful moments of respite to catch my breath while I marveled at the unique formations around me followed by periods of chaotic pummeling in the water.

It lasted for several minutes until the boat finally concluded its rapids. Then, my mother finally moved from her perch against the edge of the boat, releasing me to drop fully into the now calm water.

When I came back on board, she was not aware that she was pinning my legs against the side of the boat as she had entirely focused on how to navigate the coming waves. My father returned from his swim, and my older brother stayed perfectly safe in the back of the boat the whole time, steering it through the rapids, wondering why everyone else on the boat couldn’t keep their seats. It goes to show you how different people given their personalities and initial positions in life have very different experiences with the same phenomena.

Watching the waves crash above me reminded me how I really have very little control over my life. I am really being taken along for a ride by bigger forces around me outside of my control. At the same time, I still get to see wondrous sites as these entities form and break around me. The glory of life lies in these moments of surrender towards the unique dances the world creates.

At the same time, at least for now, I have been given enough of a break from the chaos of life to catch my breath and survive, to have my needs met in between the moments of serenity and chaos. That has been enough.

The Meaningless Film (A Short Story)

A group of film writers were brainstorming new movie ideas. They were tired and burnt out from churning out the usual cliche crap that regular people enjoyed, so they settled on a completely different concept: a meaningless film. It would have no meaning or significance whatsoever.

They cobbled together an assortment of scenes. No plot really, but random dialogue from conversations they had been in throughout the week. Each contributed a scene or two, and it produced a mess without a coherent story, not even stable characters. One scene one “character” was bursting with rage, the next she was timid and docile.

They showed the script to the owners of their production company, and the owners found it amazing. How did they manage to come up with such a creative yet authentic portrayal of life? Each conversation demonstrated the ambiguities and contradictions latent in the contemporary world.

The filmmakers bit their lip in frustration. How could these producers find so much meaning in such dribble? The producers were excited to make the movie, but the filmmakers abandoned the concept and went back to the drawing board. Even a film without plot or character development could have meaning.

So, they stripped all characters and plot and displayed a randomly generated series of images. But this too piqued the interest of the avant-garde film connoisseurs within their company. What an interesting statement of what art has turned into nowadays?

So, they scrapped that meaningful dribble and opted for complete silence: an hour and a half of a blank screen instead of a feature film. This stoked interest among the public, though. Would they dare make such a radical film, and what kind of statement were they trying to make?

They realized that people give meaning to the things around them, so the only way to have the film be meaningless is to have it not exist at all. Thus, they never made the film. Social media still repeated the rumor of a blank film, but it was never publicized.

The filmmakers settled. They told themselves that because no such film existed, the film itself was meaningless, although the concept and potential title of the film seemed meaningful to whatever journalists were required to opine about their supposed vision for making such a thing. That, to them, was enough.

Their producer bosses chastised them for wasting so much time and failing to make a single one of their films, so they decided upon a more productive way to take a break and heal from this burnout. They would go on strike for having to churn so much cliche content.

Time with the Glaciers of Patagonia: Finding Humanity’s Place in Nature’s Power and Majesty

Visiting Perito Moreno Glacier in Los Glaciares National Park, I was struck by how interesting I find glaciers. They remind me of nature’s majesty and subtly. Millions of bits of snow and ice slowly pack one by one until they become a landscape-shaping force. Even through nature’s slow, subtle works, all-inspiring entities emerge. Glaciers go on to reshape the landscape around them.

Every few minutes, its mass creaks with white thunder and whole towers of ice fall into the water, demonstrating how the glacier’s powerful yet slow flow builds overtime. A glacier can seem like a static entity, but the entire walls of ice falling out of nowhere into the lake below challenge this assumption. They really flow very, very slowly as they slide down the mountains. All that pressure eventually causes the ice at the very bottom to snap off. The ear-cracking thunder removes any notion other than that these glaciers are powerful forces working their way through the valley they inhabit.

In Torres del Paine National park, I hiked within the dusty leftover basis on the retreating Grey Glacier. Glaciers move tons of earth and leave the lakes, rivers, fjords, islands, moraines, and much more in their wake. For example, massive glaciers during the Ice Age produced or reformed Long Island and most of New York City, and significantly reshaped the Eastern United States.

Seeing towering walls of ice the size of skyscrapers fall suddenly into the water, humanity’s contribution to the world looks small in comparison. Natural entities like glaciers that are bigger, bolder, and older than us emerge naturally.. We can only experience the eons of time glaciers have existed in the ways they mold the landscapes around them.

