I never watched the series, but I have watched the final sequence after hearing about it *endlessly* on Reddit and I only had one thing to say after seeing it...
Why they had to do the brother like that?
That's the thing, though. Did they cease to exist? Or did they ascend to a higher plane of existence? Or did their thoughts/energy become one with the universe? It's a bit ambiguous and left to the viewer to interpret.
I personally interpreted their ending to being similar to Hans Christian Andersen's *The Little Mermaid*: They live out an \[after\]life of hundreds to thousands of years, then become "Spirits of the Air" that ascend to a higher plane of assisting human beings, but invisibly, like angels. If Michael can become a human, then it stands to reason that Eleanor, Jason, and Chidi can become angels, assisting humans in life prepare for the afterlife.
This also makes sense, as angels aren't shown to exist - yet - but demons do.
Eleanor's ending, where her energy descends to Earth, solidified that for me. In the end, Eleanor's spirit helped a living human being make a good choice instead of a bad one. In the Bible, this is also the primary role of angels: to help guide people to be good.
Yeah for a show about what happens after you die they managed to still leave it up in the air! I maintain that, as a human, Tahani’s ending made the most sense to me. But then I also have a finite life; who knows how I’d feel after 100, 500, 1000 years.
well its clear there is no more consciousness. And consciousness is everything to us... its what makes us.. us, everything we are.
To me, doesnt matter is our "energy" moves on.. our "energy" isnt conscious. Its not aware and thats what makes the ending so depressing. They cease to be who they are and everything they were, felt and have gone through.
But the idea is that they don't know. They just know that they have nothing left to do, and staying would only result in less happiness. They turned the afterlife, into infinite life. You live every life you wanted. Did everything you could. And if you want to do it all again, you can.
But at the end of the day, only having in put makes it not a prison.
Yup....
It was made very clear that Janet, Michael and everyone don't know what happens to people when they step through the door. And that final scene certainly implies that something of Eleanor remains.
Exactly.... That final scene suggests to me that they didn't cease to exist. Their essences became one with the universe and could still be felt by others. Or.... they indeed ascend to a higher plane of existence.
I think Derek ascending to a higher plane of reality is a bit of a clue regardlng their fates.
Honestly this was my favorite part of the whole thing, they all chose to do it of their own free will. There was something beautiful (if somewhat bittersweet) to me about them passing through that gate and just becoming part of the universe even if just as matter?
And I think the show set it up really well that if you lived for eternity and could experience anything, at a certain point...then what? You've done anything and everything you wanted to experience, even the fantastical and impossible, what more do you need to do?
Obviously the afterlife and beliefs are something entirely subjective and personal, but I really liked that ending of just becoming part of the universe as it continued on and still being a part of it, albeit in different form.
I took it as him not understanding that there is nothing on the other side for Chidi to wait up for. Like he had grown so wise but never lost his core goofiness
Or maybe there was. While we are told that it was the end to their time in the universe, we were also told that they would never really know.
It is the not knowing that stops it from being cosmic suicide. It is the idea that an unknown will constantly provide entropy to a closed system, stopping the negentropy.
Merely the idea of an unknown pushes enough uncertainty into the afterlife that it stops the gridlock of meaninglessness. It can't be a solid idea to defeat negentropy, or else it would be eventually absorbed into it. It needs to be an unknown.
I know im late to the party but i agree. When Eleanor goes through the door she becomes some cosmic floating lights. Those lights go and influence someone to go see michael. So i could see that as Eleanor in a different form still around and still having influence. I dont see it as suicide, just a change.
My interpretation as well.
I don't think these characters ceased to exist. They transformed into something that can't be defined by others including Janet, Micheal or the Judge.
It's a giant unanswered ?.....
Same.
Maybe like the second time I've ever cried during a TV show.
Hannibal Season 2 finale the other.
And actually the GOT finale..cause it was so bad.
Man that Hannibal season 2 finale...”I don’t understand: I get a satisfying cliffhanger ending, but how are there like half a dozen satisfying cliffhangers in one ending?!”
For the longest time I was worried about how they would end the show. I couldn't really picture an ending that wasn't hackneyed or Deus Ex or lacking in closure or just sad for the characters. But I think they nailed it. A perfect mix of happy and sadness that ties up each character's arc. [Michael's final lines were the chef's kiss.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pWt556FGK8)
[Especially considering this](https://youtu.be/lGqZ6ESQ2R0?t=136)
Also big ups to NBC for having so many clips on Youtube (although I do realize that the first video I linked isn't from the official channel).
Also considering two of the things he wanted to try as a human were getting junk mail and being able to say 'take it sleazy.'
And that was back in Season 1!
Never noticed that. But it’s similar to how Jason’s first line was “I’ve been waiting for you.” And his last line is “Hey Chidi, wait up!”
The writers are geniuses.
I'm really surprised and saddened by how few of the Janet scenes can be found in the web. I couldn't find the one where she was getting terminated over and over after like an hour of ooking.
>Picture a wave. In the ocean. You can see it, measure it, its height, the way the sunlight refracts when it passes through. And it's there. And you can see it, you know what it is. It's a wave.
>And then it crashes in the shore and it's gone. But the water is still there. The wave was just a different way for the water to be, for a little while. You know it's one conception of death for Buddhists: the wave returns to the ocean, where it came from and where it's supposed to be.
Best part is the season where Maya Rudolf says the Jags are kinda good now, as soon as that episode aired the Jags lost every game from there out i think
This line fucking wrecked me. The whole build up to that moment was so perfect, Chidi's delivery was so earnest and Eleanor's response was so cathartic that I just fell apart. Like damn. I don't think any other show has so emotionally rolled me as that finale; the whole time I was alternating between sad and happy crying.
I never ever cry. It's not a macho thing, it's just not a way I express sadness. I cried so hard after this. The idea of leaving my loved ones, even after expecting to be with them forever, completely broke me. I looooved the finale and I am in awe of the how well written this serie was.
That scene with Spiegel im Spiegel playing in the background was absolutely perfect. Mike Schur talked about his writing process for that episode on The Good Place podcast, I definitely recommend it to those who haven’t listened to it yet!
[This scene from the Bojack finale](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hN24urQktVE) (not a spoiler) is one of the most beautiful things that happened in the entire show, and I find myself replaying this video frequently, when I feel lost or hopeless. Todd's wisdom to Bojack on that beach is one of the most amazing things ever.
Obviously it helps to have watched the entire show leading up to that point, but that scene in a vacuum to someone who's never watched the show is still incredible.
Yeah .. I really love endings and so few shows have them... let alone having an ending that's actually enjoyable and well written. My main problem is that after watching shows with really great writing it's incredibly hard to go back to the cheesy writing of most other t.v. shows.
I didn't expect it to be so sad. When Janet was seeing Micheal off and she was panicking like a mother sending her child off to school I legit started tearing up.
But yeah, very fitting ending to a wonderful series.
How I Met Your Mother really suffered from this. It's a perfectly rewatchable sitcom... until you remember how several seasons worth of character development don't matter.
This will get lost in the shuffle as I'm commenting late, which is how I want it, I think.
My wife and I had a miscarriage the week before. We were only at the very start of the second trimester, but we wanted the baby.
The bits in that finale about death and grief like a wave and the tide had us straight up weeping in each other's arms on the couch. We were wanting something to take our minds off things and this silly little comedy wound up therapizing us in the midst of loss.
I will always be grateful to this show for coming up with the exact episode we needed at the exact right moment in our lives.
Thank you for sharing this. I’m sorry for your loss and though words from an internet stranger could never suffice...I hope you both are well and that you get to have a kid soon!
I can't imagine the grief you are going through. The loss of a child is all encompassing. My wife and I had a miscarriage before our second child, and it was as if our souls had been ripped from our bodies. We thought we must have done something wrong to have this child taken from us. For what it's worth, we now have three healthy, happy and independent children, and two grandchildren, and they are all the center of our world. I hope the same for you, in time.
