I think I remember liking the ending but only in the way that it felt satisfying. I think the whole of S5 (final one) was kind of irritating but I was happy with the send off. I can’t remember the details though
Except I think the whole ending felt human. Like the whole stack of turtles things where the explanation of death is just another lifetime. It’s just another humanity really.
I enjoyed The Good Place. It was fun to watch a show that discussed various philosophical ideas.
While I thought Jason was a too stupid to live, the truth of the matter is that there are lots of people in this world that count as stupid. I’ll go further than that, we are all stupid, but it is a matter of degree.
As for the ending, if a story is going to end then there are some options. Happy for now, happy ever after, or an acknowledgement that all good things must end. For me, the show did a good job of unpacking those narrative tropes.
Thank you. I just forget that the forum is here, as in active etc.
Ah remember when we were all worried that this forum would dwindle into obscurity.
We still have a link off the SU&SD front page (the “two speech balloons” icon) and that is certainly welcome.
I must be a weird person, because I found the ending a little too clean and saccharine.
First, I thought the reveal that everyone in paradise is bored and miserable was fantastic. I don’t just agree with that premise, but I came to that exact conclusion a long time ago; eternity is way, way longer than anyone can even comprehend, and there simply isn’t a way to keep your humanity for that long. If I were an ant, and took one step every million years, by the time I walked across every inch of the Earth, eternity would still be in its infancy. Why would anything matter at that point? You could live a thousand lives, love a million loves, witness a trillion miracles, and you would still have made no progress towards anything. Every joy you ever experienced would become another boulder to push up a hill. I’ve even had a theory that heaven, if it did exist, would have to exist as the fixed point of an endless regenerative cycle; only by dying and being reborn could you ever find eternal bliss, because you can forget about the experiences you had before…
And, that’s exactly what the show did! The afterlife becomes an iterative process of improvement; you try again and again until you become a good person, then you get to live in paradise for as long as you want, until you chose to go through the door. But… that’s not the Good Place anymore. It doesn’t solve the problem of the afterlife, it just ignores it, tearing the afterlife down and replacing it with “life, but you get to choose when it ends.” And, it tears open the problems that an afterlife without punishment can lead to. You get infinite do-overs! All the people you made miserable will make it to the Good Place eventually, so why does it matter how much suffering you cause in the meantime? If your life on Earth has little bearing on your overall happiness by the end of your time in the Good Place, does that mean life is less important than the afterlife? If so, POSSIBLE TRIGGER WARNING why not commit suicide now, so you can fix yourself quicker and find eternal happiness as quickly as possible?
These are really important questions in the context of life, both from a theistic and atheistic perspective, but The Good Place completely ignores those festering wounds, and focuses on the positivity of “everyone can change if you give them a chance.” Which is a great idea, but when you have infinite chances, you quickly lose the incentive to be good on the first try.
That probably got a little rambly, but in short, I thought the way the Good Place “fixed” itself in the end raises a lot more problems than it solves, but ignores them and pretends like the system is now perfected. I still love the show overall, and it raises a lot of interesting philosophical questions, but I think it tried to hard to provide definite answers to those questions, rather than let them linger.
The point of this Spoileriffic thread is that you don’t have to hide everything.
Which is a great idea, but when you have infinite chances, you quickly lose the incentive to be good on the first try.
But each individual doesn’t know this. Certainly on your first “real” life, you don’t know the iterative self-improvement nature of the afterlife. During each iteration, the subject may not know of previous iterations or the possibility of future ones. Furthermore, each afterlife is customized for the person. Not everyone will experience the same journey and you can’t make broad generalizations.
Absolutely agree with your points about infinity here. Don’t want to go on about it but I find the concept of forever not just boring but absolutely terrifying.
Good to know! 
It’s true that each person’s journey from life to the Good Place will be different, but the end point is still the same. Importantly, each individual will only have a conscious experience of three lives–their actual life, their final “test” afterlife (in which they will be a fundamentally good person because they have to pass the test), and their Good Place afterlife, because their memory is wiped after every unsuccessful test. Meaning, unless someone is so despicable that they stay in that middle stage forever (which is statistically impossible), they will end this process as a good person, living out their paradise in the Good Place, with a cosmic nanosecond representing their period of immorality. That alone leads to some issues (in particular, whether anyone in the Good Place has free will or is even the same person who died, since their minds and souls have been slowly molded and shaped by the testing process), and while I might take issue with that in a Dostoevskian sense, those are admittedly minor quibbles if you can attain perfect happiness for every human being… but then, if that’s the end goal, in what sense does life matter at all?
