The Good Place was a comedy show about the afterlife that took philosophical questions seriously — in fact, much of the action involved placing interesting characters in difficult situations that required them to think through their choices. It featured characters with broadly exaggerated, but mostly endearing, flaws who had to cope with a complex afterlife that kept confronting them with meaning and purpose and conflict, which they generally overcame with good humor. It was a kind of Sesame Street for beginning philosophers.
They recently aired their grand finale, ending the season and the series definitively. It was an entertaining, sweet, charming episode in which characters we’d grown to know and love moved on (or beyond) their afterlife. I enjoyed watching it, and it was quite nice to see a show wrap up four years of build-up in a consistent, satisfying way (Game of Thrones, I’m giving you some side-eye there).
But here’s my problem with it: shouldn’t a show that is wallowing happily in its philosophy at some point question its premises? The show concludes nicely within the self-contained bubble of its own conceits, but it never tries to go outside of them — instead, it builds a complex set of rules that sort of work together and provide a framework for coming up with answers that fit its universe, but never steps outside of itself.
The premises of The Good Place are
that people have an essence that persists after death,
that there are higher powers that judge your behavior,
and that the universe is ultimately kind.
Accept those ideas, and you have a set of rules within which characters can operate and drive a story. These are also premises that are as old as sentient beings’ attempts to find meaning in their existence, and they are also the premises that people want to be true, which ought to immediately throw up a red flag on the play. I distrust those ideas. I can see how they are necessary to drive a commercially viable, relatively long-running narrative, but there are alternatives that aren’t addressed.
It’s a kind of anti-Lovecraftian show, for example. The premises of a Cthulhu story would be
that people are insignificant, ephemeral specks moving into the void,
that there are greater beings who are implacable and unsympathetic,
and that the universe is ultimately cruel in its uncaring nature.
There isn’t a lot of room for humor or plot development there. My show, The Meaningless Place, which I ought to float for some network executives, would begin with Eleanor Shellstrop dying an unexpected, arbitrary death, and then…credits. We could maybe linger over her decaying corpse for a bit, but otherwise it’s over. There are no amusing hijinks, no character development, no dilemmas for Eleanor to think about, because she has ceased to exist and there is no one there to think anymore. The universe would roll on, unperturbed. Viewers would receive no comfort or consolation in a heart-warming finale.
It would be cheap and quick to make, at least.
I can understand why the show made the decisions it did — it was one of the few ways to set up propositions that would allow dead people to move within a framework interesting to living people — but its premises are also its greatest limitations. I can still enjoy The Good Place as a thought experiment or metaphor for a humanist ideal of a well considered life, but the finale only works within its own conceits, and none of its solutions are applicable to me. I’d been maneuvered into an improbable scenario with its own internal logic that had placed it outside of any useful experience.
Which is fine. You can still enjoy a fantasy novel, even if dragons and magic aren’t real. It’s just hard to find a real-life situation where dragon-slaying skills matter.
I’d be interested in a comparison between The Good Place and Twain’s Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Trip to Heaven but I can’t be arsed to watch the TV show. (Stormfield is free [here])
There isn’t any cynicism in The Good Place, so they don’t really compare well.
I take your point, PZ, but I was reading the show more as about the question of how to live when you’re alive — the whole afterlife/afterlives as shown was/were acting in the same way the enactment of the trolley problem was. I mean, how should we live? Of course there’s no control when we’re actually living, so the show’s world enabled that and counterfactuals and all that.
Challenging the show’s own premise would have been interesting (Mr. Robot did that intentionally, Discovery kind of deconstructed itself as it went along due to behind-the-scenes changes and backpedalling of horrible decisions). Maybe this sounds Pollyannish but at least if we feel, after watching the show, that we can check ourselves as to whether we’re making the kind choice about what we owe to each other, I’ll take that as a win.
Back around 1980, a friend had the idea (did not execute) of reprinting the famed Jack T. Chick pamphlet/comic SOMEBODY LOVES ME and just leaving off the last two panels. Three if you count the text block
I guess, to make it come out even, one could just substitute black rectangles of the proper dimensions, and put a house ad or something on the back page, or leave it as is.
Whatever for?
Whatever for? so it could be a different show, silly.
Or, alternatively, one could watch a different show.
The afterlife of The Good Place is actually pretty cruel (universal damnation) until successfully reformed by the lead characters in the last few episodes, after a multi-season struggle.
One interesting aspect of the show is that there doesn’t seem to be a God, per se. The most powerful character is The Judge, who has the ability to wipe out all life on Earth, and is prepared to exercise it with all the casual callousness we’ve come to expect from the gods… but she doesn’t seem to be The Creator. Yet, there’s no one over her, either, at least not that we see or hear about.
I had no real problems with the finale. Sure it bent over backwards to reward loyal viewers of the show, but series finales have a hard time sticking the landing at the best of times, so wrapping up all the character arcs in neat little bows was to be expected. As interesting as the premise was, The Good Place was never a show that seriously challenged the viewers preconceptions, and the finale fit the premise and the tone of the show to a tee.
What I do think is useful about the show’s ultimate resolution is the contrast between their (ultimate) vision of a universal afterlife where everyone gets a fair shake, and the ultimate iniquity of traditional Christian vision of Heaven and Hell, where unless you are lucky enough to be born into the right religion, you’re almost certainly doomed from the start. There’s a reason why many Christians prefer a version of the Good Place’s universalism these days.