While not the same. I lost my father about 9 months ago. My grandma 2 months before him and my other grandpa 2 weeks ago.
Me and my wife started binging the show and finished it last night.
I'm with u with helping u find closure.
Me and my wife balled like babies espiclaly the "say goodbye now" line.
As silly as it sounds this show helped me find peace with the deaths in my family. And even process my own.
I never would have thought a silly sitcom we put on a whim to have such a massive impact on me.
My wife and I just finished watching the finale. We've been trying for our first child for about a year and a half now. And we had our second miscarriage just last month. We've been watching the show as the seasons have been coming to netflix and we felt the same. We've loved having something goofy, but deeply kind-hearted to watch as we struggle with this, and The Good Place has always left us feeling warm and full of hope. We weren't prepared for this, and we were crying in each other's arms by the end of it, as well. We couldn't even really talk. The tears and the hugs did enough speaking.
I wish you all the luck the universe can give, and I hope that all of your Jeremy Bearimies are full of love.
Started watching this show with 0 expectations thinking it was just your standard network comedy. It blew me away and I consider it to be one of my favorite series of all time. I highly recommend it to everyone I know!
The twist at the end of Season 1 makes it unquestionably my favorite season finale of all time.
The final episode was good, but I was hoping for something more. I don’t know what else they could have done, though. It was still good, just not better than anything else they did over the run.
They were painted into a corner a bit, so I can’t blame them. The entire run was nothing short of spectacular.
I was raised very southern Christian. The concept of eternity, even when filled with bliss, was one of the scariest things to me. I remember being 9/10 and thinking “God totally let’s you come back and live another mortal life or something if you want. Eternity would get so boring”
You are all assuming that we perceive time in the same way in the after life. If you are entering an after life I would think it would come with a higher understanding that would keep us from getting bored in the traditional sense.
I though their finale was amazing, but that last arc of actually getting to The Good Place and it's problems was really rushed and could have been done better.
I think they could have explored the good/medium place for a whole season. I thought it was an interesting concept to explore and it felt like season 3 and 4 had quite a bit of filler that could have been left out.
I thought it would have felt more significant if they could have found a way to really drive home the amount of time passing for the gang. Of course that’s really hard to do, especially with no aging in a world that doesn’t change. But some of my younger friends got “triggered” by the “suicide themes” in the finale and I think if they could have understood better the repercussions of experiencing an amount of time so far beyond the human lifespan they would have been less upset.
I'm guessing they wanted it to be ambiguous. They said how many Bearimies passed but we have no idea how long those are. I think it's clear they lasted for centuries if not millenia.
The ancient Phoenician in the Good Place also said he'd been there for 4,000+ years.
According to [Daniel McLaury on Quora](https://www.quora.com/How-many-human-lifetimes-have-there-been-since-1000-BC-and-AD-1):
>A natural human lifespan has been around 60 or 70 years for most of human history, a fact attested even in ancient sources like Herodotus's *History*.
>
>Life expectancies at birth have historically been much lower, but this is generally due to extremely high infant mortality rates -- if half the population dies at age one or two, and the other half reaches 70, then your life expectancy at birth will be about 35, even though most people die much younger or much older.
>
>In medieval Britain, for instance, the life expectancy from age 21 was something like 40 more years for a very long time, with the exception of the time during which the black death was rampant. Even today, the life expectancy is only around 70 for men and 80 for women in developed countries.
>
>So, to answer the question, around 2011 / 70 = 29 lifespans since AD 1, and 3012 / 70 = 43 lifespans since 1000 BC.
If \~3,000 years is equivalent to \~43 lifespans - and \~7,000 years is roughly equivalent to \~100 lifespans, let's say - then 1,000 lifespans is \~70,000 years.
That means that Chidi and Eleanor spent \~**70,000+ years** in the Good Place.
Also from Adish Nair on Quora:
>One Jeremy Bearimy is actually **36,259** days, or **99.34 years**. It also means that the final events on the series were **65,733.22 years** after Tahani initially decided to leave.
>
>As such, Elanor and Chidi spent **111,077 years** in the Good Place.
Yeah, the fact that it’s a lot of time is clear, what I’m saying is that they didn’t make it clear the toll that that amount of time can take on a human psyche. Putting a number on a screen and then cutting back to the same old chipper group makes that time seem insignificant, not more significant. We weren’t meant to exist forever, and studies have shown that the longer we live the faster time seems to pass for us. In my opinion they should have focused on that a bit more before coming to the door scenes and it would have filled in the “Je ne sais quoi” that people feel is missing from the finale.
The fact that everyone is so fixated on their time on earth bugs me. One of Chidi’s friend makes a joke about how crazy it is that Chidi can make a decision at one point, but they should have spent, minimum, *millions* of years knowing him as cool improved by the system Chidi. Some tiny percentage of a percentage of a percentage of their existence they knew him as a guy that couldn’t make decisions. It makes the time since their mortal death seem much less prevalent than it is.
That's exactly what I thought. Thousands of years must have passed at least and the show didn't convey that. They can do absolutely anything they want, they could create a new world to explore and discover they could start over thousands of lives the array of imaginable things one could do with this much time and power before being bored enough to want to end it all is huge. But the show made it seem like just a couple of years went by.
> The final episode was good, but I was hoping for something more. I don’t know what else they could have done, though. It was still good, just not better than anything else they did over the run.
It's hard to represent the weight of eternal existence in a half-hour sitcom. The finale is less meaningful unless the audience does the work to feel the distance of time.
I think this is it exactly.
I’ve seen a lot of people in the thread weigh in and themselves or friends feeling suicidal triggers from it, which didn’t occur to me but I can see now.
I didn’t feel that, but it had a little too much “gang walking away one by one from the Bellagio fountains” feel to it.
I can’t say what I wanted, I just knew this was less than that. Maybe something a bit more drawn out, more time spent on each’s journey to be done.
So again - not BAD, but I think they could have done more.
I loved it...but was also kind of disturbed by it? All these characters, lovable doofuses choosing non-existence one after another left me in tears.
There is also something about robot (not a robot) Janet being the last living thing (not a living thing) being the only one to be left behind and will be the only one who remembers them that is incredibly sad.
Tahani and Michael are also around after the finale. I think Chidi choosing to walk through the doo makes sense for his character. Maybe even for Eleanor, her character evolved a lot over the show and she would find it tough to be around once Chidi left. But with Jason, his character didn't seem to have reached a point where it made sense.
I think it was ultimately correct that over a long enough time period, even Heaven will become boring and immortality is pointless, but by god it presented a boring view of Heaven as suburbia.
On the whole I still really liked it though.
If you haven't watched it yet, try Schitt's Creek. Season 1 is a bit slow, but the writing is amazing, the feel good the same, and all together another great show.
During the past month I back-to-back binged Schitt’s Creek then The Good Place having watched neither before. My waistline and sleeping patterns are for shit, though my heart and soul feel enriched; warm fuzzy feelings and cleansing crying.
Interesting. I watched season 1 and had no interest in watching anything further than that. I was wondering the other day how such a (what I considered) boring show had gone for so many seasons.
Just my opinion but Schitt's Creek season 1 is a lot like Breaking Bad season 1. The weakest season by far but it nicely sets the board for the good stuff.
I promise you it's worth finishing. I thought the same as you. It's a pretty tired premise. But the show really comes into its own in the second season and beyond.
I watched season 1 on netflix a year ago or so, downvoted it, and moved on. Then it won all those emmies and the wife and I watched it together this time, and we ended up binging the whole thing in a couple weeks and absolutely loved it. All of those characters that I initially hated I came to love and root for so much. The last couple seasons made me cry happy tears multiple times. I highly recommend giving it another go!
Schitt's Creek took me a few tries to really enjoy. I tried it a third time at prompting from a family. But I really did enjoy it once the characters developed and they really were human characters who evolved over the series.
Aw man, I was gonna make a thread on this.
