NBC's hit series, The Good Place, recently ended after four incredibly successful seasons on the air. What started off seeming like a show about a woman who ended up in heaven by mistake ended up being a wild philosophical ride, taking its audience through twists and turns while posing fundamental questions about right, wrong, life, death and, perhaps most importantly, what happens after we die.
The show's creator, Michael Schur, has been a sort of King Midas writer for NBC for about two decades now. Since his humble beginnings as a writer for SNL and, later, The Office, (you may also recognize him as Dwight's cousin Mose), he created both Parks and Recreation and Brooklyn Nine-Nine before the network decided to give him free rein to use his comedic genius to create any show he wanted... and boy, did he ever.
As he explained on The Good Place: The Podcast, one of Schur's main goals with The Good Place was simply to do something unexpected, something that had never been done before. He kept that philosophy of doing something unexpected right up until the very end, and as a result, the show was one of the least predictable comedies on television.
The ending, of course, kept in step with that unpredictability. The penultimate episode seemed like a perfectly lovely stopping point, and it would have made a great finale on its own. Frankly, if you want a strictly happy ending to the show, you should just stop watching there, because the actual final episode is packed with heart-wrenching moments one after the other. If you didn't pause it to sob profusely at least once, you might be a robot (or a less-advanced Janet).
In the second to last episode, Team Cockroach discovers that life in the Good Place isn't all it's cracked up to be. Because time goes on for infinity and nobody has any drive or motivation to do things, everybody has essentially turned into a glassy-eyed shell of their former self.
After he's tricked into taking charge of the whole affair, Michael and the others realize that there's a simple fix for this: Give people the option to leave. Simply adding the possibility of ending the infinity of the afterlife gives people their drive back, and motivates them to do the things they used to enjoy again. After all, as Eleanor put it, "Vacations are only special because they end."
In "Chapter 52: Whenever You're Ready," viewers are made to contend with the inevitable result of this option being put into place: The beloved cast of characters all taking it, one at a time.
Of course, in the show as in life, where there is pain felt, there is learning to be done. For every sad or bittersweet moment that the finale has to offer, there's a bit of meaningful symbolism or a life lesson. If you're one of the fans still tearfully reeling over it and you haven't had time to untangle all the meaning behind it, maybe this will help you out a little bit.
Why Jason Was Ready to Leave First
If you were to sit down and think about it long enough, even before watching the episode, it would probably make sense that Jason is the first to be ready to walk through the door and end his afterlife. He's the simplest member of the gang: His desires are very easy to fulfill, and it seems his only real goals in life were to get (moderately) rich, achieve success as a DJ, ride go-karts with monkeys, and play a perfect game of Madden. His inherent simplicity means his happiness is the easiest to achieve, and thus, he is the first to feel the calm of true peace that accompanies being ready to, essentially, die for real.
The only thing that could maybe have held Jason back was Janet. But if Janet were going to keep Jason in the afterlife, he'd be there forever, and he knows that. So, when he gets the feeling that it's time to go, true to his impulsive nature, he makes the decision then and there.
Many fans were upset about Janet's ending, since she, as an immortal being, would be left behind by everyone else, but there is a little bit of a silver lining built into that. As she explained to Jason, because she is an immortal being, she doesn't experience time the same way humans do: When she remembers something, she can literally relive the moment, sort of like time travel. So when she's not busy caring for the ever-growing number of Good Place residents, she can be with Jason (or anyone else) again and again.
(He even surprises Janet one last time, in true Jason fashion, by waiting around for thousands of years just to give her a necklace he thought he had lost. When he says he was just existing alone with his thoughts while he waited for her, Janet points out that he had sort of become a monk: A callback to his role in the first season that, while lost on him, was certainly not lost on the audience.)
Why Tahani Chose Not To Walk Through the Door
Tahani Al-Jamil was a woman of many talents and many goals when she was alive, and that didn't stop after she died. Even when she had accomplished everything on her list and attained her deepest desire, the love and approval of her parents, she still never seems to get that "inner peace" feeling that the others describe. She decides that she is done because her goals are all checked off, but there is never a moment where it seems like she's truly bored of the afterlife, rather just what this afterlife has to offer.
Tahani's ambition truly knows no bounds, but that's not the only reason she asks Michael to become an architect. As she says herself: "I spent my whole life pretending to help people. If I was an architect, I could do it for real."
That feeling of inner peace, of being ready to embrace non-existence or whatever comes after after-death, doesn't just come from accomplishing a set of goals: It comes from healing the wounds that life leaves and finishing any business one might have. There is one thing that living in the Good Place never allowed Tahani to do, and that was to truly help people the way she wanted to on Earth. With that business unfinished, she would never be able to walk through the door. As an architect, she finally gets that chance, a do-over at what she meant to be the purpose of her life.
Maybe someday, Tahani will tire of being an architect and, feeling that she has done enough good, finally walk through the door. Or maybe she'll remain an immortal being forever, essentially replacing Michael, the immortal-fire-squid-turned-human. Either way, for now, she got the most perfectly Tahani ending she could have: she asked for more.
Why Chidi Was Ready Before Eleanor And Why She Let Him Go
Most fans probably expected Eleanor and Chidi to walk through the door together. After all, they were a team for almost the whole show, so it makes sense that they'd stay a team right up until the end.
However, if you think about it, it makes more sense that they didn't, and it gives a powerful message about existence and personhood as well.