The final door addresses the ultimate tedium of eternity quite neatly, and they even addressed the other solution — periodic forgetting — which was a nice touch. Of course, Christians will argue that they won’t get bored because they will become timeless beings (like Janet) but that transformation in itself merely aggravates the iniquity of the Salvation system of Christianity.
If you’re looking for a darker, more technological look at how an afterlife could be used and misused by a society, I highly recommend Iain M. Banks’ Culture novel Surface Detail.
tacitus @8 mentioned one of the things I loved about it – that they addressed the biggest problem with an eternal afterlife, that eternal life would suck. Almost every main human character chose oblivion by the end of the episode (of the main cast except for Tahani and that’s interesting to me because I don’t know if it was because she was arguably the most self-centered character or because she found something meaningful to occupy her time) and that’s a fairly brave thing to portray on American broadcast television considering how much it flies in the face of Christian theology.
I wish they had reveled that the whole thing was a simulation, or maybe a multiplayer role-playing game, and that none of the characters were ever ‘real’. (Or gone with reincarnation as an alternative to an endless afterlife.)
While I equally thought reincarnation would have been a fitting end, and it very clearly turned the afterlife into THIS life, I had read an excellent break down of how it was a very Jewish approach to an afterlife, written by a Jewish man. Not knowing much about Judaism or its approaches to death I cant confirm or deny it, but it was a compelling argument.
And I feel there was no need for the show to doubt its foundational premises. It was a four season story, and the goal was to tell a specific answer of How To Live, not to fully explore every single version of it.
I haven’t seen the show, but I’d like to take up PZ’s third premise,
.
My belief is that we imagine how we want the universe to be, and then act to cause it to align with our imaginations. So promoting the idea that the universe is kind is a good thing (whether technically true or not), because people who believe the universe is kind are more likely to act kindly, whereas people who believe the universe is cruel or indifferent are more likely to act cruelly or indifferently.
Dreams make the world.
The Good Place was not about death or the afterlife, but was about the struggle to live a meaningful life and making ethical choices, most importantly those that had impact on one’s relationships with others and the greater good. It was also very funny.
It’s just hard to find a real-life situation where dragon-slaying skills matter.
No, it’s just hard to find a dark alley whose denizens will use a street knife to attack someone with a full-sized sword.
susans@13:
Nicely said…
It’s been doing that, over and over again, literally dozens of times, since the first season. In order for it to be a finale – because like death, whether you wanted a finale or not, you’re getting one – it needs to be written in a way that is genuinely conclusive. That means it ends with a period, not a question mark.
Also, there are nonetheless some question marks hanging around for you to wonder about, if you like that sort of thing, so I think this criticism is not hitting the mark even on that account. I don’t know if you were not paying attention, didn’t appreciate those bits for whatever reason, or what, but they were there.
You wanted it to be inconsistent? That’s absurd. That’s also not how the real world is, no matter how caring or cruel or indifferent or anything else it may be. Try to imagine doing this with your Cthulhu-flavored idea: so you say it must at some point no longer be whatever actually fits in that universe, to step “outside of itself.” But why? There is not a single reason why it must be inconsistent in that way, and all sorts of reasons (logical ones, practical ones, storytelling ones, etc.) which entail the opposite.
No, no, and no. Not one of those things correctly describes what actually takes place in the show.
(1) In the end, people can stop existing whenever they’re done with the afterlife. They made a huge deal of this, because it’s kind of a huge deal. So, whatever “essence” you might imagine they need to have (for the premise of an afterlife to work at all), in fact that doesn’t persist indefinitely. That’s one way in which, for the thousandth time, they have turned the tables on the original premise of the show – which among other things had them purportedly in “the good place” all along (similar to your premise #3 which I’ll address more below). But of course that was not the truth at all, and there’s no way you could possibly miss this if you’ve seen the show.
(2) The ordinary characters (especially Chidi, Eleanor and Michael) make all of the actual decisions and judgments that make a difference in the end, not “higher powers.”
(3a) The entire moral/justice system of this universe is in practice owned and operated by demons.
(3b) There’s a “higher power” in the form of a judge, who is an utterly indifferent centrist type. She is not a kind person and she ends up doing nothing very important anyway.
(3c) All of the good angelic types one would expect from your “summary” are either absent from the show entirely, or the few who do “good place” characters who do appear are represented as thoroughly incompetent/ineffectual. They do basically nothing to make the universe into something that is “ultimately kind.” They’ve clearly failed at that multiple times, even before the finale, where they literally run away frantically from their jobs and Michael, leaving all of their failures for him to sort out. That wasn’t just a silly bit of comedy; it tells an important part of the story that apparently flew over your head.
(3d) The person/demon who was finally keeping things in a reasonably good state at the end (Michael) left the system behind to become a human, with a real possibility that it’s not going to remain that way. They don’t bang you over the head with an overly dramatic cliffhanger, as in many episodes, but that was definitely still a big question mark at the end … if you looking for that sort of thing, to imagine how things might unfold now that the show is over.
Since the first season, the audience does see things mainly from the perspectives of several people who are basically good (one “not a person,” but anyway, six main characters). They all certainly have flaws — so don’t complain about that either — but I mean they at least have some degree of decency and motivation to do good, unlike nearly everyone else in the show. You just shouldn’t confuse their perspective (which to be fair is very prominent) with what the entirety of that fictional world is actually all about, since those are two very different things.
CR:
Leading to the after-afterlife, presumably.
No, John, they cease to exist as people, as with real death in the real world.