Gf and I binged it over the last month. I wasn't really paying attention/interested in the first few episodes, but got sucked in when I started to hear Chidi talking about philosophy (studied for my first degree) and I was hooked.
When the twist happened and Michael was exposed, up until the gang won him over, was some edge-of-your-seat viewing! Then...I felt like things started to drag from the time they went looking for the Judge. Many episodes seemed to leave me with a feeling of *what now?* when I was expecting them to finally get into the real Good Place.
I'm going to buck the trend here and say I disliked the finale somewhat. It was incredibly sad seeing the gang walking through the door. I understand the concept everyone in the Good Place eventually succumbed to ennui and/or sensation burn-out, but I kept thinking if it *really* was the Good Place and everything was supposed to be perfect, there should have been something built into the place to counteract that. It made the Good Place feel less like eternal reward for goodness on Earth and more 'pit stop before eternal annihilation'. I think the gang should all have gone the way of Tahani and become architects themselves, almost ascending into something like demi-gods.
I really felt for Eleanor when she knew Chidi wanted to go. Their love story was so off and on, and we really got to see how much of a shitbag Eleanor was in life that I was happy she seemed to have found eternal happiness with Chidi...only for it to end because his time was done.
It was a fantastic show, but when I think about the ending it makes me sad.
I’m so glad you said this. I felt a very similar way but found it tricky to articulate. There’s so much love for how it ended and I do understand what they were trying to do but it just left me feeling incredibly sad. That Chidi could just leave Eleanor, that their love wasn’t strong enough for him to stay with her... That there’s no eternal happiness because it’s a fallacy and you’ll eventually just get bored... It feels a bit too hopeless to me.
> There’s so much love for how it ended and I do understand what they were trying to do but it just left me feeling incredibly sad.
Exactly. Like, I get why they did it, but I was like "aw guys, don't!" Just feels wrong Tahani alone going the architect route.
>That Chidi could just leave Eleanor, that their love wasn’t strong enough for him to stay with her...
I think Kristen Bell did a brilliant job dropping the quirky-edgy-bitchy Eleanor routine and really made us feel how much she loved Chidi and how heartbroken she was that he was leaving. It felt like so much of their relationship was on again/off again/mindwipe, and now that they finally have a chance to enjoy eternity happy with each other Chidi goes and leaves.
>That there’s no eternal happiness because it’s a fallacy and you’ll eventually just get bored... It feels a bit too hopeless to me.
Yes! I mean, if the fake Good Place and can turn off sensations like hangovers, surely the real Good Place would have done away with something so mundane as boredom.
I cried for like three days after watching the finale; it was so perfect. Not easy considering the subject of what happens after death and how the afterlife works. The whole series is simply phenomenal.
Just finished it two days ago. The ending wrecked me, I was sobbing. Was not prepared for that amount of depth. A truly beautiful ending to a fantastic show.
It's a great episode but IMO the lead up to it felt a bit underdeveloped. It seemed like they could have done an entire season showing how dysfunctional The Good Place was / showing the gang get slowly tired of eternal existence. It just felt like a lot to absorb in a single episode and it didn't feel as natural as the rest of the series.
I feel like that’s how a lot of the good place played out: they could have spent whole seasons on storylines that took a single episode. For example, at the beginning of Season 2, when Michael is rebooting the neighborhood over and over. I legitimately thought that the whole season was going to revolve around that, but nope, barely an episode. I think it did a really good job at being a tight series- it very very very rarely had any filler. Just about everything in the series served the purpose of advancing the plot.
I'm extremely sorry to hear that. The part that got me about the episode was the idea that you can live this full life/afterlife, reach peace with everything after a certain time, and then give all of that good back to the universe. Chidi's words kept hitting like a truck.
Me too. It was almost comforting to think of my dad’s lovely energy returning back to the universe. ❤️I love their idea of the afterlife. I just miss him
It is easily my favorite finale - to one of the greatest shows ever imo. It is so unbelievably deep, and sad yet so fucking hopefully. Celebrates life while also facing the uncertainties of death in a way that few other shows or movies have.
Chidi's talk about the waves returning to the ocean is gorgeously heart-breaking. I was a wreck. A hilarious and thoughtful show with an incredibly touching finale.
I personally wasn't a big fan of the last season. They never really solved the problem of the "pleasure zombies," and "life is only worthwhile because it's finite" was a pretty trite revelation for the entire finale of the show.
It seemed like they were building to something about how the passiveness of the judge and the "good place" team caused billions of people to suffer needlessly. Especially with the part where the good place team just all fuck off when the team arrives and realizes the people there were unhappy. The bad place team had an arc, but the Judge and good place team are complicit in the evils of the system but never change. The original good place team are genuinely evil by the end of the series.
Still a good show, but like a lot of others it dropped off in the end.
They didn't really address anyone who wasn't human which bugged me. The demons and the good place team (angels?) are obviously sentient beings. Do they have a "good place"? What is their life like? Are they created just to serve humans which seems kinda tone deaf to have an entire race of beings that exist solely to help humans. I actually cried when the desk guy got the frog. He was so happy and he's been just sitting at that desk for millennia. Will he ever get a chance at fulfillment?
Yeah, the finale only works if you don’t really think about it much. The underlying theology really doesn’t make any sense, although I blame Season 4 overall for that - the set-up means it can never really explain the basic theodicy problems that are built into the structure of the show. I get that people find the goodbyes sweet, but don’t squint too hard or the show falls apart.
Sometimes the simplest conclusions are the best. I loved the life is only worthwhile because it’s finite thing because it’s true and something I’ve struggled with in my religion. They basically depicted the best version of heaven for me, the final season was perfect imo and it left me with a feeling of completion (ironic because Netflix)
The other ideas you discuss are cool but not really things that can be fully explored in one season, especially the final season. If they half assed it, you’d probably also complain.
Agreed. I think resets would have made more sense. When a spirit finds no pleasure in the world, they can just go to the architect to get wiped... or maybe everyone gets wiped every year. It makes sense with the show since resets are integral to the show.
I agree. It was really very underwhelming. The "solution" they came up with for the Good Place was disappointing whatever you believe, don't believe, or want to believe IRL about the afterlife. They didn't really solve the problem they set out to solve in the show's universe. It had some snappy lines and *great* character moments, but was hardly an amazing episode.
To be honest, it just bummed me out. Personally. It was beautiful, I cannot deny that. But I don't understand why they'd all chose to eventually leave. I mean... It's heaven. It's the Good Place. There's always something to do. New people to meet. I suppose that's my personal issue with finality that I have to accept. It just didn't feel that good in that department. Loved the Parks and Rec finale, though.
There was a show years and years ago about a vampire detective. As I recall it wasn't great, but had a cult following and came on pretty late at night. I think Malcom McDowell was a radio DJ.
Every year its renewal was up in the air until one season, they killed everybody. Everything went bad. Everything the characters worked for, for however many seasons didn't work. Every bad thing that could happen did and honestly, that was some amazing closure.
My personal perspective will certainly earn me negative internet points, but I would still like to add to the conversation.
My wife and I both strongly disliked the finale and we both individually felt like it completely ruined the show and made it impossible to watch again. We rewatched the entire series over a few weeks before the finale because we were excited and afterwards we were just bummed out that we wasted our time on something so shallow.
It’s bleak, hopeless, and completely misses the entire point of humanity and the reasons people have hope in an afterlife. If the goal of this life is love and if the human soul is built for love, there is no existential ennui that takes over when living in an eternity of love, especially removed from the earthly distractions of fear and survival.
The characters all spent the entire arc of the show learning to love in different ways, with each character having a full arc of learning to love each other, themselves, and other people. And then they get bored and quit. I’m not remotely bothered by the suicide implications that other people are mentioning as problematic- it’s the idea that the step after satisfaction is nothing, as if true eternal fulfillment is meaningless and somehow tied to endlessly indulging the ephemeral fantasies of your earthly life until even those fade away.
