“The Good Place” Ends in a Very Good Place
[Minor spoilers ahead]
The half-life of a quality network series typically meets one of two painful fates: either it is ripped from broadcast too soon, leaving devotees only a handful of short-lived episodes as mementos, or it becomes excruciatingly stretched for all its commercial worth, running far longer than it ever should, forcing a once-good thing to become stale and unappealing.
It is rare that a program departs at the perfect time, leaving the audience hungry for just a bit more, but feeling satisfied still with what they’ve been given. And by the grace of the sitcom gods (or should we say architects), this final fate was embodied by The Good Place finale.
The series, of course, is one big thought-experiment about what makes a life worth living, and what makes a fair and just afterlife. As the final season began in late 2019, viewers knew that the show’s central quartet would need to reach some ultimate conclusion, some lasting version of an afterlife that the characters deserved. Fans of the punny and thought-provoking sitcom would feel unfulfilled if after four seasons our heroes didn’t arrive in a truly good place.
Much of the final season focused on the protagonists’ attempts to rewrite the rules of the universe, and build a new system that didn’t result in the majority of humans being condemned to eternal suffering. But even after they succeed in constructing a better world where souls have the opportunity to reincarnate and learn from their mistakes, even after Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, and Jason at long last gain access to the Real Good Place, eternal life doesn’t seem all that fulfilling.
In the show’s penultimate episode, last week’s “Patty,” the core four discovered that living in eternal bliss makes everything seem purposeless. In that episode, they meet the ancient Greek philosopher Hypatia, played chipperly by Lisa Kudrow, and discover that after eons in heaven, her brain has turned to mush, and her ability to enjoy the fruits of the Good Place has similarly melted away. In short, it is possible to have too much of a good thing.
And so, like a sitcom in danger of losing its charm after eight or nine seasons, the humans of The Good Place acknowledge that life (or its successor) is meaningful only because we know it will eventually end. In the final episode, appropriately titled “Whenever You’re Ready,” the characters are given the opportunity to reap the rewards of the Good Place, to live in bliss for as long as they’d like, but ultimately decide when they’re ready to move on, returning their essence to the universe. Even the Good Place must be finite to feel worthwhile.
As we watch each of the main characters decide to leave paradise and move on forever, viewers can’t help but recognize what a good place the series ends in, never outrunning its premise for the sake of reaching a hundred episodes, and concluding a story that leaves us wanting just a little more. The show will live on as a perfect, self-contained story, given value by the confines of its perfectly-timed departure.