I guess you haven’t seen it. There is some kind of assumption about a conservation law for matter/energy. Chidi uses a metaphor of a wave no longer being a wave when it crashes onto the shore, although the water of which it was composed does still exist and goes back into the ocean. So, it’s not like they suggest it all just blinks out of existence or whatever, which is fine with me. It’s depicted very fancifully, like many other elements in the show. When Eleanor finally decides it’s over for her (which one does by walking through a magic door in a forest), what you see are little orange/gold particles dispersing into the air, like embers rising from a campfire. Anyway, the show definitely establishes that she’s gone, and that is what remains.
CR, quite correct, I haven’t watched any of it, but merely read about it.
Um, the very premise of the show is that they do not cease to exist as people, as with real death in the real world.
You mean, as with real death in the real world? ;)
You should just watch the show or listen to what I said about it. There’s an afterlife, and these people have all been in it since season 1 episode 1, because they had all “died,” in the sense of not being alive on Earth anymore and instead existing in this kind of afterlife state. (Things change wildly from episode to episode, so it’s not exactly a single thing, and they did also at one point go back to being “alive” for a while … but I won’t try to explain the entire show to you here.)
However, there’s no “after-afterlife,” like you had presumed. You might have wondered about that sort of thing while watching earlier parts of the show (maybe… although you wouldn’t have much reason to do so). But the last episode spends most of its time on this point and establishes it very clearly.
CR:
Apparently, my sarcasm was too subtle for you.
But sure, there is only one afterlife*, after which one can die properly and finally.
—
∗ afterdeath, technically.
PS via Wikipedia:
“Eleanor, who led a dissolute and amoral life, tells Chidi in confidence that she must have been sent to the Good Place by accident since she was not a good person on Earth, and he hesitantly agrees to teach Eleanor how to become a better person in order to earn her place in “the Good Place” for real.”
Silly premise.
Whence this desire to earn what she already has?
Lemme get this straight, the powers-that-be select “good” people for an afterlife, though they at least once fuck that up. So non-“good” people presumably just die the first time around, without the afterlife.
And the final conceit is that the afterlife becomes boring, so then they die for real after a bit of angsting, “good” people though they are.
(Am I wrong?)
Ugh! If that’s the premise how can you watch the tripe at all, The only thing that worth it is at the very last few seconds have a secondary character tell the main “Oh, yeah, this entire experience you had is just hallucinations concocted by your dying brain. There is not but decay after death and your mind will turn off very shortly. Prepare for oblivion in 3…2…1…l” The next couple of minutes would be a black screen until the atheistic, materialist point gets into the thick, stupid noggins of the average American.
What do expect? The mainstream media (and far too much of It’s alternatives) needs to keep pushing the Opiate of the Masses. Anything, especially religion and spiritualism, to keep the sheep in line.
It starts as paranoia and a desire for self-preservation. She thinks that she’ll be found out and sent off to “the bad place” where she belongs. (In fact, it is one version of the bad place, a sort of test-run proposed by a demon named Michael to improve things, and this kind of psychological punishment is part of it. She just doesn’t know it’s the bad place.)
From her experiences, you see that she starts to understand the value of being a good person. And she gradually falls in love with Chidi, while befriending the others who are also in the same predicament. Once Michael realizes what’s going on, that he’s not tricking them anymore, it becomes a matter of subverting his goals, trying to escape, etc…. It eventually just becomes whatever they can do to make things better somehow, as many crazy events unfold, Michael eventually joins their side, other demons become antagonists, and so forth.
No. Basically everyone, no matter how good they are, winds up in the bad place (part of the afterlife), and basically nobody is admitted into the good place. Everybody is tortured endlessly. Billions of major fuck ups. That is the state of affairs initially, although you wouldn’t know it at first. PZ’s description, if you were reading anything into that, was not even remotely accurate, so just ignore everything he said.
Ooh! Ooh! Me next! I, too, have strong opinions on things I haven’t seen or read much about!!
CR:
‘
Well, it’s a bit late, no? If being sent to either place is based on her pre-afterlife, then nothing she does there changes things.
But it’s the “good place” — everyone is supposedly a good person, so it boils down to the value of being just like everyone else. In other words, the value of conforming to the milieu.
Better? It’s already the “good place”, now one has to strive for the “better than good place”?
The more I learn, the sillier the conceit seems to me.
Leaving aside that the culmination of the “good place” is suicide, you’ve just described the Christian conceit of Heaven and Hell, with only the thinnest of disguises.
—
Kip T.W, do you really? Fine, you’re next. Do elaborate.
I suggest you go find somebody who knows the show and just talk about it with them. Or even read about it on TV Tropes, as a top-of-the-head suggestion. The things you say it didn’t address have been addressed in detail, but I’m not inclined to sit here and spoil it all.
Kip, I’m quite informed about what people have said about the show.
What do you imagine I said it didn’t address?
(Try to quote one such thing, I dare you)
—
BTW, are you familiar with PZ’s “Courtier’s reply?”
(Because that’s what you’ve just essayed)
Pretty much all of #27 is wrong and uninformed. I have no interest in arguing this, as you don’t know a bit about it and I don’t want to spend all night telling you the basics of the show. As I said, I’m not into spoiling things for people who haven’t seen them.
I enjoy some of what you write here, by the way.
Not familiar with the Courtier’s Reply, so unless and until someone tells me, I won’t express an opinion on it or make speculations on what it says.