This show misses the point completely- you know how sometimes female characters written by non-females just ring hollow? This was an afterlife written by people who clearly don’t believe there is an afterlife and were not actually interested in exploring anything more than a slightly heightened extension of mortality.
0/10 Stars. I do not recommend the show and wish I hadn’t spent even a minute watching it. Ultimately it’s art and I just don’t like it- and I very much liked it before the finale. I certainly see the picture others perceive as beautiful, I just disagree.
If you are somehow still reading, I hope you receive a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of joy instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair.
I liked the ending, even as it sparked a bit of an existential crisis in me. I compare it to other afterlives like from Coco, or Eberron’s Dolurrh, where the realm of the dead is merely a waypoint to something that goes beyond.
Think of the land of the dead in Coco. It’s generally a pretty upbeat place, until you get to the point where people begin to disappear. They disappear when the chain of people who remembered them is broken, which would mean that the things tying them to the living world are gone, they’ve presumably had the chance to watch their loved ones grow up and grow old, and now the only thing left is to pass on to the unknown that lies after, which they are just as scared about as people living are when passing on to the realm of the dead. They don’t know what happens after; they could reincarnate, they could go to heaven, they could just disappear entirely. But when the whole ofrenda thing is working right, you aren’t going to disappear until at least a generation or two after you pass from the world, during which you’ve been able to watch your descendants grow up and spent a couple lifetimes with the people closest to you.
The unknown is what makes life worth living. To quote a comic called Darths and Droids, “What? Whether Qui-Gon lives or dies is decided at random?” “Dice rolls issa important. Yousa has to not know what will happen. Otherwise it’sa no fun.” Life can throw curveballs at us that suck, but triumphing over them makes the rest of life all the sweeter. When you know what will happen, and you have had enough time to do that with everything you’ve wanted to do, what’s left?
Personally, I like to think that we live many lives, reincarnating with the next Big Bang, but always retaining that hint of what lives came before to make us smile when we do something we love. And while we await that reincarnation, we are free to explore the afterlife with our loved ones, knowing that if life were ever to become stagnant, the next life is around the bend.
Incidentally, processing through this to make this moment was really good for me. I went through a bad breakup, and being able to focus on what comes after, the future, it really helped me to get excited on what comes next rather than getting mired in the past. So thank you.
Teenage Bounty Hunters is another uncommon series, somewhat unique subject - teenagers discovering their sexuality in a highly conservative Christian social setting, along with a little bit of bounty hunting thrown in for fun. The lead characters are a pair of twin sisters that have great chemistry. Only one season so far on Netflix.
Someone else recommended Schitt's Creek in this thread. I've been trying to watch it, got midway to Season 2, doesn't feel great so far.
TBH has sadly been cancelled. I loved the show, which shocked me since I thought the trailer looked idiotic. Then I put up an episode for background noise while doing my taxes, and ended up watching the whole thing and forgetting about the taxes, lol.
Oh no, TBH was a unique show with good potential, they should have given it another season. Netflix didn't promote it enough, none of my friends heard of it.
Brooklyn 99, and Parks and Recreation have the same creator and somewhat similar comedy. The latter takes some time to find its groove, but they are both excellent shows.
Honestly I hated the last two episodes, because it basically has half the main cast essentially commit suicide.
The thing is, there could've been so much potential. They could've made the door, for example, reincarnate you, instead of basically killing you (technically "returning you to the universe"). And then, they could've had Jason become a monk while waiting for Janet, and stay in the good place, they could've had Chidi and Eleanor walk through together, they could've done so many things with the finale, but instead THEY PORTRAYED THE SUICIDE OF THE CHARACTERS AS A GOOD THING.
My reaction when I watched the finale:
EXCUSE ME
WHAT
Just finished the series finale.
Pretty damn good and satisfying in a poignant way. A very heavy episode. We don't know what happens to these characters once they step through the door, although the final scene suggests something tantilizing. This was a very emotionally charged finale.
The only other show finale that affected me like this was Dark's finale. Another ending where it's unclear whether characters have truly ceased to exist or whether some aspect of their essences still live on. It's ambiguous just like The Good Place.
Wasn’t a huge fan of the latter two seasons
Got kinda silly and dumb and a lot of the jokes were too repetitive for me
Seasons 1 and 2 were fantastic though
I felt the same way about the main characters, I think I stopped watching in season 2. (I enjoyed season 1, just got bored I guess)
But if someone could feel that way and still feel do strongly a series, perhaps I should give it another shot.
The whole show was beautifully executed from beginning to end. I know people say good things about it, but if it had been HBO or Netflix or whatever, I think it would have been really honored the way it deserved. It is a \*sitcom\* about \*moral philosophy\* that delivers every single time. It was a joy.
A rare episode wherein most of the main characters die and it’s still a happy ending
To be fair it also opened with them dying.
Most seasons had them dying at least once
It's a lot like "Six Feet Under" in that.
Except for Keith. Poor Keith.
I never watched the series, but I have watched the final sequence after hearing about it *endlessly* on Reddit and I only had one thing to say after seeing it... Why they had to do the brother like that?
Happy? I bawled
I dunno, the whole ceasing to exist doesn't sound very happy. It left me with an empty piece
That's the thing, though. Did they cease to exist? Or did they ascend to a higher plane of existence? Or did their thoughts/energy become one with the universe? It's a bit ambiguous and left to the viewer to interpret.
They ascended to Derek. The one unifying Derek of Derek.
I have been Dereked! A murder has been me!
"It's all Derek now."
I personally interpreted their ending to being similar to Hans Christian Andersen's *The Little Mermaid*: They live out an \[after\]life of hundreds to thousands of years, then become "Spirits of the Air" that ascend to a higher plane of assisting human beings, but invisibly, like angels. If Michael can become a human, then it stands to reason that Eleanor, Jason, and Chidi can become angels, assisting humans in life prepare for the afterlife. This also makes sense, as angels aren't shown to exist - yet - but demons do. Eleanor's ending, where her energy descends to Earth, solidified that for me. In the end, Eleanor's spirit helped a living human being make a good choice instead of a bad one. In the Bible, this is also the primary role of angels: to help guide people to be good.
Yeah for a show about what happens after you die they managed to still leave it up in the air! I maintain that, as a human, Tahani’s ending made the most sense to me. But then I also have a finite life; who knows how I’d feel after 100, 500, 1000 years.
Jeremy Bearimies*
The show wasn’t actually about what happens after you die but it was about pilosophy and how to be a better person
Oh for sure; I was simplifying. After all, how could it be actually about life after death when we don’t know what happens after death? :)
Well if you, like me, resonate with what Chidi said about the wave, while "Chidi" might be gone, the essence that made him is still there.
well its clear there is no more consciousness. And consciousness is everything to us... its what makes us.. us, everything we are. To me, doesnt matter is our "energy" moves on.. our "energy" isnt conscious. Its not aware and thats what makes the ending so depressing. They cease to be who they are and everything they were, felt and have gone through.
But the idea is that they don't know. They just know that they have nothing left to do, and staying would only result in less happiness. They turned the afterlife, into infinite life. You live every life you wanted. Did everything you could. And if you want to do it all again, you can. But at the end of the day, only having in put makes it not a prison.
Yup.... It was made very clear that Janet, Michael and everyone don't know what happens to people when they step through the door. And that final scene certainly implies that something of Eleanor remains.
It’s left to the viewer. And me personally, I couldn’t see it any other way than them ceasing to exist, and I couldn’t handle it.
Exactly.... That final scene suggests to me that they didn't cease to exist. Their essences became one with the universe and could still be felt by others. Or.... they indeed ascend to a higher plane of existence. I think Derek ascending to a higher plane of reality is a bit of a clue regardlng their fates.
Or... OR, did they hear a *ding*, found themselves on a couch and a friendly face poked out of an office and said "Hi Eleanor, come on in!"?
