Good Place spoiler thread

What a great show! Let’s spoil it.

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10 Responses to Good Place spoiler thread

  1. Chris says:

    My ideal ending for the show is for the group to be sentenced to the Bad Place for all eternity, BUT they get to use that time to try and reform and rehabilitate the people and demons there. So they get to make it a place not of eternal torment, but of redemption; they can actually make the Bad Place into a Good Place through teaching ethics. The show has been pretty clear that the whole system is wrong, so having them actually change the system would be much more interesting to me than an ending where they all get to go to the Good Place.

  2. Douglas Scheinberg says:

    My father suspected the season 1 finale twist from pretty early on; he’s seen that particular thing happen at least once.

    https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/heaven-2

  3. nobody.really says:

    My ideal ending for the show is for the group to be sentenced to the Bad Place for all eternity, BUT they get to use that time to try and reform and rehabilitate the people and demons there. So they get to make it a place not of eternal torment, but of redemption….

    Ooo–not bad. So in the final scene, we see Shawn and Vicky Sengupta secretly spying on Michael and the gang conducting their ethics classes/experiments (perhaps looking at secretly-recorded tape on Mindy’s VHS). They give a satisfied smile, fist-bump, then suddenly sprouting wings and halos and fly away into the sunlight. The entire show was really life in The Good Place after all (or perhaps in The Middle Place), as heaven really consists of well-intentioned flawed people trying to make the best of their circumstances.

  4. Ben Lehman says:

    My thought is that they’re going to get to the Good Place and there’s no one in it.

    I hope it doesn’t turn out to have been secretly a plan of angels all along. One of the best things about The Good Place is that it shows the utter moral bankruptcy of American Christianity’s afterlife system.

  5. Eytan Zweig says:

    There’s no such thing as a non-morally corrupt afterlife system, because all ideas of afterlife are fiction and any attempt to sell them as reality is inherently deceitful. As long as it’s understood as fiction, of course, the afterlife makes for great stories, and the Good Place is an example thereof.

    I have no idea where this is going, but I kind of hope it’s not that there’s another layer of deception underneath. At the moment, it’s a story of a group of flawed yet well meaning people up against a system that’s both unfair and in total control. Sure, it’s ridiculous and fantastical, but it’s inherently relatable. Ending with “Surprise! It was secretly good all along” would invalidate this.

  6. Mandolin says:

    My thought is that they’re going to get to the Good Place and there’s no one in it.

    I was rewatching with this in mind as a possibility and I’m not quite sure it scans (although I do like it as a possibility).

    In particular, if Mindy St Clair at her level of good/badness is just on the tipping point, then theoretically there must be better people than she is who got in, because she’s not great. And if being as not great as Mindy gets you a medium place, then either there would have to be people in the good place, or else there would be a lot more medium places where the flawed-but-better-than-Mindy people are.

    I may be missing something. Like maybe her charity was *just that good.*

  7. nobody.really says:

    My thought is that they’re going to get to the Good Place and there’s no one in it.

    Eh. Cute idea, but insufficiently vague to pass theological muster.

    First, adopting this concept would imply that the current crew of The Good Place have demonstrated unprecedented moral virtue–virtue surpassing [fill in your dead moral hero here–e.g., Mr. Rogers]. That’s a tough sell, and risks offending a large chunk of the viewership. Hard to get the reruns into syndication then.

    Second, the emptiness would be noteworthy only if the crew were not immediately overwhelmed by finding themselves in the presence of God. So if God is there, the writers would need to depict God–a second opportunity to offend viewers. Conversely, if they arrived only to find that there is no god there, this would present a third (and largest) opportunity to offend. Kiss syndication goodbye.

    So I’m skeptical.

  8. Eytan Zweig says:

    I don’t think that God needs to be present in whatever part of the Good Place they visit any more than the devil has to be present in the parts of the Bad Place we’ve seen. The show has established that the afterlife is large and full of internal subdivisions.

    Also, I think that the segment of the population who would be offended by any representation of the afterlife that isn’t exactly the one advocated by their personal church would have already been turned off by now. Remember, the show already featured an almighty, all-knowing judge who is also very clearly not God (I’m talking about Maya Rudolph’s character, not Shawn) and indeed is clearly stated to be neutral rather than aligned with the good place. That’s pretty problematic from a narrow Christian reading.

    Also, we’re talking about a show that explicitly stated in episode 1 that Christianity is only 5% right about the afterlife. If they can get away with that, they can get away with representing a Good Place without showing God.

  9. nobody.really says:

    Fair points. But….

    I don’t think that God needs to be present in whatever part of the Good Place they visit any more than the devil has to be present in the parts of the Bad Place we’ve seen.

    Depends upon what it means to say that the crew “get to the Good Place and there’s no one in it.”

    Throughout the show, the crew has not been left to an environment without others–they had Michael–and thus, there wasn’t any special cause to remark on the lack of others. So if they arrive in The Good Place and there are administrators present, that’s one scenario. Heck, that would barely be distinguishable from the state of the show.

    But if “no one in it” means not even administrators, that would suggest the absence of an omniscient, omnipotent mind; that’s a pretty different scenario, and pretty hard to reconcile with even vague concepts of heaven.

  10. Ben Lehman says:

    Oh, I just meant no mortals, not no administrators. Clearly, the Good Place does exist, and is administered. They have Janets.

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