No, it isn’t. That’s not a good inference. It doesn’t follow that nothing relevant can change about her situation, no matter what she does. Whatever you imagine being “sent” there is based on, she is there, so now she has to deal with that fact in a coherent way.
Again, she doesn’t want to be discovered by those running things, including Michael, who she believes are running “the good place.” (Same deal with the other three humans in the main cast.) She doesn’t really understand how to act like a good person, because her life has been a complete fucking mess to put it mildly; but she realizes something like that is expected in (what she thinks is) the good place. She enlists the help of a moral philosopher there (Chidi), and she starts to learn some helpful things from him. It’s not all about him teaching her, however. Other significant changes for her just come from all sorts of new experiences they have, dealing with the demons in all sorts of ways, being able to help Michael through his personal issues and essentially converting him, etc.
You (or at any rate someone else, who’s not trolling me) may be curious about Chidi’s initial motivations too. At first, he thinks torture in the bad place is unjustifiably bad, which is an entirely sensible and predictable view for a moral philosopher to have. So, although she’s far from perfect, he can’t accept that she should have to suffer so much for it. So, he thinks it would be better to help her, even though he knows it puts him at risk of also being sent to the bad place (which he thinks he’s not in), instead of turning her and the others over to (he thinks) the good place authorities. Only later does he (along with the others) learn that they aren’t in the good place after all. But at that point, they’re not in the situation you were wondering about. They certainly don’t already have what they purportedly want, because they’re actually not in the good place, as I’ve repeated multiple times now. You seem to be highly resistant to comprehension of this basic fact about the show, even in what you say below, which came after you reading me saying otherwise (plus the rest of this thread, etc.). All I can say about it is that you’re mistaken.
I know that you’re not this stupid, so don’t make yourself look like it. That’s only the name of the fucking show, John, but you have to get beyond those three tiny words and then read what the fuck I’m saying (or just watch the fucking show) if you’re going to say something coherent about it.
There is actually a smarmy asshole character who’s promised a sort of “better than good place,” to try to coax him into acting like a decent person for once, when their goal at the time is to show that he can change. They do this, on the (mistaken) assumption that this may provide a plausible form of redemption which (so they had hoped) would be good enough (although it wasn’t). But the existence of such a place is not to be taken seriously by the audience itself, only that asshole character who was being tricked. Are you that asshole? Perhaps an asshole, at times, but not that particular one.
Hey, thanks, CR! I get to follow Kip’s advice and discuss this with someone familiar with the Emperor’s purported clothing.
As per Kip’s advide, from TVTropes: “After being killed by an oncoming truck, Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell) wakes up in an unfamiliar and idyllic world. She is greeted by Michael (Ted Danson), the “architect” of this world, who tells her that as a reward for her exceptionally virtuous life, she will now spend eternity within “The Good Place” along with the rest of the best of the best of humanity.”
Basically, I’ve read up on it, and the premise is damn clear. No inference required.
Again, that does not make any sense.
She was sent there by them already, she’s about as discovered as one could be.
Yes, yes. I do get the conceit, you know. I just think it’s very, very silly and nonsensical.
Not even slightly. Chidi is a Good Person.
(duh)
<snicker>
To you, I seem mistaken. But I’m not, I get it alright.
The basic fact about the show is that it posits a post-death life, and is used as a vehicle to explore some ideas in moral philosophy.
(Wanna dispute that?)
(sigh)
Whatever gives you the impression I’m not reading what you’ve written? After all, I am quoting you.
Yes, it is the name of the show, but within its conceit its inhabitants share that belief, that it indeed is “the good place” (aka Heaven) rather than its opposite.
Heh. Being coaxed into a particular behavioural pattern is better than being coerced into it.
(Sure, shit all over the idea of intrinsic goodness, and settle for apparent goodness)
—
Bottom line, it’s very thinly disguised Christian mythos, and for me, it grates.
(Surely you see the teleological slant!)
—
I did watch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Dreams_May_Come_(film) — much better conceit, for mine — one’s heaven and/or hell is what they imagine it to be.
Does everything you read or watch or listen to have to be miserably grim and edgy? Seriously, I like dark comedy a lot, but I don’t insist on it every time, in fact, it’s more a treat than a main course. Would I get a better response from here on my blog if I added a mass suicide or a subplot about illegal organ harvesting?
Susan, miserably grim and edgy is alright, though I’m not much for it. But some is good.
(E.g. Joe Abercrombie’s First Law original trilogy)
But this show is clearly grim and edgy, since its apotheosis is that its inhabitants eventually get to suicide, whilst (thanks, CR!) the rest are tortured eternally.
(Makes Warhammer 40k seem positively rosy!)
[OT]
Kip,
Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Courtier%27s_reply
She figures that there was some kind of oversight or glitch in the “points system” that they use (which is shown and described to her in a fair amount of detail). That is what determines who goes to the good place and the bad place. I don’t know what you might have assumed, about how “they” go about “discovering” a person’s goodness or badness, in order to send them to the appropriate place. But that is what happens in this fictional world. A system like that could malfunction or be mismanaged, and there is nothing nonsensical about that possibility.
And in actual fact, it turns out that this points system was horribly flawed, not in the way that Eleanor or the others had suspected (letting seemingly bad people into the good place), but because nobody was getting into the real good place at all. Combine that with Michael being comically inept at trying to torment these people, within the context of his farcical “paradise” designed by demons to improve on their tormenting methodology — that place, I repeat, is not the good place — and what that leads to is that they eventually figure this stuff out and try to do something about it.