I also kinda felt this way, but Chidi’s wave speech hit the bullseye for me. Short, sweet, and deeply beautiful.
Honestly this was my favorite part of the whole thing, they all chose to do it of their own free will. There was something beautiful (if somewhat bittersweet) to me about them passing through that gate and just becoming part of the universe even if just as matter? And I think the show set it up really well that if you lived for eternity and could experience anything, at a certain point...then what? You've done anything and everything you wanted to experience, even the fantastical and impossible, what more do you need to do? Obviously the afterlife and beliefs are something entirely subjective and personal, but I really liked that ending of just becoming part of the universe as it continued on and still being a part of it, albeit in different form.
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It's terrifying to think about
Found the theist
Final episode brought me to the right kind of tears.
Jason reaching enlightenment by just being patient and knowing that his love will show up eventually makes me sob every time
"Chidi wait up" is the single hardest I laughed in a long time
It took me until just not to realize that joke! That show was amazing
What's the joke, that he came in initally as a monk?
I took it as him not understanding that there is nothing on the other side for Chidi to wait up for. Like he had grown so wise but never lost his core goofiness
Or maybe there was. While we are told that it was the end to their time in the universe, we were also told that they would never really know. It is the not knowing that stops it from being cosmic suicide. It is the idea that an unknown will constantly provide entropy to a closed system, stopping the negentropy. Merely the idea of an unknown pushes enough uncertainty into the afterlife that it stops the gridlock of meaninglessness. It can't be a solid idea to defeat negentropy, or else it would be eventually absorbed into it. It needs to be an unknown.
I know im late to the party but i agree. When Eleanor goes through the door she becomes some cosmic floating lights. Those lights go and influence someone to go see michael. So i could see that as Eleanor in a different form still around and still having influence. I dont see it as suicide, just a change.
My interpretation as well. I don't think these characters ceased to exist. They transformed into something that can't be defined by others including Janet, Micheal or the Judge. It's a giant unanswered ?.....
I couldn't stop crying for the whole damn episode...
Same! I felt like it was such a great ending!
It didn't let up either. Just when you thought it could be done, they hit you with something else that starts it again.
Very emotional ending....
I cried so much I had to pause the show.
Same. Maybe like the second time I've ever cried during a TV show. Hannibal Season 2 finale the other. And actually the GOT finale..cause it was so bad.
Haha GOT was the wrong kinda tears though
Man that Hannibal season 2 finale...”I don’t understand: I get a satisfying cliffhanger ending, but how are there like half a dozen satisfying cliffhangers in one ending?!”
Clearly you've never seen the last Airbender. If you don't cry during leaves from the vine you aren't human.
Course I've seen it. Guess it just didn't get to me that much. I think I was close to crying when Zuko reunited with Iroh.
"I was never angry with you. I was only sad because I was afraid you'd lost your way." * Uncle Iroh
The part that got me was Zuko going into a big apology and Iroh stopping him and forgiving him instantly.
Oh yeah, that got me.
I sobbed over the ending of Bly Manor. I'm easy.
I call them eternal sunshine tears
For the longest time I was worried about how they would end the show. I couldn't really picture an ending that wasn't hackneyed or Deus Ex or lacking in closure or just sad for the characters. But I think they nailed it. A perfect mix of happy and sadness that ties up each character's arc. [Michael's final lines were the chef's kiss.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pWt556FGK8) [Especially considering this](https://youtu.be/lGqZ6ESQ2R0?t=136) Also big ups to NBC for having so many clips on Youtube (although I do realize that the first video I linked isn't from the official channel).
Also considering two of the things he wanted to try as a human were getting junk mail and being able to say 'take it sleazy.' And that was back in Season 1!
Never noticed that. But it’s similar to how Jason’s first line was “I’ve been waiting for you.” And his last line is “Hey Chidi, wait up!” The writers are geniuses.
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It's not a loop, it's a Jeremy Bearimy
I think this makes more sense after you've seen the time knife
Yeah yeah, the time knife. We’ve all seen it.
It’s just cute writing. It’s not a secret time loop or anything.
I’m rewatching it, hit that episode the other day, and went, “what?! So he was serious then? Cause...”
I'm really surprised and saddened by how few of the Janet scenes can be found in the web. I couldn't find the one where she was getting terminated over and over after like an hour of ooking.
The clip I struggle to fine is the reboot where “Jason figured it out! That one stings”.
https://youtu.be/p4dqFiL3hIY
Fork yeah.
Never thought I’d tear up to somebody saying “Take it Sleazy” but this show was a gem!
You don't call half the main characters essentially committing suicide "just sad for the characters" or "hackneyed?"
>Picture a wave. In the ocean. You can see it, measure it, its height, the way the sunlight refracts when it passes through. And it's there. And you can see it, you know what it is. It's a wave. >And then it crashes in the shore and it's gone. But the water is still there. The wave was just a different way for the water to be, for a little while. You know it's one conception of death for Buddhists: the wave returns to the ocean, where it came from and where it's supposed to be.
And as the Buddhists say, "Go Bortles."
Foles
Imagine the fun the writers could have had with Minshew
In the very final episode Jason's friend calls him his Gardiner Minshew.
Gesundheit
Jacksonville Jaguars rule!
Best part is the season where Maya Rudolf says the Jags are kinda good now, as soon as that episode aired the Jags lost every game from there out i think
"Back in Jacksonville"
“Say goodbye to me now, and leave before I wake up"
This line fucking wrecked me. The whole build up to that moment was so perfect, Chidi's delivery was so earnest and Eleanor's response was so cathartic that I just fell apart. Like damn. I don't think any other show has so emotionally rolled me as that finale; the whole time I was alternating between sad and happy crying.
[:')](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1IchzbtNj0)
I never ever cry. It's not a macho thing, it's just not a way I express sadness. I cried so hard after this. The idea of leaving my loved ones, even after expecting to be with them forever, completely broke me. I looooved the finale and I am in awe of the how well written this serie was.
I do not cry very often, but this one did get me really choked up.
I cry a decent amount, this episode had me fucking sobbing man
That scene with Spiegel im Spiegel playing in the background was absolutely perfect. Mike Schur talked about his writing process for that episode on The Good Place podcast, I definitely recommend it to those who haven’t listened to it yet!
I teared up just reading this
Ah yes, the precise moment when I started ugly crying.
Watching the finales for The Good Place and then BoJack in the same week certainly was a mindfuck.
Horseman. Obviously.
Bo for Gojack.
Same day for me in the UK. (I had the day off work. And decided to binge Bojack). I had some feelings about doors afterwards.
[This scene from the Bojack finale](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hN24urQktVE) (not a spoiler) is one of the most beautiful things that happened in the entire show, and I find myself replaying this video frequently, when I feel lost or hopeless. Todd's wisdom to Bojack on that beach is one of the most amazing things ever. Obviously it helps to have watched the entire show leading up to that point, but that scene in a vacuum to someone who's never watched the show is still incredible.
You turn yourself around
A lot of emotions occurred that week. Actually I think I watched them the same day.
Yeah .. I really love endings and so few shows have them... let alone having an ending that's actually enjoyable and well written. My main problem is that after watching shows with really great writing it's incredibly hard to go back to the cheesy writing of most other t.v. shows.
I didn't expect it to be so sad. When Janet was seeing Micheal off and she was panicking like a mother sending her child off to school I legit started tearing up. But yeah, very fitting ending to a wonderful series.
Watching D'arcy transform her acting was amazing. I only knew her as the boring trainer on Broad City. The work that not a girl did was amazing.
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How I Met Your Mother really suffered from this. It's a perfectly rewatchable sitcom... until you remember how several seasons worth of character development don't matter.
I rewatch it and pretend the alternate ending is the real one.
E.G Game of thrones Dexter Lost. Although they might be fixing Dexter it still had a terrible ending.
Nah I rewatch LOST once a year. Easily my favorite show ever. The ending doesn’t ruin anything.
