The Good Place: Flipping The Script Until There's Nothing Left
Feeling lonely? Consider turning into morally good particles.
With four seasons to its belt, The Good Place is a masterpiece of a show that perfectly captured everything it wanted to.
Everything from religious tones, comedy, existential crisis, androids falling in love, friendship, loneliness, and frogs. The show mainly focuses on philosophy and comedy.
There's nothing better than wondering about the who, how, when, and where while having a good laugh over the never-ending answers.
Faulty Heaven turns out to be Hell
The series starts off with the concept of a person who does not deserve to be in heaven by any means makes it into a good place also known as heaven.
Eleanor Shellstrop needs to find a way to blend in with all the "good" people so as to safeguard her place in heaven.
In doing so, she manages to become a literal flaw within the existence of a good place and starts to glitch into heaven.
We find out later on in the series that she is not the only one who seems to be a faulty member of a good place as she meets another person who has been posing as a silent monk when in reality he was a DJ when he was still alive.
As Eleanor and Jason try their level best to stay in a good place, they realize that they would just need to become a genuinely nice person for the system to fall back into place.
Therefore, they take the help of Chidi, a person who has overthought every nook and cranny of every philosopher's book and suffers from his constant habit of being indecisive.
Not to mention Tahani, who literally could not be more of a narcissist and chooses to join the crusade of helping Eleanor and Jason.
But here's the biggest twist of it all: None of these characters belong in a good place and they have been purposely chosen to torment each other in a hell that is designed to feel like heaven.
800 reboots and we're still just halfway out of ideas
The handler of a good place, Michael, alongside his trusty assistant, Janet, were the only ones who wanted to make a faulty heaven to torture the minds of their subjects.
When news came out that the subjects figured out what the good place really is, Michael's plans were foiled as he predicted that he could easily torture them for a thousand years before running into a hiccup.
We then get revealed that Michael is just a demon of many and he is just another subordinate to the ruler of hell, Shawn.
Michael's idea of a good place only came to be due to the fact that he is bored with torturing people by stabbing, burning, and stabbing again.
He wanted to make his job more interesting and therefore thought of making a faulty heaven designed to torture his subjects without any actual effort from his end.
After Eleanor found out about his whole plan, Michael attempted a second version of a good place by erasing everyone's memories and setting up the world once again. Quite literally rebooting the series.
However, Eleanor still found out which led to Michael rebooting once more and then once more.
The poor demon started to lose faith in his idea after the 800th try but that didn't stop the show from evolving even further with its twists.
How to make your demon your best friend 101
After trying 800 reboots of a good place, Michael was burned out. He was out of ideas and was in constant misery.
This was mainly due to the fact that he was warned by Shawn that he would be tortured if his second version of a good place failed.
Michael did not think to notify his boss that not only did his second version fail, but every version leading up to his latest, 800th version has also failed (For understandable reasons).
It was now time to take a new look into the purpose of what a good place could truly be.
After having a proper therapy session with Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, and Jason, Michael realized that the only reason his plan was failing to work was due to the fact that his subjects kept getting better at being good human beings and therefore blew the whole concept apart each time.
This led him to believe that this fault good place might actually be a way to make every one of his subjects worthy enough to be in the actual good place.
Thus, the journey of making a demon teach his humans on how to be good began.
It was still mostly Chidi who was teaching everyone the morals and philosophy while the gang tried their best to listen while Michael was trying his best to keep demon spawn from noticing what was actually going on.
Heaven equals true hell
Another twist that evolved the show was when we find out that no one has made it into heaven since c. 1497 CE.
Even after a person decoded exactly what to do to get into heaven, his score was still too low due to the indirect consequences of his actions.
The morality point to get into heaven became so hard that the lowest score to become a member was by scoring close to +900,000.
After proving that the system of judgment needs to accommodate to current times, the gang was allowed a trial which gave them a pass into heaven.
However, as it turns out, the staff managing heaven has been the most incompetent of people to ever exist in the show.
Therefore, it is now up to the gang of four humans, one android, and a demon to liven up the place.
Not only does Michael become a true demon turned angel as he literally pulled up his subjects who he was planning to torture in hell all the way into heaven, he also becomes the most efficient at running the actual good place.
His redemption arc is definitely one of the best things this show has to offer.
Nothing left but particles
Alas, we reach the end of the series. Congratulations!
You have made it to heaven, what now? You have made every wish of yours come true, every dream fulfilled, and every wants to be achieved.
What now? Turns out that is exactly what the good place answers in its final season as it turns out that the humans that were already in heaven are almost lifeless, virtually and literally having no end to their existence have turned them into a husk of what they used to be.
Chidi provides a solution to this problem. After achieving total and utter joy, there is nothing else to do but stop existing.
Yes, the true ending of all the dead people earning their place in heaven eventually leads to more deaths.
It is truly a heart-wrenching moment seeing the characters you have seen grow and become fond of starting to turn into nothing but particles by the big finale of the season.
Even Michael decides that he does not wish to be immortal anymore and becomes a human on Earth to truly experience humanity, knowing that it means he will also die and get judged and eventually, die again.
Arin Jain
Prerna