But you had a simpler issue that you said didn’t understand: Eleanor was scared that someone would find out that she’s not really the good person they (seem to) believe she is, which would very plausibly (in this fictional world) lead to her being tortured forever in the bad place. That’s why she acted as she did. That makes sense to me, a person who’s watched how this actually plays out in the actual show, even if it doesn’t make sense to a person like you who has not.
Until they don’t. It seems like a long time ago, the end of the first season. You know there was more than one season, right? Did you read about that on TVTropes or wikipedia perhaps?
John, dude, just watch the show. It’s wholesome and entertaining and sneaks in lessons in ethics.
CR:
No point reiterating what you’ve already stated. I do get that’s what’s in the script.
Put it this way: were I in her position, I might share that worry, but I would most certainly not reveal myself by seeking help for my “non-goodness”, any more than I revealed I was already an atheist back when I was an altar boy. That’s just stupid, and asking for trouble.
And again, it’s the Christian ethos: be good, or be punished horribly.
(nasty!)
Every single thing I’ve read claims it’s what one did before the first dying that sends you there. I’ve read nothing about to-and-froing between both places or indicates that there is ongoing monitoring of the degree of goodness.
I never said I didn’t understand it, what I wrote was “that does not make any sense”.
I mean, I perfectly understand the concept of the Trinity, but nonetheless I think it makes no sense.
You imagine that were I to watch the show, it would make sense to me? Heh.
Might as well tell me that everything you’ve claimed so far is not the case, because I’m taking you at your own word as to what happens, and saying that I find it nonsensical.
(I don’t dispute that you yourself don’t, but that’s on you)
<
blockquote>Until they don’t. It seems like a long time ago, the end of the first season. You know there was more than one season, right?
<
blockquote>
Yup. Four seasons… want me to quote synopses to prove that I know that?
Yup. I did quote from both, so why you doubt my claim is opaque to me.
Wishful thinking or rhetorical manoeuvring, I reckon. Both are futile.
I also know that “In September 2019, prior to the release of fourth season of The Good Place, NBC released a six-episode web series on their website, app, and their YouTube channel.”
WMDKitty:
No, thanks. I don’t like to watch stupid stuff, nor do I need further instruction in ethics.
(Especially from a show where the ultimate ethical thing to do is to kill oneself)
Um, to prove CR wrong, from season 4:
Well, lucky for me, I used to ace tests after a bit of cramming. So I’d do alright.
—
In the theology within which I was inculcated, that new system was called ‘purgatory’.
(In Mormon theology, it’s called the ‘Spirit Prison in the Spirit World’)
BTW, do neonates and infants get to be tested after they die? I haven’t seen any reference to them.
What about people with degenerative neural disorders?
(So many questions about the conceit!)
Then you think Eleanor was stupid and was asking for trouble, because she’s not like you. So what? I don’t know how many times they tell you about really stupid things she did in her life (I mean seriously, laughably, unquestionably stupid), which seem like they’re asking for trouble. Maybe that’s just what her character is like.
I have and will dispute the stupidity of that particular choice, but no matter — it’s definitely possible for people to be flawed in exactly those ways, even if that’s your criticism. So that does make sense. And I guess that leaves us with this: she’s not like you, I don’t care, and I have no clue why anybody else should care.
No shit, Sherlock. The show isn’t trying to sell this as being good. This is the bad situation the protagonists need to overcome, the basic source of all the conflict in the story. If you think that’s nasty, as you should, then you would appreciate that aspect of the show. It’s also a fun, silly comedy. Also, on a technical level of the writing, directing, and acting, it’s impressive. It packs in an incredible amount of storytelling, characterization, world-building, intricate plot twists and so forth, very radical changes to the dramatic situation/setting/etc. (which usually requires tons of exposition), as well as dealing with some fairly complex philosophical issues … all of that somehow makes it into just a few seasons of bite-sized 20-minute episodes, without it turning into a total clusterfuck. I can’t think of any other TV show (or anything else) like it.
You may also appreciate some of the other not-too-subtle commentary about real life. For instance, as I’ve mentioned, the demons are trying to trick their subjects into thinking they’re in the good place…. But that’s mainly by offering them superficial, capitalistic fluff (e.g., in an early attempt, there are frozen yogurt stands everywhere, named with ridiculous puns). That of course doesn’t work out as the demons had hoped.
CR:
Not because she’s not like me, but because she’s revealing herself needlessly.
So, why do that?
Well, I grant you that; she was stupid in life as in the afterlife. And not because she’s not like me, but because it’s in the script.
Yes, and it’s possible that the next time I get up from my chair, I will trip and break a bone.
(Sure, that which is not impossible is perforce possible, but it doesn’t entail that it makes sense)
Um, you claim there are innumerable times she’s been “seriously, laughably, unquestionably stupid”, but can’t accept that she continues to do such in the afterlife?
OK.
OK, got it. “The Good Place” is a bad situation, and it needs to be overcome.
Yes, it sure sounds comedic. But we do concur about its silliness, so there’s that.
By ‘real life’ you mean USA life, right?
Anyway, I grant that’s not impossible, but do you seriously think I’m gonna invest however many hours of my life to confirm my initial opinion?
(Incidentally, someone once made much the same argument about Touched by an Angel, and I’ve yet to take them up on it. Perhaps I’m missing out, but I very much doubt that)
Ah yes, demons. Are there angels?
@39.