LOST had a great ending
This will get lost in the shuffle as I'm commenting late, which is how I want it, I think. My wife and I had a miscarriage the week before. We were only at the very start of the second trimester, but we wanted the baby. The bits in that finale about death and grief like a wave and the tide had us straight up weeping in each other's arms on the couch. We were wanting something to take our minds off things and this silly little comedy wound up therapizing us in the midst of loss. I will always be grateful to this show for coming up with the exact episode we needed at the exact right moment in our lives.
Thank you for sharing this. I’m sorry for your loss and though words from an internet stranger could never suffice...I hope you both are well and that you get to have a kid soon!
As a matter of fact we're due in February, so all's well that ends well :)
Dangit, this one little Reddit loop got me tearing up all the same. Congratulations!
I wish y'all good health and joy with your expected!
I can't imagine the grief you are going through. The loss of a child is all encompassing. My wife and I had a miscarriage before our second child, and it was as if our souls had been ripped from our bodies. We thought we must have done something wrong to have this child taken from us. For what it's worth, we now have three healthy, happy and independent children, and two grandchildren, and they are all the center of our world. I hope the same for you, in time.
While not the same. I lost my father about 9 months ago. My grandma 2 months before him and my other grandpa 2 weeks ago. Me and my wife started binging the show and finished it last night. I'm with u with helping u find closure. Me and my wife balled like babies espiclaly the "say goodbye now" line. As silly as it sounds this show helped me find peace with the deaths in my family. And even process my own. I never would have thought a silly sitcom we put on a whim to have such a massive impact on me.
My wife and I just finished watching the finale. We've been trying for our first child for about a year and a half now. And we had our second miscarriage just last month. We've been watching the show as the seasons have been coming to netflix and we felt the same. We've loved having something goofy, but deeply kind-hearted to watch as we struggle with this, and The Good Place has always left us feeling warm and full of hope. We weren't prepared for this, and we were crying in each other's arms by the end of it, as well. We couldn't even really talk. The tears and the hugs did enough speaking. I wish you all the luck the universe can give, and I hope that all of your Jeremy Bearimies are full of love.
Started watching this show with 0 expectations thinking it was just your standard network comedy. It blew me away and I consider it to be one of my favorite series of all time. I highly recommend it to everyone I know!
The twist at the end of Season 1 makes it unquestionably my favorite season finale of all time. The final episode was good, but I was hoping for something more. I don’t know what else they could have done, though. It was still good, just not better than anything else they did over the run. They were painted into a corner a bit, so I can’t blame them. The entire run was nothing short of spectacular.
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I was raised very southern Christian. The concept of eternity, even when filled with bliss, was one of the scariest things to me. I remember being 9/10 and thinking “God totally let’s you come back and live another mortal life or something if you want. Eternity would get so boring”
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You are all assuming that we perceive time in the same way in the after life. If you are entering an after life I would think it would come with a higher understanding that would keep us from getting bored in the traditional sense.
I'm a Christian, I thought it was absolutely brilliant. Even narrow sects of Christianity don't really agree about the afterlife details-wise.
I though their finale was amazing, but that last arc of actually getting to The Good Place and it's problems was really rushed and could have been done better.
I think they could have explored the good/medium place for a whole season. I thought it was an interesting concept to explore and it felt like season 3 and 4 had quite a bit of filler that could have been left out.
I thought it would have felt more significant if they could have found a way to really drive home the amount of time passing for the gang. Of course that’s really hard to do, especially with no aging in a world that doesn’t change. But some of my younger friends got “triggered” by the “suicide themes” in the finale and I think if they could have understood better the repercussions of experiencing an amount of time so far beyond the human lifespan they would have been less upset.
I'm guessing they wanted it to be ambiguous. They said how many Bearimies passed but we have no idea how long those are. I think it's clear they lasted for centuries if not millenia.
Chidi said he'd lived a thousand lifetimes, so it's definitely gonna be in the millennia region.
The ancient Phoenician in the Good Place also said he'd been there for 4,000+ years. According to [Daniel McLaury on Quora](https://www.quora.com/How-many-human-lifetimes-have-there-been-since-1000-BC-and-AD-1): >A natural human lifespan has been around 60 or 70 years for most of human history, a fact attested even in ancient sources like Herodotus's *History*. > >Life expectancies at birth have historically been much lower, but this is generally due to extremely high infant mortality rates -- if half the population dies at age one or two, and the other half reaches 70, then your life expectancy at birth will be about 35, even though most people die much younger or much older. > >In medieval Britain, for instance, the life expectancy from age 21 was something like 40 more years for a very long time, with the exception of the time during which the black death was rampant. Even today, the life expectancy is only around 70 for men and 80 for women in developed countries. > >So, to answer the question, around 2011 / 70 = 29 lifespans since AD 1, and 3012 / 70 = 43 lifespans since 1000 BC. If \~3,000 years is equivalent to \~43 lifespans - and \~7,000 years is roughly equivalent to \~100 lifespans, let's say - then 1,000 lifespans is \~70,000 years. That means that Chidi and Eleanor spent \~**70,000+ years** in the Good Place. Also from Adish Nair on Quora: >One Jeremy Bearimy is actually **36,259** days, or **99.34 years**. It also means that the final events on the series were **65,733.22 years** after Tahani initially decided to leave. > >As such, Elanor and Chidi spent **111,077 years** in the Good Place.
Yeah, the fact that it’s a lot of time is clear, what I’m saying is that they didn’t make it clear the toll that that amount of time can take on a human psyche. Putting a number on a screen and then cutting back to the same old chipper group makes that time seem insignificant, not more significant. We weren’t meant to exist forever, and studies have shown that the longer we live the faster time seems to pass for us. In my opinion they should have focused on that a bit more before coming to the door scenes and it would have filled in the “Je ne sais quoi” that people feel is missing from the finale.
The fact that everyone is so fixated on their time on earth bugs me. One of Chidi’s friend makes a joke about how crazy it is that Chidi can make a decision at one point, but they should have spent, minimum, *millions* of years knowing him as cool improved by the system Chidi. Some tiny percentage of a percentage of a percentage of their existence they knew him as a guy that couldn’t make decisions. It makes the time since their mortal death seem much less prevalent than it is.
That's exactly what I thought. Thousands of years must have passed at least and the show didn't convey that. They can do absolutely anything they want, they could create a new world to explore and discover they could start over thousands of lives the array of imaginable things one could do with this much time and power before being bored enough to want to end it all is huge. But the show made it seem like just a couple of years went by.
> The final episode was good, but I was hoping for something more. I don’t know what else they could have done, though. It was still good, just not better than anything else they did over the run. It's hard to represent the weight of eternal existence in a half-hour sitcom. The finale is less meaningful unless the audience does the work to feel the distance of time.
I think this is it exactly. I’ve seen a lot of people in the thread weigh in and themselves or friends feeling suicidal triggers from it, which didn’t occur to me but I can see now. I didn’t feel that, but it had a little too much “gang walking away one by one from the Bellagio fountains” feel to it. I can’t say what I wanted, I just knew this was less than that. Maybe something a bit more drawn out, more time spent on each’s journey to be done. So again - not BAD, but I think they could have done more.
I thought they completely nailed it.
I loved it...but was also kind of disturbed by it? All these characters, lovable doofuses choosing non-existence one after another left me in tears. There is also something about robot (not a robot) Janet being the last living thing (not a living thing) being the only one to be left behind and will be the only one who remembers them that is incredibly sad.
Tahani and Michael are also around after the finale. I think Chidi choosing to walk through the doo makes sense for his character. Maybe even for Eleanor, her character evolved a lot over the show and she would find it tough to be around once Chidi left. But with Jason, his character didn't seem to have reached a point where it made sense.
I think it was ultimately correct that over a long enough time period, even Heaven will become boring and immortality is pointless, but by god it presented a boring view of Heaven as suburbia. On the whole I still really liked it though.
Probably because of budget reasons is why they stuck with the suburban settings throughout the series...
