The Good Place Season 4: Eternity is Hell…Even in Heaven

The Good Place has become one of my favorite shows. But all good things must come to an end and that’s exactly what this season ultimately ended up being about. Here are my thoughts on the last season.

What I watched:

This was the closest thing to a trailer I could find

The team is charged with running an experiment to show humans are capable of improving themselves. The Bad Place choose four subjects that are the most difficult for each team member to work with. Chidi, who had his memory erased to prevent him from reacting to his ex-girlfriend, becomes a subject after it was discovered the Bad Place snuck in a demon as a subject. Three subjects show improvement, but one subject is stuck in his rude ways until the very last second of the experiment. The evidence is just enough to convince the judge to make a change. However, the change the judge decides to make is to end human existence and have some other lifeform evolve to replace it. Michael restores Chidi’s memories and he proposes a new system of reincarnation where humans relive their lives until they improve enough to make it into the Good Place. Humanity saved! The team is ushered into the real Good Place as a reward for their efforts only to discover that everyone there is miserable. The team once again comes up with a way to reform the Good Place to make it meaningful by adding a form of death. Each of them end up choosing their own meaning of existence.

What I saw:

The first part of the season is focused on how humans are shaped and flawed given their own experiences and circumstances in life. It’s no coincidence that the one subject that has the most difficulty improving is a middle-aged, middle class, white, American male named Brent. In our current world structure, this is the most privileged a person can be. The capitalist power structure is designed to make that particular group the most happy because that is the group that has managed to keep the most power. When the world shapes its system around a particular group, there is no need for that group to be introspective and ask if they can treat others better because, to them, there is nothing to improve in their lives.

This concept is mirrored in the show as Eleanor and Michael encourage the rest of the subjects to put up with Brent’s rude behavior. Everyone is told to conform to his needs, and since everything is working out the way he wants to there is no incentive for him to change. Simone is correct to challenge this behavior, and she tells him the truth about how his behaviors impact everyone else. She even goes so far as to abandon him when a rift opens up and he is hanging on to the ledge. However, punishment is not the only tool needed to change behavior. Chidi saving Brent models the kind of behavior that is actually good. This causes Brent to think about how he was not the easiest person to put up with yet someone was willing to risk themselves to help him anyways. This is the first step in an introspective journey to improve as a person.

The middle part of the season looks at Western conventional thinking of good and evil; specifically the idea that if you’re a good person you go to heaven and if you’re bad you go to hell. Chidi points out the flaw in this belief when he talks about how a short time on Earth being used to justify an eternity of being in the Bad Place is a wildly unfair punishment. He points out that in some Eastern religions and philosophies people are reincarnated over several lifetimes (even different lifeforms) to shape the spirit to become better until they reach the pinnacle of understanding the human experience. His explanation is a great introduction for an American audience to think about concepts of good and evil, heaven and hell, from a perspective that is different than they may be used to.

Chidi presenting his idea of a new moral system based on Eastern Philosophy

The last part of the season shows that the concept of spending eternity in heaven may sound good in theory, but it is flawed in one important way. The concept of an absolute paradise, stretched out across eternity, is just as bad as being tortured for eternity. That is because everything becomes meaningless when a person has an infinite amount of time to do it. Want to learn how to play an instrument? Go ahead. No need to rush because you have eternity to do it. There is such a lack of urgency that one may never even get around to actually doing it. What gives meaning to doing things for a human being is the fact that we cannot possibly do everything we want in our lifetime. We are forced to make choices based on what we value as the most important, or what we most enjoy. Death, or non-existence in the case of the souls in the Good Place, is what ultimately gives that existence meaning.

So how is this different than being alive on Earth? Each character who chose to cross the arch into non-existence experienced a moment of clarity or completion. This could be viewed as a state similar to Nirvana or enlightenment. What I liked in the show was that moment of clarity was different for each person along with arriving at a different time for each person. Chidi’s moment of clarity led to him wanting to move on from the Good Place, even if that meant leaving Eleanor behind. Their talk about existence was one of the best scenes in the show:

“None of this is bad” — that’s what I thought about the entire series.

Final thoughts:

An honorable mention was the arch where Simone thought she was in a dream and did all sorts of crazy things without consequence, also known as Solipsism. As a gamer, I have done my share of doing ridiculous things in a game that I would never do in real life because I knew I was the only real thing interacting in a fake world. However, doing ridiculous things without consequence gets boring fast. Not only that, but we can choose to be good people even if there is no incentive to do it other than following our own sense morality.

As for this last season, having three archs may give the appearance that the writers were rushing to finish the show. But in practice I thought it actually flowed quite well. Each idea built on top of the other adding to lessons learned about life and morality. Across the whole series we learn: 1. Being a human is complicated and the world is imperfect. 2. Despite our flaws humans should still strive to be better. 3. Finite lifespan is what gives our existence meaning. 4. We all return to where we came from, and that’s okay.

I wish all shows could leave us with such important lessons.