There is no on going monitoring of her ‘goodness’ but the neighborhood sure does glitch out a lot after the way she acts at the welcome to the neighborhood party. It is explained to her that if one thing is out of place and they don’t find what it is the neighborhood will destroy itself. That is her initial impetus to learn how to act good so she does not set off the neighborhoods immune system. Obviously this was doomed to failure because the entire thing was a bad place experiment in psychological torture.
timorous, informative. Thanks.
So, that sustains my impression that merely acting ‘good’ (i.e. conforming to the local norm) is what matters, not actually being ‘good’. The intrinsic/extrinsic distinction.
You’re still confusing matters here. This is only what Eleanor is told is happening to the neighborhood, by Michael, a demon who is actually lying to her. He says he doesn’t know what’s causing it, and at first he “confides” with her (this is only pretending), worrying about his own failure as a new “good place” architect who wants to prove himself to his superiors. She tries to be encouraging to him, but secretly has her own shit to worry about obviously. One thing she doesn’t do is stupidly admit the truth to Michael outright, because she hopes there’s some other way out of it.
Anyway, she does not know that this was all an absurdly elaborate scheme by Michael, which will eventually backfire on him. So of course she doesn’t act like she knows this. That is at any rate part of what motivates her to get Chidi’s help, because it does seem to her to be true that she can’t just hide from this somehow: a “bad person” like her being in “the good place” supposedly has these disastrous consequences which she experiences firsthand. (This however only happens because Michael orchestrates it to happen, including extremely obvious “hints” that the destruction/chaos is being caused by Eleanor, which she is not likely to misinterpret.)
Chidi, meanwhile, seems like a pretty trustworthy, friendly, smart guy, who might be able and willing to help her. He’s a completely open book, and he doesn’t come across as threatening or devious or self-serving or anything that might make her think twice about revealing this to him. So it’s not really stupid of her to trust him. Out of anybody around who might be able to help (because this is a serious, immediate threat which has to be dealt with, as far as she knows), he’s definitely the best and most obvious choice that she has. Very conveniently, he was a moral philosopher, in case that needs repeating, which is as close as one ever gets to an expert on good and bad behavior.
CR:
:)
Sam Harris is listed as a moral philosopher in Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Moral_philosophers). Bow down to his expertise!
—
This is the same Michael whose dearest wish is to become an ordinary human on Earth, and who achieves that goal in Season 4, right? And when he dies, he will be judged accordingly, whence he will get to properly kill himself, like Eleanor. Makes about as much sense as anything else in that show.
(What is it with this fantasy trope about superhuman beings wishing to become humans? I never got that)
Why are so many people bothering to discuss the series with someone who hasn’t watched it and apparently has no interest in watching it?
@48.
That was not his goal at the outset. Initially he wanted to create an interesting and different torture chamber to put humans in but it wasn’t working and he ended up lying to his boss so got himself into a bit of a situation.
Paul, why are you puzzled?
Obviously, they liked it and found it interesting, and furthermore care enough to endorse and justify their appreciation. And it’s not out of the question that some lurkers who haven’t seen it might find it sufficiently intriguing after this discussion to then go on to watch and enjoy it.
(I myself find it puzzling how people go on about ‘spoilers’, as if they’ve never re-read a book, re-looked at a painting, or re-listened to an album. Shouldn’t that be spoiled for them? ;) )
—
timorous, ah, character arc. Me, I like plot-driven stories, particularly those that are internally-consistent, rather than character-driven. But there’s no right and wrong about it, it’s just a matter of preference.
Right after you bow down to the expertise of that wikipedia category page.
But hold on a minute…. I only said that’s as close as one gets. And I said that of actual philosophers, not a person like Harris. And I didn’t mention anything about needing to bow.
Am I the same person who thought being an astronaut might be what I want to do with my life, when I was about eight or nine years old, without giving a single thought about how risky that line of work was?
In some sense, I am the same person, but that doesn’t imply that I haven’t changed. I’ve also been a musician my whole life, so maybe I haven’t changed all that much. Real people are complicated, John.
Also, it was not what I would call his dearest wish. He was unhappy and insecure about being a demon (a “fire squid” or some such thing), and he had trouble really understanding people in important ways, which he found sort of fascinating. In the finale, since the rest of the conflict was basically over, he was finally in a position to find some kind of peace with himself by doing this, and it came from a suggestion by someone else (I don’t remember who). So, that’s what he did.
You don’t get it. That all changed. The whole system, up until the last episode, is no longer. So don’t assume that it’s still operative. Because you haven’t seen the fucking show and don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.
Only if he wants to, whenever he wants to.
Would you only be satisfied with an infinite amount of time, or do you think you might become bored/frustrated/whatever after some possibly very large but finite amount of time?
If only infinity will do for the likes of John Morales (as well as, coincidentally, the orthodox view of the Christian afterlife), then you can fucking have that if you want it. You have that freedom. Others do too, which means they don’t need to make the same choice as you would.
CR:
Wouldn’t it take a moral philosopher to knowledgeably determine the degree of expertise therein, as per your own contention?
Anyway, you can edit that page, if you think it wrong right now.
Well, you did appeal to authority :).
FWIW, I didn’t mean it literally, I was using an idiom to indicate I meant it metaphorically, as in deferring to their expertise.
(I’m gratified that you employed one of my techniques there, if rather clumsily)
Does your personhood when you were about eight or nine years old culminate the arc of your story, as in the case at hand? If not, whence the relevance?
Sure, but the topic at hand is a fictional character, not a real person.