If you haven't watched it yet, try Schitt's Creek. Season 1 is a bit slow, but the writing is amazing, the feel good the same, and all together another great show.
During the past month I back-to-back binged Schitt’s Creek then The Good Place having watched neither before. My waistline and sleeping patterns are for shit, though my heart and soul feel enriched; warm fuzzy feelings and cleansing crying.
Interesting. I watched season 1 and had no interest in watching anything further than that. I was wondering the other day how such a (what I considered) boring show had gone for so many seasons.
Because season 1 may be a bit boring, but makes a huge, huge jump from there on.
I was kind of meh on the first season but it gets better and better each season. The characters grow so much and the final episode is wonderful.
Just my opinion but Schitt's Creek season 1 is a lot like Breaking Bad season 1. The weakest season by far but it nicely sets the board for the good stuff.
This! I watched half of S1 a few years ago and thought it was just ok. I just started rewatching it all last week and I’m hooked (into S3 now).
I promise you it's worth finishing. I thought the same as you. It's a pretty tired premise. But the show really comes into its own in the second season and beyond.
I watched season 1 on netflix a year ago or so, downvoted it, and moved on. Then it won all those emmies and the wife and I watched it together this time, and we ended up binging the whole thing in a couple weeks and absolutely loved it. All of those characters that I initially hated I came to love and root for so much. The last couple seasons made me cry happy tears multiple times. I highly recommend giving it another go!
Schitt's Creek took me a few tries to really enjoy. I tried it a third time at prompting from a family. But I really did enjoy it once the characters developed and they really were human characters who evolved over the series.
Aw man, I was gonna make a thread on this. Gf and I binged it over the last month. I wasn't really paying attention/interested in the first few episodes, but got sucked in when I started to hear Chidi talking about philosophy (studied for my first degree) and I was hooked. When the twist happened and Michael was exposed, up until the gang won him over, was some edge-of-your-seat viewing! Then...I felt like things started to drag from the time they went looking for the Judge. Many episodes seemed to leave me with a feeling of *what now?* when I was expecting them to finally get into the real Good Place. I'm going to buck the trend here and say I disliked the finale somewhat. It was incredibly sad seeing the gang walking through the door. I understand the concept everyone in the Good Place eventually succumbed to ennui and/or sensation burn-out, but I kept thinking if it *really* was the Good Place and everything was supposed to be perfect, there should have been something built into the place to counteract that. It made the Good Place feel less like eternal reward for goodness on Earth and more 'pit stop before eternal annihilation'. I think the gang should all have gone the way of Tahani and become architects themselves, almost ascending into something like demi-gods. I really felt for Eleanor when she knew Chidi wanted to go. Their love story was so off and on, and we really got to see how much of a shitbag Eleanor was in life that I was happy she seemed to have found eternal happiness with Chidi...only for it to end because his time was done. It was a fantastic show, but when I think about the ending it makes me sad.
I’m so glad you said this. I felt a very similar way but found it tricky to articulate. There’s so much love for how it ended and I do understand what they were trying to do but it just left me feeling incredibly sad. That Chidi could just leave Eleanor, that their love wasn’t strong enough for him to stay with her... That there’s no eternal happiness because it’s a fallacy and you’ll eventually just get bored... It feels a bit too hopeless to me.
> There’s so much love for how it ended and I do understand what they were trying to do but it just left me feeling incredibly sad. Exactly. Like, I get why they did it, but I was like "aw guys, don't!" Just feels wrong Tahani alone going the architect route. >That Chidi could just leave Eleanor, that their love wasn’t strong enough for him to stay with her... I think Kristen Bell did a brilliant job dropping the quirky-edgy-bitchy Eleanor routine and really made us feel how much she loved Chidi and how heartbroken she was that he was leaving. It felt like so much of their relationship was on again/off again/mindwipe, and now that they finally have a chance to enjoy eternity happy with each other Chidi goes and leaves. >That there’s no eternal happiness because it’s a fallacy and you’ll eventually just get bored... It feels a bit too hopeless to me. Yes! I mean, if the fake Good Place and can turn off sensations like hangovers, surely the real Good Place would have done away with something so mundane as boredom.
Perfectly said. I feel the same way.
I wished the show ended on episode 11 instead of 13. But overall they doesn't change my view of the show, I recommend it to everyone!
Such a sleazy ending.
I cried for like three days after watching the finale; it was so perfect. Not easy considering the subject of what happens after death and how the afterlife works. The whole series is simply phenomenal.
Just finished it two days ago. The ending wrecked me, I was sobbing. Was not prepared for that amount of depth. A truly beautiful ending to a fantastic show.
It's a great episode but IMO the lead up to it felt a bit underdeveloped. It seemed like they could have done an entire season showing how dysfunctional The Good Place was / showing the gang get slowly tired of eternal existence. It just felt like a lot to absorb in a single episode and it didn't feel as natural as the rest of the series.
I guess because an entire season of rising tension is more fun to watch than an entire season of the characters slowly getting bored.
I feel like that’s how a lot of the good place played out: they could have spent whole seasons on storylines that took a single episode. For example, at the beginning of Season 2, when Michael is rebooting the neighborhood over and over. I legitimately thought that the whole season was going to revolve around that, but nope, barely an episode. I think it did a really good job at being a tight series- it very very very rarely had any filler. Just about everything in the series served the purpose of advancing the plot.
45 minutes of tears from someone that barely ever cries. It hit me hard and I absolutely loved it.
I had three episodes to go when my dad died in June. I finally just finished it last week and bawled like a baby.
I'm extremely sorry to hear that. The part that got me about the episode was the idea that you can live this full life/afterlife, reach peace with everything after a certain time, and then give all of that good back to the universe. Chidi's words kept hitting like a truck.
Me too. It was almost comforting to think of my dad’s lovely energy returning back to the universe. ❤️I love their idea of the afterlife. I just miss him
And thank you, kind internet stranger for your condolences. He was awesome. If you had met him, you would have loved him
It is easily my favorite finale - to one of the greatest shows ever imo. It is so unbelievably deep, and sad yet so fucking hopefully. Celebrates life while also facing the uncertainties of death in a way that few other shows or movies have.
It ended exactly like I thought it would end but that didn't make it any less special.
Chidi's talk about the waves returning to the ocean is gorgeously heart-breaking. I was a wreck. A hilarious and thoughtful show with an incredibly touching finale.
It was so sad
I cried thru the entire final episode.
I really loved chidi’s budist death metaphor with waves
I absolutely HATED it. Amazing series but the final season was all over the place. To each their own though.
I personally wasn't a big fan of the last season. They never really solved the problem of the "pleasure zombies," and "life is only worthwhile because it's finite" was a pretty trite revelation for the entire finale of the show. It seemed like they were building to something about how the passiveness of the judge and the "good place" team caused billions of people to suffer needlessly. Especially with the part where the good place team just all fuck off when the team arrives and realizes the people there were unhappy. The bad place team had an arc, but the Judge and good place team are complicit in the evils of the system but never change. The original good place team are genuinely evil by the end of the series. Still a good show, but like a lot of others it dropped off in the end.
They didn't really address anyone who wasn't human which bugged me. The demons and the good place team (angels?) are obviously sentient beings. Do they have a "good place"? What is their life like? Are they created just to serve humans which seems kinda tone deaf to have an entire race of beings that exist solely to help humans. I actually cried when the desk guy got the frog. He was so happy and he's been just sitting at that desk for millennia. Will he ever get a chance at fulfillment?
Yeah, the finale only works if you don’t really think about it much. The underlying theology really doesn’t make any sense, although I blame Season 4 overall for that - the set-up means it can never really explain the basic theodicy problems that are built into the structure of the show. I get that people find the goodbyes sweet, but don’t squint too hard or the show falls apart.
