The Ending of ‘The Good Place’, and what you need to know about it
On the ending of the Michael-Schur directed American fantasy/comedy series, The Good Place, there have been two rather peculiar lines of opinion. An example of the first is to be found in Joshua Rivera’s review. Rivera says that the end of the show is for him a contrast to the series at large, which “wasn’t one that trafficked in certainty about anything”. He also says that ideally, he would “want to believe [the protagonists] would’ve done [the good they did in the world] all the same, even if they weren’t [rewarded in the end]”. The second kind of thinking is encapsulated in Spencer Kornhaber’s review. He says that the show’s ending is somehow suggesting suicide as an answer, drawing upon his analysis of “online…comments from fans of the show who were triggered into harmful thoughts…experienced painful memories, and…felt knocked in the wrong direction”. Given such views, I thought I’d just put my thoughts forward.
Mr. Rivera begins his piece with saying that for years The Good Place has been for him a “radical” show. He gives it its due as a series that “was initially about what happens when the wrong person goes to heaven transformed into a meditation on what it means to be a good person, and how no one is beyond redemption”. He praises the idea of “chronically selfish people learning to mitigate their selfishness by caring more for each other, even in the face of a cartoonishly elaborate demon bureaucracy that wanted them to believe none of that mattered”. But, he says of the main body of the series, “there [was] uncertainty in this.” For him, the show’s ending loses that uncertainty, “trafficking in certainty” as it does.
I do not think the ending of The Good Place is attempting to suddenly traffic in certainty about something. For one thing, we don’t see what happens after characters like Chidi or Jason pass through the portal into what a certain other fantasy creator would describe as ‘the great unknown’. We don’t know what happens to them on their journey after that act of faith. Compounding that uncertainty and ambiguity is the visually sheerly volatile quality to the scene that does show what happens to Eleanor Shellstrop.
That is, conversion into a speck of light which careens this way and that about in the wind before finally alighting on a man. A man who had been about to throw away a gift card that had wrongly been delivered to him, but who now just decides not to but to go give it to its rightful addressee. I don’t think that scene holds a certainty about anything. It holds in itself multiple possibilities simultaneously at every moment about what might not have happened. This good thing not being what occurs after Eleanor passes through the door. The speck of light going out or not being able to reach its destination. The man electing not to be influenced by what the speck of light attempted to nudge him towards. The camera focuses on the demon-turned-human Michael’s life advice for the last seconds of the show. But we don’t know whether Michael’s attempt to pay a good act forward will work. We see nothing of whether the encounter that happens to the unknown man will have beneficial impacts radiating outward in his life, going onward. We simply do not know what kind of impact it is that Michael’s closing lines, no matter how they might affect viewers, will make. Or even if they will make any at all. There’s a suggestion, but no certainty.
And with that, I think the show has captured in its ending moments a moving on, a further ‘volta’ or turn, from the demonstration in the final episode that the set of protagonists did get some material rewards in the end. (By the way, someone ought to point out to Mr. Rivera that there’s no evidence in the show’s script to show that the characters would not have done the same things they did if there had been no material reward for their own after-lives personally.) This ‘turn’ is for me an arc just bringing back everything that the show has been about. To me it’s a scene encapsulating briefly a story of trying. Trying against the odds, despite everything. And as such, fully vindicating what Mr. Schur has had to say about his intellectual project in the show: “We were trying to make the case for trying.”
That quote of Mr. Schur’s also brings one to the reason why this ending isn’t about suicide. Spencer Kornhaber correctly identifies the fact that the Good Place often operates “at the level of metaphor”. He has, however, seriously misdiagnosed the metaphor that is being “tried” for here. And no, one is not quibbling over the fact that these are the character’s after-lives that are under consideration and not their lives- which is the point of technicality that Kornhaber sees as a likely possible objection. One is taking the metaphor to indeed apply to lives.
That Jason’s ending up being stranded outside the final door for eons before he finally performs the crossing over is a matter not showing the entire process of the waiting may have made some audiences miss out on the point to it. The point to it, I’d say, lies beyond the blatant fact that Janet points out (i.e. that since pretending to be a monk he has now come a ways to actually being a monk, showing his mastery of self-control over himself). At least, however, one should have got a possible alert at the fact that the show’s most confirmedly indecisive man makes a determined, philosophical decision. And we are NOT speaking of a philosophical decision in favour of the extinguishment of one’s life in the face of it all. That Camus/Nietzschean solution has already been addressed in the show, actually (in the episode starring Chidi’s existential crisis, naked chili-pot stirring and declamation that “Nothing actually matters”). It’s also been shown to be rejected.
One is speaking here about a philosophical decision that is taken by these characters having experienced the most intense satiations that (after)life had to offer- intellectual, emotional, sexual. There have been random treasures, unexpected surprises, moments that’re joyous and exciting for the protagonists at personal levels, and miraculous conversations. On the other hand, there has been securing of fulfilment in goals. Jason’s attained self mastery. Chidi’s met all of the people he wished to have conversations with and got over his problem of obsessive self-consuming indecisive thought. Eleanor has helped Michael achieve his heart’s desire to become human. She’s also crafted the scope of opportunity for Mindy Saintclair to become a better person.
This is akin to having passed through the stage of ‘grihastha’ where all of this is supposed to happen, as an ideal and integral part to life, in the philosophy of the Hindu religion. Let’s note also that Tahani Al-Jamil chooses not to go down that route right now, but in becoming an architect chooses a further ‘retirement’ into other-serving duty. That is a subsequent stage to grihastha life in Hindu and Buddhist religions. (This is interesting on another minor note. One would have expected with the way the serial began that Eleanor would choose to become the architect. One notes when one sees this creative decision, however, that Eleanor’s ‘selfish’ness has to an extent always been of a social nature. This is, in the sense that she has wanted revenge on ex-boyfriends, people who have refused to give her something etc., or at least involved multiple other people in its scope. By contrast Tahani’s selfishness has been of a particularly self-focused nature, drawing inward into itself in what could be called a selfish selfishness. It purely concentrates on her own achievements and her desire to prove a point to her sister and her parents. As such, it is indeed possibly a more striking, startling selection than Eleanor to show Tahani as the one who opts for a ‘retirement’ into duty of sustained future service of others.)
Now, what do these metaphors drawn from religions do? The decision a lot of the characters make needs Not to be read as a radical extinguishing oneself. It is a matured and satisfied willingness to meet the giving up of existence, and to meet it on one’s own terms and not just its own. That’s important and crucial because there the show is crafting a metaphor for Death as a concept (not suicide). It would have been foolish, with the show’s scope and nature, to have gone ahead and ignored that part of the whole concept of a life well lived. That coming to terms had to happen because back here on the round spinning ball we call Earth, humans are carbon-based organisms and at one point, we do come to entropy. We die. It is going to happen to all of us in the end, but in fact it can happen at any moment. The show “tries” to nudge us into the question of dealing with that, think about what we’d like to do, what we should try for, drawing on metaphors from world religions. Those audiences who have seen the show as attempting to make them feel “knocked in the wrong direction” are missing the point.