OK, it was a passing fancy, then. Whatever. But in the end, it was his desire, no?
Ah, you’d better correct the synopses then, because the testing and judging aspect is something they all claim remains.
As Wikipedia puts it, the new system entails that “each dead human will be subjected to personalized tests of moral development, and will be rebooted as many times as they need until they pass the test”; Michael becomes human, so he will die, so he will be subjected to those tests.
Sorry, my bad. He will get to do it, but only if and when he wants to.
Depends. Ask me in, say, 1,000 years, and I will have a better idea of how I feel about a bit of longevity. And of course, I wouldn’t want to be a Struldbrugg.
I live in the real world, not a fictional one, and I’m pretty sure I’m not that special in considering the human lifespan less than ample.
(But I can’t deny that, in the Christian mythos, everyone gets eternal afterlife — some in the Good Place, some in the Other Place, but everyone gets it)
@35 Yeah, but there seems to be this fundamental objection to something just being nice. I first really noticed this in the early ’90s when Barney the dinosaur first became a “thing”. I found myself saying, way too often: “Of course, it’s nice, and saccharine and simple. It’s a fucking show for toddlers.” At first, I just put it down as a kind of generational sibling rivalry. After all, Barney was the first pop culture phenomenon not directly aimed at Gen Xers and there was bound to be resentment at that.
But, as the ’90s went on, the base, the vulgar and the cruel became increasingly valued while the good was sneered at ever harder. And then, Trump became president. But I’m sure there’s no connection…
I’ve said this elsewhere, so I’ll say it here: I think the idea of sending someone whose only crime was “buying tomatoes under capitalism” to be tortured until they’re “a better person” is bullshit even within the show’s premises. They had an amazing opportunity with the season 3 reveal that they just resolve by pretending the real-world consequences of that reveal don’t mean anything and can be safely ignored.
But I also think, “life is meaningful because it ends”, is a trite and unambitious view of both what life is and what an afterlife could be. It’s like, you put all this effort and energy into letting people “become good enough” to make it to the good place, but then the good place is a place where… you make a big bucket list that you slowly cross off until you’re done? Why?
John.
I would probably call it plot induced character development as the plot is putting these characters into new situations that ends up changing them. That then leads to new character decisions that drive the plot so it does become a bit cyclical.
When I was nineteen, following the notion that God is Eternal, Omniscient, Omnipresent and Omnipotent, I concluded that God is WHAT HAPPENS. Divinity, on the other hand, is what humans do with What Happens. One can choose to layer that with morality that greases the wheels of human interaction and it seems humans have done that, sometimes more successfully than others. In this construct, I was able to see divinity everywhere without assuming the yoke of religion.I rarely see it on TV.
That’s an accurate one-sentence summary, although it’s sort of lacking as a detailed explanation. Everyone passes these tests, at which point they go to the new and improved “good place.”
I understood you to be saying that there would still be a sort of judgment day for Michael, like there had been throughout the rest of the series, with that judgment possibly leading to torture in the bad place (or at least multiple possible outcomes, whatever they may be like, rather than only one). And in context, you seemed to be implying that this judgment is based on his life as a human on Earth, not based on these later “tests” conducted in the afterlife (which he won’t fail, rendering them irrelevant for your projection of that character’s future after the finale). If this wasn’t supposed to be your implication, I don’t believe you would’ve put it that way.
I think this wiki quote could use some clarification. Although the show does use the term at one point, if I recall correctly, it’s not merely a “test” (or a trial or a judgment or what have you). In the show, it’s portrayed as more like a remedial educational program for people entering the afterlife. So, if they were deprived of that while alive on Earth (as many are), they will get the benefit of it afterward.
I loved the episode with the trolley problem made real in a failed attempt to explain ethics to a demon.
DanDare, hm.
I gotta concede I found that quite comedic, to the degree that it elicited a chortle.
The entire point of the show is that you don’t have to be perfect, you just have to do your best.
And I like the idea of returning to the cosmos upon my final exit.
WMDKitty:
Not a sentiment I share; good enough is good enough for me.
You’re already part of the cosmos, and logically, you can’t return to where you already are.
Sounds like SMBC did it first.
Vicar, I found it very weak, however droll the short duration, which for Hell is non-canonical.
Specifically, I’m no devil, but I do know one can get a lot of torturing done in 1 minute.
Yes, I get bad singing can be “torture” — but then, should I ever be tortured, I’ll take it over pretty much anything else, especially the bone-crushing, eye-gouging sort of stuff.
(Yes, I know I can be a bit literal, but I was raised Catholic, and theirs is no weak-ass Hell)
… which makes me think of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(Niven_and_Pournelle_novel) — that’s from 1976.
Arguably, much the same conceit, but inverted. (spoiler: it’s the Bad Place)
(That’s before SMBC)
@John Morales:
Dunno. My own feelings about even the possibility of an afterlife are pretty much these, instead. A “me” who wouldn’t get bored wouldn’t really be me anyway — to say nothing of the standard phenomenon of sudden recollection of embarrassing memories; if you would never remember those times when adolescent you was mortified and frustrated, you wouldn’t be you any more, but do you really want to keep remembering all that for the rest of eternity? Ugh! I wouldn’t even want to go to Secular Heaven.
Vicar, such convoluted reasoning!
Me, I find the concept of life after death incoherent; the very definition of death is the absence of previous life. Language-games that confuse the gullible.
Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And once it does come, we no longer exist.
Epicurus, some time ago.