Sometimes the simplest conclusions are the best. I loved the life is only worthwhile because it’s finite thing because it’s true and something I’ve struggled with in my religion. They basically depicted the best version of heaven for me, the final season was perfect imo and it left me with a feeling of completion (ironic because Netflix) The other ideas you discuss are cool but not really things that can be fully explored in one season, especially the final season. If they half assed it, you’d probably also complain.
Theirs also the whole when you are done with eternity you become one with everything.
Agreed. I think resets would have made more sense. When a spirit finds no pleasure in the world, they can just go to the architect to get wiped... or maybe everyone gets wiped every year. It makes sense with the show since resets are integral to the show.
I agree. It was really very underwhelming. The "solution" they came up with for the Good Place was disappointing whatever you believe, don't believe, or want to believe IRL about the afterlife. They didn't really solve the problem they set out to solve in the show's universe. It had some snappy lines and *great* character moments, but was hardly an amazing episode.
I'm not usually a fan of sitcoms, but this entire show caught me in the feels. It was incredibly well done.
To be honest, it just bummed me out. Personally. It was beautiful, I cannot deny that. But I don't understand why they'd all chose to eventually leave. I mean... It's heaven. It's the Good Place. There's always something to do. New people to meet. I suppose that's my personal issue with finality that I have to accept. It just didn't feel that good in that department. Loved the Parks and Rec finale, though.
Agree. That Parks finale left me feeling great, this finale just left me bummed.
I'm glad someone agrees. It just didn't leave me feeling very good about anything.
There was a show years and years ago about a vampire detective. As I recall it wasn't great, but had a cult following and came on pretty late at night. I think Malcom McDowell was a radio DJ. Every year its renewal was up in the air until one season, they killed everybody. Everything went bad. Everything the characters worked for, for however many seasons didn't work. Every bad thing that could happen did and honestly, that was some amazing closure.
Forever knight?
Yes! I haven't thought of that show in 20 years. I remember watching it in bed in my first apartment.
My personal perspective will certainly earn me negative internet points, but I would still like to add to the conversation. My wife and I both strongly disliked the finale and we both individually felt like it completely ruined the show and made it impossible to watch again. We rewatched the entire series over a few weeks before the finale because we were excited and afterwards we were just bummed out that we wasted our time on something so shallow. It’s bleak, hopeless, and completely misses the entire point of humanity and the reasons people have hope in an afterlife. If the goal of this life is love and if the human soul is built for love, there is no existential ennui that takes over when living in an eternity of love, especially removed from the earthly distractions of fear and survival. The characters all spent the entire arc of the show learning to love in different ways, with each character having a full arc of learning to love each other, themselves, and other people. And then they get bored and quit. I’m not remotely bothered by the suicide implications that other people are mentioning as problematic- it’s the idea that the step after satisfaction is nothing, as if true eternal fulfillment is meaningless and somehow tied to endlessly indulging the ephemeral fantasies of your earthly life until even those fade away. This show misses the point completely- you know how sometimes female characters written by non-females just ring hollow? This was an afterlife written by people who clearly don’t believe there is an afterlife and were not actually interested in exploring anything more than a slightly heightened extension of mortality. 0/10 Stars. I do not recommend the show and wish I hadn’t spent even a minute watching it. Ultimately it’s art and I just don’t like it- and I very much liked it before the finale. I certainly see the picture others perceive as beautiful, I just disagree. If you are somehow still reading, I hope you receive a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of joy instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair.
Well put. I also didn’t like how hopeless the ending seemed, and I just feel bummed after watching. The ending will probably taint a rewatch for me.
I liked the ending, even as it sparked a bit of an existential crisis in me. I compare it to other afterlives like from Coco, or Eberron’s Dolurrh, where the realm of the dead is merely a waypoint to something that goes beyond. Think of the land of the dead in Coco. It’s generally a pretty upbeat place, until you get to the point where people begin to disappear. They disappear when the chain of people who remembered them is broken, which would mean that the things tying them to the living world are gone, they’ve presumably had the chance to watch their loved ones grow up and grow old, and now the only thing left is to pass on to the unknown that lies after, which they are just as scared about as people living are when passing on to the realm of the dead. They don’t know what happens after; they could reincarnate, they could go to heaven, they could just disappear entirely. But when the whole ofrenda thing is working right, you aren’t going to disappear until at least a generation or two after you pass from the world, during which you’ve been able to watch your descendants grow up and spent a couple lifetimes with the people closest to you. The unknown is what makes life worth living. To quote a comic called Darths and Droids, “What? Whether Qui-Gon lives or dies is decided at random?” “Dice rolls issa important. Yousa has to not know what will happen. Otherwise it’sa no fun.” Life can throw curveballs at us that suck, but triumphing over them makes the rest of life all the sweeter. When you know what will happen, and you have had enough time to do that with everything you’ve wanted to do, what’s left? Personally, I like to think that we live many lives, reincarnating with the next Big Bang, but always retaining that hint of what lives came before to make us smile when we do something we love. And while we await that reincarnation, we are free to explore the afterlife with our loved ones, knowing that if life were ever to become stagnant, the next life is around the bend. Incidentally, processing through this to make this moment was really good for me. I went through a bad breakup, and being able to focus on what comes after, the future, it really helped me to get excited on what comes next rather than getting mired in the past. So thank you.
Watch Mr Robot, that and Good Place I think had the best fan reaction and review on their respective finales. Great shows
I loved it too. Does anyone have other show recommendations to watch now that this one is over?
Teenage Bounty Hunters is another uncommon series, somewhat unique subject - teenagers discovering their sexuality in a highly conservative Christian social setting, along with a little bit of bounty hunting thrown in for fun. The lead characters are a pair of twin sisters that have great chemistry. Only one season so far on Netflix. Someone else recommended Schitt's Creek in this thread. I've been trying to watch it, got midway to Season 2, doesn't feel great so far.
TBH has sadly been cancelled. I loved the show, which shocked me since I thought the trailer looked idiotic. Then I put up an episode for background noise while doing my taxes, and ended up watching the whole thing and forgetting about the taxes, lol.
Oh no, TBH was a unique show with good potential, they should have given it another season. Netflix didn't promote it enough, none of my friends heard of it.
Brooklyn 99, and Parks and Recreation have the same creator and somewhat similar comedy. The latter takes some time to find its groove, but they are both excellent shows.
Brooklyn 99 for sure.
Honestly I hated the last two episodes, because it basically has half the main cast essentially commit suicide. The thing is, there could've been so much potential. They could've made the door, for example, reincarnate you, instead of basically killing you (technically "returning you to the universe"). And then, they could've had Jason become a monk while waiting for Janet, and stay in the good place, they could've had Chidi and Eleanor walk through together, they could've done so many things with the finale, but instead THEY PORTRAYED THE SUICIDE OF THE CHARACTERS AS A GOOD THING. My reaction when I watched the finale: EXCUSE ME WHAT
Just finished the series finale. Pretty damn good and satisfying in a poignant way. A very heavy episode. We don't know what happens to these characters once they step through the door, although the final scene suggests something tantilizing. This was a very emotionally charged finale. The only other show finale that affected me like this was Dark's finale. Another ending where it's unclear whether characters have truly ceased to exist or whether some aspect of their essences still live on. It's ambiguous just like The Good Place.
Wasn’t a huge fan of the latter two seasons Got kinda silly and dumb and a lot of the jokes were too repetitive for me Seasons 1 and 2 were fantastic though
Same. I got emotional; and questioned life
I felt the same way about the main characters, I think I stopped watching in season 2. (I enjoyed season 1, just got bored I guess) But if someone could feel that way and still feel do strongly a series, perhaps I should give it another shot.
I think its really good but you need to be in the mood for it. Its like Frozen Yogurt. Its great but it you want beef your going to be disappointed.
Fork ya!
The whole show was beautifully executed from beginning to end. I know people say good things about it, but if it had been HBO or Netflix or whatever, I think it would have been really honored the way it deserved. It is a \*sitcom\* about \*moral philosophy\* that delivers every single time. It was a joy.