The Good Place season 2 has seemingly introduced an endgame: Get Eleanor and the gang into the actual Good Place. But are they not morally obligated to fix the system that is so clearly broken first?
The Good Place season 1 left us on a huge cliffhanger: Eleanor (Kristen Bell) and Jason (Manny Jacinto) had not in fact ended up in the Good Place by mistake; rather, Michael (Ted Danson) was an Architect of the Bad Place, and had engineered a fake Good Place in which Eleanor, Jason, Chidi (William Jackson Harper) and Tahani (Jameela Jamil) were supposed to torture each other.
Michael, a young and eager hell-raiser with big ideas, evidently thinks that lava pits, butt spiders and the general concept of eternal physical torture is beneath him — and I think we can all agree that as diabolical as he thinks he is, the “epistemological nightmare” of his fake Good Place is infinitely better than literally being tortured for all eternity! But even that kind of hell seems like a clearly disproportionate fate for all four of the humans who ended up there.
In fact, the very foundation of Mike Schur’s latest comedy hinges on the fact that the Good Place is reserved for a very small number of extraordinarily pious people, while literally every single other person who ever lived — including all artists and philosophers, and actual too-pure-cinnamon-roll Chidi, a genuinely good person who is crippled by anxieties he can’t control — is condemned to suffer endless, unimaginable pain. It might be funny to imagine some Bad Place lackey running around biting people, but it’s probably less fun for the people doomed to have their limbs slowly gnawed off again and again, forever.
Clearly, the Good Place is the place to be. And thus, it might have seemed like a relief when Michael revealed his alleged new plan to the gang in this week’s episode: work together to find a way to cheat the system and sneak into the actual Good Place. Sure, he could be lying through his teeth and setting up another elaborate deception. But giving the characters a path to the Good Place seems like an obvious endgame to the series, and a way to give this would-be feel-good comedy with super dark and depressing undertones a legitimately happy ending. Yes, countless people just like them will continue to be horrendously tortured for all eternity, but at least our main characters won’t suffer that same fate, right?
(Why Michael wants to go to the Good Place, if that is actually his plan now, seems like another mystery waiting to be explored. To escape retirement, sure, but why exactly wasn’t he content with physically torturing humans like his fellow Architects in the first place? What is the allure of a Good Place for a being who presumably exists to cause suffering? Was he perhaps once in the Good Place himself? Those are all questions for another time.)
Except that’s not the show, is it? The Good Place season 1 was all about Eleanor learning to improve herself, first for selfish reasons, and later because she actually wanted to be a better person. By season’s end, she was ready to sacrifice herself and voluntarily go to the Bad Place to save her friends, simply because it was the right thing to do.
And, although Eleanor’s memory has been reset countless times since the season 1 finale, she seems to be retaining some of the newfound values Chidi has instilled in her in season 2, suggesting that being a good person isn’t just skin deep. Eleanor always had the potential to be good, and now that her goodness has ‘woken up,’ it is subtly evident in her every action, even when she’s supposedly reverted to the bad — or ‘fake’, as they tellingly dubbed her pre-improvement self — Eleanor again.
Through Eleanor, The Good Place seems to be pushing the message that it’s never too late for anyone to become a better, more selfless person who cares about other people’s general well-being — and, consequentially, nobody (or at least very few people) can be categorically declared to be a ‘bad person’ who deserves to suffer eternal torment in the afterlife based on the actions of their earthly, unenlightened selves.
As rude and selfish as she was on Earth, Eleanor clearly doesn’t deserve to end up in the Bad Place now, if she ever did, and you might argue that her actions in the Fake Good Place will eventually earn her a spot in the Actual Good Place. But if that is the case for Eleanor, wouldn’t that be the case for most people in the Bad Place? And might Eleanor herself not realize that this is true, and that she is in a unique position to actually do something to right this big, cosmic wrong?
Certainly, if she continues on the trajectory of moral improvement, it’s hard to imagine that she’ll feel right about going to the Good Place knowing that there are literally billions of human souls suffering endless torture on grounds that she now knows to be unjust and immoral.
The solution: a happy Medium
Eleanor herself vocalized the injustice of the Bad Place, and who does or does not get sent there, at the very start of the series. At the time, she called for there to be a Medium Place for her and people like her; later, it was revealed that a Medium Place does actually exist, but only has one single occupant. The Medium Place is basically a vast, open space of mediocrity with plenty of room for mediocre people to live in mediocre contentment — that is, if someone were to convince the Powers That Be to open up the Medium Place for everyone currently suffering unjustly in the Bad Place. After all, “pobody’s nerfect,” as Eleanor so aptly put it in season 1; very few people are 100% good or bad, and it makes no actual sense for the Bad Place to be the general dumping ground for all bad-to-moderate-to-almost-perfect people. Seems like a lazy system at best and a genuinely sadistic system at worst.
Even though the Bad Place ostensibly exists as a running gag in the series, The Good Place is constantly reminding both the characters and the audience that it is in fact full of people just like us, who are being doled out very disproportionate punishments for living relatively normal, harmless lives. It is an uncomfortable knowledge that we see the characters consciously work to compartmentalize, and as viewers trying to enjoy the fluffy comedy that The Good Place pretends to be, we’re forced to do the same. But just imagine Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani or even Jason suffering the kind of torture the show is insinuating takes place in the Bad Place: isn’t that terrible? Isn’t it almost too unjust to handle? Wouldn’t Chidi’s lessons of morality, intended to make Eleanor worthy of the Good Place, actually support the fact that The Bad Place is a bad place and that the universe needs to improve itself?
For all her faults, Eleanor clearly has a very fine-tuned sense of right and wrong (even before she learns to apply that knowledge to her own actions), and I don’t think it was an accident that it was her who almost immediately identified the need for a Medium Place for her and people like her. My guess is that Eleanor has become enough of a ‘good,’ compassionate person by the time she gets the chance to go to the Good Place that she’ll realize that going there without first setting things right in the Bad Place would be the ultimate act of selfishness. After all, she ended up in Michael’s fake Good Place by something like random selection; her going to the actual Good Place by tricking the system would not only be ultimate proof that she doesn’t belong there, but Eleanor likely won’t feel right going there knowing that there might be a way to save all the people that have been unfairly condemned to an eternity of torment. It wouldn’t (or shouldn’t) feel right for the audience, either, knowing how forked up The Good Place‘s version of the afterlife truly is.
So, rather than letting Eleanor and her friends find ultimate salvation in the real Good Place — or even letting them end up in the Medium Place with Mindy St. Clair — I suspect that The Good Place‘s actual endgame will involve Eleanor taking up a selfless cause bigger than herself, with her and her friends ultimately fighting to overthrow the Bad Place, sending most of its current inhabitants to the Medium Place where they belong. I believe we’re being set up for an eventual overhaul of the deeply corrupt, broken system at the core of the series, as part of The Good Place‘s remarkably clever and thoughtful exploration of morality and humanity. (And, since it seems inevitable that the series will eventually head to the Bad Place, I’m guessing that Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, Jason, Janet and a very reluctant Michael will eventually find themselves going there voluntarily as part of this mission.)
Literally overhauling the afterlife and giving the Powers That Be themselves a lesson in morality would not only be exactly the kind of wildly ambitious, batshit crazy storyline I’ve come to expect from The Good Place, but would ultimately reinforce the core message at the heart of the series: that it is never too late to make the world — nay, the universe — a better place.
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