This argument puts me in mind of a sharpshooting contest in which one of the contestants missed every shot by a significant margin because he showed up at the wrong range, the range he did show up at was in fact a garden centre coffee shop, and his sporting pistol is actually a spoon. And not even a very good spoon. It’s bent, and stained, and it wasn’t washed up properly. And the saddest thing is, he was never even interested in entering the contest in the first place. But he’s trying. God dammit, he’s trying. With the spoon.
You’re the one playing this game of yours and confusing yourself with it.
There’s a substantive question to ask about whether or not anything like a “soul” exists. We both think that there isn’t one, as I’m sure you realize. However, that fact doesn’t somehow come from anything like the meanings of words like “life” or “death.” So, you can coherently ask questions about whether you have a soul and whether it continues to exist (and that part/aspect of you with it) after your body dies.
Again, we’re both going to say that no, that doesn’t exist: you don’t have a soul which survives your body after death. But it is incoherent for you to attempt to make this case, about what exists and doesn’t exist, by pointing at some items in a fucking dictionary that somebody wrote down once — specifically, a dictionary that happens to contain a favorable set of definitions that agree with you, not any other dictionaries which don’t. (This represents a lot of circularity and arbitrariness in your argument, in addition to its failure to come to grips with the actual metaphysical questions at issue.)
So, this is not a reasonable way to approach such questions, which are clearly not questions about the contents of dictionaries or anything silly like that.
And there’s no need to approach it in such an obviously presumptuous, trolling bullshitty way….. You can do much better with the mountains of evidence we have from physics, biology and the cognitive sciences, which provide a whole lot of relevant information that we can confidently say we know about what people are and how they fit into the bigger picture. The point is that, unlike some mere definitions of words which you happen subscribe to, that evidence does give us genuine reason to think there aren’t any souls. That’s no more and no less than what we were aiming for here.
They just plainly don’t exist, not here and now, not in an afterlife, not in any other sense. And it doesn’t matter which language I use to express that, which dictionaries I’m willing to endorse, or any of that crap… Those are simply statements about reality, which don’t confuse matters by trying to substitute this for claims about languages or some other type of irrelevant noise.
CR:
Not until one has some sort of definition for ‘soul’.
No, I don’t. I think everyone has a psyche, but that’s not a supernatural thingy.
But I never mentioned ‘soul’; that was your own contribution.
I wrote about life and death and afterlife and afterdeath.
(What would you say to the alternative phrasing that “life is the absence of death”?)
<snicker>
Whatever made you imagine I wrote anything about souls, anyway?
I didn’t plan on asking such questions entirely without the use of language. And I wouldn’t need to do so, in order for my arguments in #70 to work. You’re confused, if you thought that I would need to do that.
At best, you can pretend to be ignorant about how those things are very tightly interconnected, throughout the history of philosophy. I bet you are ignorant to a significant degree, but not that much, because this isn’t our first rodeo. So I just don’t buy it. If it were me, I’d rather concede the argument than play stupid like this.
Do you seriously think that’s an alternative? Or are you still just fucking with me? It’s often hard to tell with you.
A rock is neither alive nor dead. Both are absent in a rock (if you insist on talking in terms of absences like this). So, something which isn’t in the category of “life” is also “the absence of death.” So, your pitiful little offering doesn’t uniquely and unambiguously characterize “life.” You can of course swap the terms and run the parallel argument for yourself. If your original phrasing is as good as that, because this is an alternative to it, then it wasn’t very good.
(You’re playing the role of the rodeo clown, by the way.)
CR:
I didn’t plan on asking such questions entirely without the use of language. And I wouldn’t need to do so, in order for my arguments in #70 to work.
You asserted that “There’s a substantive question to ask about whether or not anything like a “soul” exists.”, and I noted that do ask about something entails a shared definition of that something.
Fine. A ‘soul’ is a person, no?
e.g. “On this day in history: June 7, 1692… – National Museum Jamaica …
Where, in two minutes time the town was sunk under ground and two thousand souls perished.””
People exist, so if souls are people, souls exist.
(There you go, a definition whose use is well-documented; there are plenty of other examples)
Heh.
You sure?
It’s not dead because “death is the absence of previous life”, and it’s not alive because “life is the absence of death”. My pitiful offering works just fine for rocks.
(Wanna try again?)
If so, you’re playing the role of the steer. Whooo-ah!
Steer?
Castrated bull.
Only children ride those.
Holy fuck, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anyone argue this hard against a television show they’ve never watched and only read some chunks of a Wiki about. We get it, you’re a hardened, grizzled atheist and any show that takes place in an imaginary “afterlife” has to be pure garbage because there is no afterlife.
Would you be happier if they reboot the show and there’s only one episode – opening credits, Eleanor dies, closing credits?
Tabby, I was not arguing against the show, I was arguing with CR.
I’d only intended to make my comment @17, thereafter I was basically responding to others’ comments. Like now.
(Stimulus, response)
Actually, atheism doesn’t entail no belief in some afterlife — after all, gods aren’t the only speculative mechanism for it.
Your question is predicated on a misunderstanding of my stance.
(Do I really seem unhappy to you? I do like arguing, you know!)
I had never heard of this show until PZ’s post. The original post and a few comments sent me to my TV’s ‘search’ function and I found it for free.
I have now watched the first seven episodes and I think it is clever and funny. If I wind up watching all four seasons and don’t like the final episode, so be it. I don’t watch much TV and here is something amusing and thoughtful so – what the heck.