Chidi didn't have a lot of wounds to heal or problems to solve in his afterlife. His one major flaw was that he hurt the others in his life through his indecisiveness, and that flaw was completely fixed before he even got to the Good Place. He had an otherwise full life on Earth. The only things the series shows him deeply longing to accomplish are to finish his thesis and find true love. With his indecisiveness cured, finishing his thesis would probably have been a breeze (if solving the entire afterlife hadn't already filled that void) and he found true love with Eleanor.
One could argue that if finding love were one of his goals, then he should have wanted to stay with his love until the end, but Chidi did have thousands and thousands of Jeremy Bearimys with Eleanor. That was enough for him, once everything else was said and done, because loving her didn't mean he was attached to her.
One of the best small lessons the finale teaches is that loving someone doesn't mean you still aren't your own person. Chidi loved Eleanor so much that he would be willing to live a life that he could get nothing more out of just to make sure Eleanor wouldn't be lonely, but she realized it would be selfish to make him do that because living your life for someone else isn't really living it.
Eleanor was the last thing holding him there, though, in a sense. The significance of the moment that Chidi realized he was ready to leave was lost on him, but not necessarily on those watching. His mother kissed Eleanor on the cheek and got lipstick on her, and Eleanor's mother wiped it off. Seeing this probably made a part of Chidi realize that Eleanor had people who loved her, and she would be okay without him.
In that sense, the two really were deeply connected. Eleanor had her own unfinished business, and it was the hardest to complete both; to make genuine human connections, and to stop ignoring that little voice in her head and help those people. Eleanor always had to be the last one to leave, because her own personal mission, even if she didn't know it, was to make sure that all the other people she cared about were truly happy. And to make Chidi happy, she had to let him leave. It would have been nice if he had been the last person on that list, but given how many tougher cases there were than his, it was never really possible.
(This doesn't really make "say goodbye to me now, and leave before I wake up" any less of a punch to the gut, but it at least makes the events make more sense.)
Why Anybody Left At All
As the show explains it, a door to leave the afterlife has to exist because, without knowing it has an ending, life has no meaning. This call to the nature of our own existence is beautiful and poignant and was meant to make viewers stop and appreciate the beauty that can be found in death.
However, in a more meta sense, The Good Place only ended that way because of the views of one man: One of the show's consulting philosophers, Todd May of Clemson University. (He and the other philosopher, Pamela Heironymi, are actually both featured in the finale - see the above photo.)
When he was laying the groundwork for the show, Michael Schur reached out to philosophers in order to learn more about the current discussions on ethics and the afterlife, to make the show more nuanced and realistic. Believe it or not, and Chidi would balk if you were to answer 'not', not all matters on the subject of philosophy were settled in ancient Greece or during the Renaissance. Many philosophical areas of study are still new, being actively discussed and argued in those communities, and one of those is the philosophy of death.
As May himself explained in an interview with Slate:
"There are debates between philosophers who think immortality would be good and philosophers like me who think you need mortality. One of them has called people like me the “immortality curmudgeons.”
May wrote about his views on death in his 2014 book, Death: The Art of Living. His book is used in higher-level philosophy classes to help facilitate discussions on the subject, which is why Chidi uses it to teach on the show.
Hieronymi brought contrast to the discussion, as she seems to tentatively take the opposite side in that argument:
"They’re definitely taking a side in an ongoing philosophical discussion about immortality, saying that an infinite and trouble-less life would be meaningless. I’m not sure I agree with that. I think probably Tahani got it right in trying to see what she could do to help the rest of humanity... the portrayal of existence as relying on a termination to give it meaning—I’m skeptical of that idea."
So, who knows? Maybe if Schur had happened to ask a different consulting philosopher, all of Team Cockroach would have eventually moved on to take jobs in the immortal sector, helping to create new tests, or participating in them. It would have certainly been less painful to watch, but it wouldn't have given the audience the same reminder about the value of their own lives, or draw the metaphor of a peaceful acceptance of death, which certainly factored in the overall emotional depth of the ending.
What Happens When You Go Through the Door
We don't see what happens to those who walk through the door until the very end of the episode. It's only when Eleanor, the last to leave, finally realizes she's ready, that the result is revealed: Those who walk through the door sort of evaporate, dissipating into tiny bits of energy that float randomly through the universe.
When one of these little floating Eleanor-bits lands on a random mortal, he's struck by some inspiration to bring a piece of misdelivered mail to the person it was meant for, which, in a touching moment, turns out to be the now-human Michael Realman.
The simplest interpretation of this is that, when you die, your essence becomes a million little small forces for good in the world. That's a beautiful ending as-is: By creating this way out for people and allowing that filtered good to re-enter, Team Cockroach and the rest actually made it so that the world eventually becomes a little better for every person in their new Good Place.
However, it could be even more than that.
The thing that bit of Eleanor got that man to do was a callback to earlier season three when Eleanor does something very similar as she returns a wallet she found to its rightful owner. She does this because of the "little voice" in her head that she always used to ignore. The drive to make her do good, one of the most essential good things about her.
Maybe, when they leave the Good Place and become that "wave returning to the ocean," a person becomes a small, little voice in the head of whoever their pieces land on. Maybe those little voices are all forces for good... or maybe they're forces for the small bits of what's best in that person. Eleanor became a voice telling people to help others. Chidi became a little voice telling people to make a decision. Jason became a little voice telling people to control their impulses.
The Good Place helps people perfect those parts of themselves, and maybe, like Heironymi said, in a sense, they can then go on to help other people. In a way, both philosophies get to be right.
How you read it is up to you, which is one of the beautiful things about this ending. But maybe, the next time you hear a little voice in your head telling you what the right thing to do is, you should listen to it... it could just be someone who knows better.
