Every episode of The Good Place is built to blow up expectations. What began as an already complex sitcom about a selfish woman faking her way through heaven was revealed, by the end of season one, to be about a quartet of screwed-up humans realizing they were being used to psychologically torture one another in hell. Then in season two, The Good Place turned just about every storyline it had on its head, rebooting its own premise over and over again to challenge what its fans had come to know and what fans of television in general have come to expect.
There is simply no other show on TV like The Good Place — a fact the series both knows and relishes.
Its ability to morph into whatever it wants from episode to episode, from a frighteningly realistic simulation of an abstract philosophy problem to a bonkers montage of 800 afterlife scenarios, has been its greatest strength. And in Thursday’s season two finale — “Somewhere Else,” written and directed by creator Mike Schur — The Good Place leans on that strength harder than ever.
Reformed demon Michael (Ted Danson) makes a desperate last-ditch attempt to save the four dead humans he had once selected to torture each other — Kristen Bell’s dirtbag with a heart of gold Eleanor, William Harper Jackson’s anxious academic Chidi, Jameela Jamil’s pretentious socialite Tahani, and Manny Jacinto’s lovable dope Jason — by making his case for their eternal souls. As Michael explains in a passionate monologue to a wary omniscient judge (Maya Rudolph) named Gen, though he expected them to torture each other, they instead made each other better people. “That isn’t supposed to happen,” Michael insists, as an intrigued Gen nods.
Ultimately, she agrees to try something unprecedented with the four of them. She’ll administer a new test, and if they pass, they’ll make it into the real Good Place. If they fail, they’ll be sent to the Bad Place, where people are subjected to personalized forms of torture, which may include having hot dogs stuffed into places where hot dogs are decidedly not meant to be.
Rather than tell the humans what they’re in for, Michael snaps his fingers, and the next thing we see is Eleanor back on Earth, right at the moment when she died — but instead of getting crushed by runaway shopping carts, someone pushes her out of the way. From there, the episode follows Eleanor as she attempts to become a better person and make something good out of her life, having come so close to losing it.
For six months(!), she makes a concerted effort to ditch her old selfish ways. The only thing is, being good is hard work. After Eleanor keeps falling flat on her face despite her better intentions, she decides her efforts aren’t worth it, until a worried Michael steps in and acts as her sympathetic bartender for a night to put her back on course. (And yes, The Good Place knows exactly what it’s doing by putting Danson behind a bar to sling a dishrag over his shoulder and dole out advice, bless it.)
Eventually, Eleanor finds her way to Chidi after watching his philosophy lectures on YouTube, and takes a spontaneous trip to Australia to ask him to teach her the error of her ways — exactly like she did so many times before in Michael’s “Good Place” simulations.
When I finished the episode, I was overwhelmed, confused, and frankly a little annoyed that the entire finale focused mainly on Eleanor without any check-ins on Chidi, Tahani, and Jason. Surely, I thought, there was more room to show the others’ redo simulations, even if just for a scene or two. But what did it mean that Eleanor had found Chidi in hers?
With months to go before any new episodes of The Good Place’s 13-episode third season air, I turned to the internet — and immediately discovered that my assumption that this latest twist was yet another reboot was a direct contradiction to how lots of people interpreted it. In fact, The Good Place’s audience seems incredibly split on what the hell happened, with some just as sure that Michael and Gen had brought Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, and Jason back to life as I was that they were running another simulation.
Floored (and more than a little freaked out that I’d somehow misread everything), I opened up the question to Twitter via an official poll, where the results have been far more evenly divided than I ever would’ve guessed.
I have just learned #TheGoodPlace finale has divided people on what exactly is happening, so here is a SPOILERY poll because I am fascinated:
— Caroline Framke (@carolineframke) February 2, 2018
*
*
*
did the finale leave off with
So, uh, what did happen on The Good Place? Are Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, and Jason getting a real-life do-over, or are they currently undergoing a particularly complex new simulation? After losing myself so deeply in reading the online speculation that I missed my subway stop and didn’t realize for a solid 10 minutes, I decided to break down each side’s argument. Here are the cases for each.
Scenario 1: Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, and Jason have been resurrected on Earth for the ultimate moral test
According to this understanding of the finale, Michael and Judge Gen decided to throw caution to the wind and allow The Good Place’s four misplaced humans to have a second chance at life, in order to see if they would continue to embrace their selfishness or bounce back from a brush with death by living as better people.
