The Good Place Season 2, Episode 12 Recap: Judgment Day
The Good Place is rooted in a question that everyone asks at one point or another: What happens to us after we die?
Over thousands of years, most religions and belief systems have settled on some variation of the same answer: A very scary, very high-stakes test. Egyptian mythology held that a person’s goodness could be tested by seeing whether their heart weighed more or less than a feather. Buddhism and Hinduism both include the concept of being reincarnated into a greater or lesser form depending on the actions you take in life. The popular (and non-biblical) conception of heaven imagines St. Peter standing at the Pearly Gates, judging whether each person should be admitted by weighing an exhaustive list of every good and bad thing they did while alive. The ancient Greeks, like The Good Place, assigned three different afterlives depending on the life you led: one good, one bad, and one in the middle.
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All of these stories are predicated on the same basic idea that the fate of a person’s life after death depends entirely on passing a test. It’s an idea that resonates just as much today; there’s an obnoxious cottage industry of online tests that promise to tell you whether you’re going to heaven or hell. (Everyone who made one of those is going to hell.)
So it’s no surprise that The Good Place has finally put its own spin on the concept of judgment in the afterlife. Having arrived in the courtroom of the impartial Judge—a quirky burrito lover played by Maya Rudolph—our heroes earnestly make the case that they belong in the Good Place after all. "We have made so much progress. All we ask is to prove it," begs Tahani. The Judge—out of boredom more than altruism—agrees.
But before the test begins, Eleanor insists on one last self-imposed stipulation: All of them were stuck in the Bad Place together, and they’re only going to the Good Place together. If any one of them fails, they all go to the Bad Place. "I don’t think anything’s gonna feel like the Good Place if we’re not together," she says.
This is an idea that The Good Place has been building up to all season: that the ultimate morality lies in teaching, learning, and growing with the people around you. It’s a reverse Sartre in which heaven is other people, and Eleanor—who has changed most dramatically, beginning with Chidi’s tutelage and continuing with her own self-exploration—would rather be condemned to eternal torture than give it up.
The Judge agrees, and brings all four of them to their personalized test. Jason is forced to play Madden 18 against his beloved Jaguars. Tahani is forced to walk down a hallway without eavesdropping on what every famous or interesting person on the planet thinks about her. Chidi is forced to decide between two different-colored fedoras. And Eleanor is told that she has earned a spot in the Good Place—but that her friends haven’t, and that it’s up to her to determine whether she wants to renege on the all-or-nothing deal she proposed before the tests began.
The Judge may be out of practice, but these are very well-designed tests. Though all four of our protagonists have distinct flaws, each of their mistakes can be boiled down to the opposite of the value they’ve been taught by their time in the Bad Place: self-centeredness. Jason is so entranced by his favorite video game that he ignores the immortal being who led him into the room. Chidi is so wrapped up in his own head that he can’t make a decision as simple as choosing a hat. Tahani finally dismisses her parents for their callous indifference to her. It’s a wonderful moment of self-affirmation, and maybe even growth—and a specific betrayal of the Judge’s very simple instructions. And if it seems unfair that Tahani would be punished for this genuine breakthrough…well, there’s a reason Shawn, an immortal demon, said fairness was the stupidest concept humans ever invented.
Last is Eleanor, who puts her compatriots to shame. Her test is the trickiest: recognizing that "Chidi," who the Judge says has earned his own spot in the Good Place, isn’t actually Chidi at all. It’s a doppelgänger designed to test her commitment to Tahani and Jason by luring her with the possibility of a romantic future with Chidi. But it’s also a test of the depth and specificity of Eleanor’s feelings for him, since it’s up to her to recognize that the real Chidi would never twist his ethical principles to justify leaving Tahani and Jason behind.
Eleanor passes with flying colors, but it doesn’t matter; everyone else failed, which means they’re all going back to the Bad Place. But the episode gives us one last ethical lesson to untangle. It’s Eleanor’s final test—which comes not from the Judge, but from her personal and hard-won moral compass—that proves how far she’s come. When the Judge recounts the dismal results of everyone else’s tests, Eleanor interrupts, making up a fake story about how she failed her test, too.
Even the most moral people tend to want a little credit for the good things they’ve done. But there’s a real chance that Eleanor will never tell anyone that she earned a spot in the Good Place and turned it down for their sakes. How good is that?
