The Good Place has seemingly rebooted itself again, with Janet whisking the humans off Earth and into her void. But is that really it?
In The Good Place 3×08 “Don’t Let the Good Life Pass You By,” our heroes died. Again.
Janet, after kicking the invading demons’ asses, realized that the portal to the Bad Place allowed her to access her powers.
So, in a last-ditch effort to save everyone from Shawn and his cronies, Janet grabbed Michael and the humans and transported them into her ‘void,’ aka the place where she goes when she isn’t corporeal. (Also the place where she’s storing Derek!)
And, in the process, she killed them.
Thus, it seems like The Good Place is once again changing the scenery, with Janet’s void the latest pitstop en route to the inevitable takedown of the real Good Place and revolutionizing of the afterlife system.
The Good Place is really taking us on quite the cosmic road trip, and we have to assume they won’t actually stay in the void for very long before moving somewhere else.
But would they ever go back to Earth?
It seems unlikely. For a show that relies heavily on magic for its schtick, Earth offered some limitations that left certain characters — Janet in particular — creatively stranded.
There was ever only so much The Good Place could do when shackled by reality, and I don’t blame the writers for wanting to high-tail it back to more interesting, limitless locations.
With only five episodes left of the season, this seems like a good time to regroup in the afterlife and set up the next stage of whatever bonkers adventure comes next.
On the other hand, Earth also opened up new possibilities for the characters to rediscover who they are, and who they are to each other.
The Good Place briefly toyed with the idea of humans learning to improve and improve each other during their time on Earth, and the main characters began to sow the seeds for their loved ones to continue improving in their absence. It felt like we had only just began that story when the show grew bored of it.
While the theme of self-improvement will undoubtedly continue as the main characters begin fighting for a restructuring of the afterlife, it would have been great to spend some more time on Earth, not just with Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani and Jason but with the people they left behind.
Simone, for example, seems like too good a character to lose, as does Kamilah Al-Jamil, whom we were only just starting to get to know better.
Even bit players like Eleanor’s mother, Pillboi and Donkey Doug feel like they have more to do in the story than briefly show up to be soul-food for our heroes.
In general, it was nice to see other ‘real people’ on The Good Place for once, as opposed to fake Good Place inhabitants and/or characters whose sole purpose in life was the eternal damnation of the main characters.
The show’s world(s) tends to feel really small if the heroes are the literal center of the bit characters’ universe; on Earth, at least, there were other people who had their own lives and priorities, which in turn made them more interesting to watch.
Even though it’s always fun to see the show move to new locations, and we’re all looking forward to finally seeing inside Janet’s void (er, you know what I mean), this represents yet another place where everything is a construct and nothing really means anything except for how it makes our main characters feel.
Even though spontaneity is the name of The Good Place‘s game, it feels like we still have unfinished business on Earth, both in terms of how it affects the main characters and what happened to the people we’ve met there.
So how might the show return to Earth in future, if Eleanor and her friends really are permanently dead again?
There is always the option of flashbacks, of course, either showing unseen moments from the humans’ time on Earth or maybe even POV-scenes from the perspectives of the secondary characters still alive there.
Considering that Eleanor, Tahani, Chidi and Jason are gone, their families might gather at a funeral, or even a search party. Maybe the rest of season 3 might occasionally check back in with the people our heroes left behind, and follow them to their deaths, to see which Places they end up in?
And, since time moves in a Jeremy Bearimy fashion, we don’t even need to wait for them to die ‘in real time’: surely, if the fake Good Place experiment lasted for hundreds of years, they are technically already dead.
As for Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani and Jason, they might be dead, but that doesn’t necessarily mean their time on Earth is over. Since there is now a door that goes there, for which Michael has the key, plus a seeming way to create new doors, who is to say they can’t pop back down as glorified ghosts to continue guiding their loved ones to the path of the Good Place?
This might give them a chance for some closure, and to reflect on how their second lives affected their souls, before season 4 yet again propels us somewhere new.
What do you think? Is The Good Place done with Earth, or are there more shenanigans to be had on this boring, magic-less plane of existence?