This Crazy ‘The Good Place’ Fan Theory on Reddit Is Genius
Warning: There are major spoilers ahead about The Good Place.
With crazy, philosophical plot twists happening every single season, The Good Place is practically made for wild fan theories. Nothing is exactly what it seems in the NBC comedy about the afterlife - including where it's set and who's who.
When we left off at the end of Season 3, the supernatural being Michael (Ted Danson) was out to prove that the standards for getting into the "Good Place" (a.k.a. heaven) have become impossible to meet. He and four humans - Eleanor (Kristen Bell), Chidi (William Jackson Harper), Tahani (Jameel Jamil), and Jason (Manny Jacinto) - plus the omnipotent assistant Janet (D'Arcy Carden) have started an experiment to prove people really can accrue enough good deeds to deserve a paradisal eternity, but not without interference from the "Bad Place" demons.
Wild fan speculation about how this theoretical afterlife really works has gotten so good that showrunner Michael Schur admitted he had to stop reading about it.
"I’m worried that I’ll find [a fan theory] too interesting and be like, ‘Oh, that’s a better idea than what we have,’ and I’ll be tempted to use it," he TheWrap in 2018. "When the show is over, I will enjoy going back and reading all of the fan theories and everything that was written."
He'll have a lot to catch up on when he does. Reddit users have spent the past few months theorizing about what will happen in Season 4, and they have some really interesting ideas:
The Good Place doesn't exist
This theory has held on for a couple of seasons now, and it's only looking stronger when you consider how little we know about the Good Place. "I don't think that the 'Good Place' exists. I think that it was just made up by the 'Bad Place' in order to torture the people who end up there," dontmakenosnense wrote. "They wanted to taunt everyone being tortured with the idea that if they had been just a little bit better, they could've ended up in paradise."
So far, a few major pieces of info support this idea:
No one has gotten into the Good Place for centuries.
No one knows how to get to the Good Place.
We've never seen the Good Place or someone from it on the show.
It would explain why the Bad Place was so angry about the humans' escape. What if the big lie about the Good Place got found out?
As for the Medium Place, is it really that "medium" after all? Mindy St. Clair's lonely afterlife seems pretty bleak, maybe minus the recent arrival of Derek. This heaven-less possibility may sound super dark, but executive producer Drew Goddard thinks it isn't as pessimistic as it seems.
"I think fundamentally at its core, the show is about flawed people trying to become better people. So it almost doesn't matter," he told Newsweek. "The secrets don't matter because at its core, where they are is less important than who they are. The thing I love about the show is it's all about these characters trying to figure out their lives, and I think that struggle will continue as the show goes on."
Chidi is a demon
This one's a little wild, but hear it out: Demons mistake Chidi for "Trent" in Season 3 and they could be one and the same. As Reddit user Daisoqa points out, "They said he hasn’t been torturing for like 800 years, and there has been a bit more than 800 reboots in the fake Good Place, so what if Chidi is actually Trent, a demon going undercover amongst humans?"
This would also explain why Chidi decides to reboot his memory in the Season 3 finale - not as a way to maintain the integrity of the experiment, but as torture for Eleanor. Plus, there's an ongoing joke on the show about how no one likes moral philosophy professors ...
Vicky will impersonate Simone
Remember when the demon Vicky complains that she never got to use her "excellent" Australian accent? A lot of Redditors can't get over how Simone's not-so-great Australian accent may actually indicate she's Vicky in disguise, either from when we saw her on Earth or in this new Medium Place experiment.
Michael is a human
Maybe our favorite demon is not so bad after all - especially now that he's turned back on his Bad Place ways. "I always figured that this was Michael's Bad Place," says Rpres70324. " He was a human whose torture was that he was convinced he was a bad place rep and had to constantly live in a world where he could not be an effective torturer." Given that Michael is now under even more stress to prove there's something going on with the points system, it's certainly an effective form of torture.
The Medium Place experiment is really still the Bad Place
This is another really popular theory given the ending of Season 3. Even with the involvement of the judge, the Bad Place has rigged the Medium Place experiment so that the four humans must try to earn points in pretty tortuous environment. Eleanor must deal with (effectively) losing the only person she's ever loved, Tahani has to contend with a hateful blogger, Jason must watch Janet reconnect with Derek, and Chidi has to erase all of his memories - back to a time when everything gave him a stomach ache, Mariacolbert23 points out. If everything's now worse than what was happening in the Bad Place in Season 1, what's to say this isn't another part of the Bad Place?
The four humans will end up in the Medium Place
For the series finale, a few Reddit posts foresee our central cast of characters finishing up in a Medium Place - not the idealistic heaven presented in the show's pilot.
"They get to be together in a 'Medium Place' and continue improving as people while also assisting the broken system that determined their fates for the afterlife," BanananaBoxes predicts. "Michael could fit a good judge or leader role for these determinations."
For example, Zakiszak believes Chidi could help by designing a new, ethically consistent points system given his philosophy expertise. The gang could also pick back up on what they attempted to do in Season 3: helping people on Earth get to the Good Place - as long as it actually exists, of course.
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