SPOILERRIFIC topic about The Good Place

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.

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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. :smiley:

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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.

  1. People on Earth will continue to be people. They will continue to act as they always have. No changes were made.
  2. The system was broken because it was impossible for people to meet The Good Place scoring criteria while on Earth. It’s just the nature of reality.
  3. Fix #1 was to transform The Bad Place (where everyone went anyway) from a place of eternal torment to a place of self-improvement where people could earn/redeem their way into The Good Place.
  4. Fix #2 was to fix The Good Place. For the few people who were there, it was turning people into mush. It is still a place where people can do anything their heart desires. It just added another option: an out. If you don’t want it, don’t take it. Once you have done all that your heart desires, doing more of the same would not only bring diminishing returns, but also become meaningless. Human life has meaning because it ends.
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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!

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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.

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Isn’t that true of every religion with a “Good Place” in the afterlife?

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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.

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And then you walk through the door…

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