The afterlife has seemingly infinite resources, a guaranteed path to moral righteousness and happiness, and can place people on that path without infringing on anyone else’s suffering. So why bother with the life part? Just separate people into their own testing Good Place at birth, raise them into being a good person, then unleash them into the real Good Place and let them live for as long as they want. Allowing any suffering on Earth doesn’t serve any purpose other than “free will”, and trapping people in a never-ending cycle of existential dread until they become better isn’t an improvement on that front, which is how the current system works.
I have way too many thoughts on this, but it boils down to the show wanting to have its cake and eat it too. The final scene makes it very clear that the show cares about people being better while on Earth (what with the sparkling essence of Eleanor showering down on a guy and making him a better person), but the structure of the Good Place at best makes life pointless, and at worst actively incentivizes selfish hedonism. And yet, the show’s message is “people will slowly get better on Earth, and you can be happy in the afterlife, so now the system works!”, which felt very disingenuous.
I hadn’t quite thought through the consequences of the ending, thanks for that clear explanation which I can’t really find any logical flaws with. You may have just ruined the ending of The Good Place for me! However, my feelings about it remain - it made me laugh and feel good and there are very very few sitcoms which spark these kind of debates, and so I’m very grateful for it.
Yeah, I still love the show! And I really liked the ending as a personal drama; I brought this thread up with my partner, and she immediately started bawling because she remembered the moment when Chidi left Eleanor. And while she thought he abandoned her and had grown sick of her, I thought it was so sweet that he loved her enough to stay even though he had reached his moment, and had the strength to leave her the way she asked him to. It’s a really great, really affecting, and really interesting show from beginning to end–I just have problems with the philosophical parts of the ending, and tend to think about that part of it more often.
That’s a rather uncharitable take. Look at it a different way: people change over time. What relationship could possibly last “forever”?
I don’t think that was the message at all.
Definitely a pretty negative take on the whole issue, but I understand where she’s coming from. It always hurts to be left, because you feel like a failure; it doesn’t matter that nothing could be good enough, it only matters that you weren’t good enough. Can’t say I agree with it though, seems like a recipe for disappointment!
I always thought the ending implied otherwise. After Eleanor steps through the door, her “essence” sort of scatters across the world, and causes a man to return mail that was incorrectly delivered to his mailbox. I figured the implication was that, when a person steps through, it leads to people becoming slightly better on Earth. And if that isn’t the case, it makes the Good Place even less reasonable (see below).
I agree with all that, I just think the ramifications are weird. The point system on Earth is wildly unfair, life is guaranteed to improve for you after you die (since that’s what the new system is all about), and if we accept that people don’t change on Earth, there’s no expectation that people on Earth will improve consistently. So why bother? How does any of this make an argument for not rebooting Earth the way the judge wants to? The show clearly thinks that human life on Earth is broadly important, but then undercuts that by making the afterlife better in every conceivable way. It would be like your parents saying you have to eat your vegetables, but it turns out the vegetables are packing peanuts, and afterwards you never have to eat vegetables again because every meal is dessert, and also you didn’t actually have to eat the vegetables because dessert was always going to happen.
Isn’t that true of every religion with a “Good Place” in the afterlife?
Most religions with a “Good Place” also have a “Bad Place”, though. If you only make it into the Good Place by being good during your life, but make it into the Bad Place otherwise, then life on Earth is important because it informs the quality of your afterlife. And that is obviously not a perfect system (the show exposes some potential issues, which is why it eliminates the Bad Place to begin with), but it at least means that your actions here matter. The show gets rid of the Bad Place, but doesn’t replace it with any other incentive to be good.
The rub is the afterlife should be disentangled from the idea of being a human. It’s only possible to get bored in an infinity good afterlife IF you’re a being capable of being bored which true for humans.
In Hinduism I’m pretty certain the “good” death is essentially a being with a loss of ego and any sense of purpose - you get melted back into God. the bad place is being on earth and suffering trauma as a living thing.
And then you walk through the door…