In theory, this would be a solid measure of their actual goodness. After all, as Gen explained in “Somewhere Else,” she suspected that they only became better people in the afterlife because they were hoping to make it into the real Good Place — or, as she put it, they wanted a “moral dessert.” By making them relive their earthly lives, oblivious to the stakes, she might be able to get a better read on whether they could truly become good people, or whether they’re just opportunists who caught a couple breaks.
The biggest piece of evidence that backs up this resurrection theory is how much the Judge hesitates before agreeing to give the humans another chance to prove themselves, and how hard Michael has to fight for it. “It sets a very dangerous precedent,” she tells him, to which he argues that “it’s only four people,” and that she can pull the plug whenever she wants. So if this is just another simulation, why would she be so reticent to try it? And why would it be such a big deal for the show to run a scenario like it has executed literally hundreds of times before, thanks to Michael’s 800-plus do-overs?
Having the four characters back on Earth also opens up an entirely different direction for The Good Place’s third season, which tracks with how the show approached its second. Whenever it reboots the characters’ reality, so, too, does it reboot its own. As Alan Sepinwall writes at Uproxx, this avenue would mean “the series is becoming something else, and a new foundation has to be laid, just like the one we got back at the start of season one.”
Scenario 2: letting the characters redo their lives is another simulation
If my incredibly scientific Twitter poll is to be believed, this is the majority opinion (though not by a super-wide margin). And while I’m admittedly biased in its favor because it’s my personal reading of “Somewhere Else,” there are at least a couple of tangible hints in this direction.
One argument that keeps coming up is how Chidi and Eleanor interact during the episode. Way back in The Good Place’s pilot, part of the magic of the supposed “Good Place” was that Chidi’s first language of French was automatically translated into English so that Eleanor would understand it, and vice versa. If that were still true, why wasn’t Chidi speaking French in the lecture Eleanor watched on YouTube? How did they understand each other when they met at the end of the finale?
(In fairness, Sepinwall also points out that Eleanor was visiting Chidi at an Australian university, where he no doubt would have to teach in English — but then again, it’s not like he has a Senegalese accent when she finds him, so maybe that issue is moot anyway. Who knows!)
Another argument in favor of the simulation theory centers on the bar where Michael plays bartender to a trashed Eleanor, gently nudging her to rethink her life over too many birthday drinks. As per Good Place tradition, one we’ve seen in simulation after simulation, the Arizonan establishment’s name is a ridiculous(ly perfect) pun: “Sting’s Desert Rosé.” (Which may also be a sly reference to the kind of philosophical “just deserts” Gen was referencing earlier.)
Also: Michael popping into his own simulation feels just a tad less convoluted than him somehow popping down to Earth for a quick stint behind the bar while Janet kept lookout. (It’s probably not fair play no matter what, but hey, as long as Gen isn’t looking...)
Still, there is one narrative obstacle I personally can’t get over, so far as the humans being resurrected for real. Yes, “it’s only four people,” but wouldn’t the fact that Michael and the Judge helped them evade their previously established deaths affect countless other lives — and even deaths? How many people would have to be yanked into or out of the Good Place and/or Bad Place thanks to Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, and Jason interacting with folks who had previously been dead? How much would change, and how would that escape detection with the big guys upstairs/downstairs?
In short, having the finale’s twist be another (admittedly more complicated) simulation would be the cleanest way for The Good Place to get around a whole lot of story complications it would otherwise have to bend over backward to explain if it had actually brought its four main characters back to life.
What it comes down to is: Who knows?! Which is great.
In the end, we have no idea which of these two scenarios is right, or even if either of them is right. And given Schur’s open obsession with Lost and this episode’s nods to Lost’s series finale — in which it’s impossible to tell whether the characters are alive or dead — the fact that either option can make sense depending on which angle you view it from is almost definitely part of the point.
And you know what? That’s awesome.
The Good Place has found a way to completely stump and amaze its audience. Time and time again, it has seemed to be moving in one direction, only to swerve off course and chart an entirely new path. So no matter which conclusion you drew from the finale, there is a very good chance none of us will guess exactly what’s coming, which is about as exciting a TV prospect as we can get.