At the same time, humans have had a pretty significant impact on the glaciers. Climate change is slowly melting many glaciers around the world, piece by piece. Our decisions too can accumulate into massive impacts on the landscapes around us.

Nevertheless, this glacier is still here. No matter what humans do to it, we can never get rid of the impacts its ice has had on the landscape. Maybe this will be the route of humanity as well: slowly creep into a massive force that slowly wither as well once we reach our zenith until we dissipate out leaving an impact on the landscape around us. Specific societies will most likely go that kind of route: wither until it becomes unrecognizable as it transitions into whatever comes next.

Nature produces massive emergent forces like glaciers and humanity, and those same patterns of physics will eventually take them away. Our lives will most likely only ever be one towering column of ice in nature’s system that also eventually falls into the water below.

Where Are You From: Navigating How I Answer While Traveling the World

While traveling the world, one of my most dreaded questions, I get asked the most frequently:

“Where are you from?”

Where am I from? That’s hard to answer. I have lived in many cities: do I tell them that I was in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania? Should I provide them with my legal residence? I spent the last five years living in New York City. What about there? Should I just say I am from the United States?

I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but internationally, your average person does not know where that is. I lived in Brooklyn for the last five years, so my most common answer is to say, “New York City.”

Oh New York, it’s the city that no matter where I am in the world, everyone has heard of, and some people I meet tell me they have visited. Everyone has an opinion about New York City, even in some of the most remote places in the world. They may view it as a spectacular land of opportunity they really want to go to (or have already visited) or as a dirty, crime-ridden hell hole, or anywhere in between this extreme, but they have heard of it.

Thus, saying I am from New York makes me familiar to them, whether they have positive or negative associations with that place. I find that it is easier to start there, rather than desperately try to explain verbally to someone where Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania fits on a map of the United States. Most often when I say I am from New York City, people’s eyes will light up; that’s a place they have wondered about from all the TV shows, movies, etc. about the city.

Most often when I say I am from New York City, people’s eyes will light up; that’s a place they have wondered about from all the TV shows, movies, etc. about the city. I can use that energy to learn about how they view the city, the United States, and the world overall.

I prefer saying that I am from New York City than that I am from the United States. The latter also puts the emphasis on the country as a whole, changing the conversation. I find people have different associations with the United States overall than New York City specifically. Sometimes even people don’t know that New York City is in the United States, but that is rare.

Both have had distinct brandings overtime. I find most people who know that New York is in the United States still don’t have the same associations when they hear “New York City” and the “United States.” And to be honest, in my current relationship with the United States and its history, I find the associations with New York City to be more interesting, preferring both to discuss that.

So, there you have it. That is how I currently answer the most complicated everyday question I get: “Where are you from?”

Shattered Icons: Rebuilding Identity in Times of Change

The last several years have felt like an iconoclastic phase in my life. By this, I mean a stage of life where most of the things I once held dear have fallen apart right in front of me, and I have had to figure out how to reform myself.

Iconoclasm refers to movements where people would destroy the sacred icons or images in their houses of religious worship. In particular, this would happen from time to time in Medieval Christianity. The Christians would slowly accrue many icons (statues, sacred objects, or other things) that would become a core part of how they experienced God. Churches would become full of such icons.

Then, every once in a while, a movement against icons would sweep through the church. They would feel that the icons got in the way of true worship of the divine and would seek to purify or cleanse the church of such “idolatries.”

This metaphorically matches my current period in life. Many of the things that became most important for me and central to my identity demolished right in front of me, or at least that is how it felt. For example, jobs that gave me a sense of who I was turned out not to be what they seemed; important relationships withered; disciplines and interests that once compelled me have lost their favor; and the places where I lived that once centered have withered away.

How does one make sense of all of this; might as well respond? It can feel overwhelming, making it hard to know what to do. For me, it has been a slow trickle over several years, not a single cataclysmic event. Thus, the stress and processing has come in trickles as well.

I have noticed that I have been more cautious of relying on new things, since in the back of my mind, I doubt whether to trust it. I also notice that I have to give myself more time and patience to process everything that has happened. I need to be patient with myself while I do so.

Having an iconoclastic phase does not seem bad in the long run. It is teaching me what really matters in my life. A kind of refining fire of those past things that I have held onto, allowing me to transition into whatever new life stage I am forming. Often someone needs an iconoclastic phase during transition stages in life to supplant what one has and make room for whatever is to come.

That’s how I have been handling this stage of life. Maybe if you have such a phase, you would handle it similarly, or maybe in a completely different way. Either way, you learn a lot about yourself, however, by how you handle transitions.