The Good Place Has One Episode Left to Stick the Landing

In preparation for the series finale of NBC's The Good Place this Thursday, two GQ contributors joined forces to talk about the final season, how we got here, and what—if anything—is next. Warning: plentiful spoilers abound.

Scott Meslow, contributing writer: So here we are, just days away from the end of The Good Place. Michael is running the Good Place, and Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, and Jason are enjoying their time in paradise before they decide, voluntarily, that it’s time to move on to… well, whatever comes next.

But before we all walk through that green door for the last time, let’s take a breath and judge The Good Place for ourselves. How have you felt about the final season of The Good Place, Josh? Has it been… good? Bad? Medium?

Joshua Rivera, Bad Place demon: It's ironic that the final season kicked off with a return to the first, with the core cast now running a version of the Bad Place designed to look like the same Good Place they were duped into believing they were in—because I now feel like I have been duped into my own kind of Bad Place this season. It looks like the show I loved, but I really haven't liked it in some time? Like that first season's form of torture, the show has surrounded me with things that I think I'm supposed to like, but one day I woke up and realized that I'm not into any of it at all!

Has this final season worked for you thus far, Scott?

Scott: To answer this question, I had to go back and remind myself what even happened in this final season. Last September kicked things off with a gambit: If Eleanor and the others could repeat the Good Place experiment with four different humans—and prove that those humans could actually improve over the course of a year—they could upend the entire system in favor of something that more accurately reflected the human experience.

And honestly: Pretty great concept for a final season! The Good Place has always been uncommonly good at ripping up its own playbook and writing itself a new one—a rare feat for any TV show, and particularly for a sitcom. (And to be clear, I don’t think this disappointing final season diminishes the ambition and creativity of The Good Place at its best. If this show is burning out now, it’s because it burned so hot before this.)

I guess what baffles me is what The Good Place actually decided to do with this quasi-reset for Season 4. For a show that has worked so earnestly to make the argument that people can grow and change, it saddled itself with some distinctly unpromising new test subjects, including a smarmy male chauvinist and a needlessly cruel gossip columnist. The Good Place isn’t beyond telling a redemption story—this is, after all, a series that utterly redeemed an unrepentant demon—but the series never really bothered to turn these new cartoon characters into human beings, and it ultimately just sort of hand-waved them off the stage altogether.

What did you make of the new crew? Did I miss something?

Joshua: No, you're right! While it makes sense that the demons would not play fair and challenge the show's heroes with redeeming irredeemable people, the show's own history compromises that premise: this gang literally rehabilitated a demon. This is not an unsolvable problem, it's just one that's difficult to parse in the show's moral universe.

The Good Place doesn't really believe in "bad" people. Its protagonists were all "bad" people, and their evolution hasn't been so much about changing who they are, but how much they care about others. Trouble is, the show needs an antagonist—and while it falls back on making that antagonist "The System" as much as it possibly can, sometimes it needs to give the gang some actual opponents—and those opponents never rise above annoying caricature.

Those caricatures could still work, if it meant meaningful change for the core cast. But unfortunately, it really seems like the only character that grows this season is Eleanor, and a big part of that growth stems from a romance that I, sadly, do not buy for a second.

Scott: The Good Place went all-in on Eleanor and Chidi a couple of seasons ago. I never really bought it—because the show basically just told us that they were perfect for each other without ever really putting in the work to earn it—but I’ve accepted that Eleanor-Chidi is a key part of The Good Place’s endgame, and I can live with it. And at the very least, Eleanor and Chidi have grown through their relationship: She’s more vulnerable and emotionally-attuned, and he’s more confident and measured. Fair enough.

What bugs me more is the sidelining of Jason and Tahani. This is not an uncommon problem for characters in the later seasons of sitcoms, as traits that were once funny get revisited so often that they become repetitive, and eventually obnoxious. But The Good Place has over-performed in so many categories—and while I’ll concede that Jason is so sweetly dumb that it’s harder to take his character anywhere new, I can’t believe we’re still getting a minimum quota of 2-3 Tahani celebrity name-drops per episode.

The whole point of this series seems to be that people change, primarily, through their relationships with other people, and the recognition that we owe something fundamental to other human beings. To quote Chidi in the best episode of the series: We are not in this alone. But at least in Season 4, when these characters have changed, it’s felt like it was mandated by the needs of the plot more than the actual inner lives of the characters. After a whole year, Brent suddenly feels remorse because somebody finally just calls him a bad person? Shawn agrees to Michael’s plan because he likes sparring with Michael? All the Bad Janets align with the Good Janets because… well, I still don’t really get why?

Joshua: Right, and in this The Good Place becomes less sincere and more cloying. I love that this show, like a lot of Mike Schur productions, fundamentally believes in people so damn much. But the drawback is in how the show chooses to portray people who don't believe in its characters, people who can't be won over. The fundamental project of The Good Place's characters—building a new, secular model of morality that brings some cosmic justice to an unjust world—never really lands because it never actually feels threatened. When you strip away the philosophy, latter-day Good Place is just the reach-across-the-aisle pablum we rightly drag The West Wing for now.

Scott: I guess what I’m missing is the fight. Earlier episodes of The Good Place, and especially the Season 2 finale, earnestly grappled with the reality that living a decent life is very, very hard. It’s constant, focused work to be moral, even if you very badly want to be. And that work is often unrewarding—particularly in a universe where the people who don’t care to do that work end up ahead.

With that in mind, the ending of The Good Place makes this series feel less like a philosophical treatise than a bedtime story. I don’t want to play armchair quarterback, but I wonder how differently this season might have played out if the writing room had started with the idea that the Good Place is fundamentally unachievable, and that the only “moral dessert” that exists is the meaning you get from living the most moral life you can in a fundamentally unfair system.

But as far as moral desserts go, The Good Place certainly seems primed to deliver a big gooey one when the series finale airs on Thursday. In a single penultimate episode that really could have spanned a half-season of its own, the gang ascended to the Good Place, discovered that endlessly getting what you want is a low-grade torture in itself, and came up with a solution: The ability to leave the Good Place whenever you want and discover whatever lies beyond it. What do you expect from the finale? And what do you want from it?

Joshua: Perhaps that's the problem: As far as The Good Place is concerned, Eleanor, Chidi, Jason and Tahani have won. They're good people, and have been for some time. Their last obstacle has been building a world that lets them enjoy that win.

Knowing this, it's hard to imagine a finale that I would want, although I can still see an interesting one—perhaps an extra-long episode that follows an entirely new cast at the end of their lives for the entire runtime, culminating with them experiencing the afterlife as rebuilt by The Good Place. Not my favorite idea, but one I'd like to see how the show executes.

Or maybe the show re-introduces that idea that we feel it's abandoned: that there is no set, determined Good Place for anyone. There is just a moment–perhaps seconds long, perhaps centuries—where you must try and contextualize the life you've lived, and sum up its moral arc. Then you can maybe build your own Good Place—or let inertia drag you somewhere worse.

The actor, who plays Chidi on the beloved NBC show, talks philosophy, capitalism, and the one thing from the 2010s he wants to never hear again.

Originally Appeared on GQ