Foil / The Good Place

The nature of The Good Place makes it ripe for comparing and contrasting personalities of different natures, upbringings, interests, personalities, and beliefs.

The Main Four Humans

• The reason the four humans were brought together in the first place was so that they could counter each other to the point of torture. In addition to making themselves all feel unstable as they believed their "soulmate" wasn't fully right for them, they were conceived as being tailored to deny each other the thing they needed most: effective advice for growth (Eleanor), decisiveness and closure (Chidi), supportive attention (Tahani), and constructive but loose structure (Jason). It failed because they balanced out each other to the point of helping each other through their worst faults, and did give each other what they needed. By the fourth season they had come to understand their primary flaws and was able to move past them.
  • Eleanor: Her core trait was indifference
    • Was meant to make Chidi face an eternal ethical dilemma, that for all his study, he's unable to teach someone who won't grow to be better. Instead, she learned ethics from Chidi and helped him teach others, and was his stable, decisive partner
    • Was meant to make Tahani feel overshadowed again in death as she was in life, by being effortlessly bombastic as the center of attention for everyone. Instead, she first felt inadequate compared to Tahani, and then included Tahani as a friend and played to her strengths
    • Was meant to make Jason feel controlled, by keeping him from being free to express himself, lest he get them all sent to the Bad Place. Instead, she bonded with Jason as a friend who understands him and encourages some of his behavior.

  • Chidi: His core trait was indecisiveness
    • Was meant to make Eleanor feel constantly criticized and face that she's unable to improve. Instead, he made Eleanor a better person and came to love her.
    • Was meant to make Tahani feel isolated by making her feel All Love Is Unrequited. Instead, he loved Tahani as a true friend, without demanding or expecting anything more from her
    • Was meant to make Jason feel angry in being around an educated, uptight professional that Jason could never be. Instead, he helped Jason learn a reasonable level of restraint and ethical wisdom.

  • Tahani: Her core trait was attention seeking
    • Was meant to make Eleanor feel insecure and inadequate in attractiveness and accomplishment. Instead, she became Eleanor's friend despite their differences.
    • Was meant to make Chidi feel more stressed as a third love option to (never) choose from, in addition to Eleanor and "Real" Eleanor. Instead, she gave Chidi an out on decisions by taking her love life into her own hands, and helping them both know what true love is, so that he could find it with Eleanor and she could find it in herself
    • Was meant to make Jason feel paranoid as her outgoing nature will never let him express his own.Instead, she helps Jason learn constructive expression so he can be a better relationship partner to Janet.

  • Jason: His core trait was impulsiveness
    • Was meant to make Eleanor feel dependent on someone else to not get them all ruined. Instead, he finds and becomes a friend Eleanor could bond with under a similar experience
    • Was meant to make Chidi feel stressed as his worst nightmare (stupid and impulsive). Instead, he was the biggest help to Chidi in making him more decisive and secure in his relationships
    • Was meant to make Tahani feel unloved by never talking to her (under the Jianyu persona), and distant by having constant other focuses, with his lack of attention. Instead, he listened to Tahani under both of his personas, and actually supported and encouraged her.

• In general, Chidi and Tahani both ending up in the Bad Place for pretty much the opposite reasons and results; Tahani did good things (her charity work) for bad reasons (she was Secretly Selfish and wanted to get one over on her sister), and Chidi did bad things (he made everyone around him miserable due to constantly acting as The Ditherer) for good reasons (he tried to live as ethical and considerate of a life as possible while unlocking the mysteries of the universe).

• Jason can also be a mirror of Eleanor, due to similar circumstances, but differing conditions:
  • They both grew up in low-class neighborhoods, but whereas Eleanor had zero love from her parents and had to grow up quickly, Jason grew up in a loving family, but never emotionally matured while he was alive.
  • Eleanor became selfish and immoral as a survival mechanism, never wanting to have to rely on anyone, or be relied on. Jason, meanwhile, is more amoral and more social, living in and relying on a close-knit community of family and friends who happen to share his ethical shortcomings.
  • Eleanor, directly or indirectly, caused a lot of problems for people (being a scam artist that might have gotten people killed with fake medicine; causing a laundromat to file bankruptcy while she reaped the benefits from the fallout) while Jason's crimes were pretty petty in nature, and not a whole lot in terms of collateral damage.

Other Humans

• John and Tahani: they both used their sense of being excluded to drive their actions. In Tahani's case, however, she was motivated to do more philanthropy out of jealousy towards Kamilah and how her sister was better regarded, so she ended up in The Bad Place for having Secretly Selfish motivations. John was just petty and wanted to hurt people out of spite towards them, which means his motives and actions were corrupt. Like Tahani, his Character Development comes about not through attending ethics classes, but by interacting with others (in his case, Tahani).

• Simone to both Eleanor and Chidi. Like the former, she puts Chidi out of his comfort zone and helps him take decisive actions, but lacks Eleanor's negative personality traits. While she studies human nature like Chidi, she also lacks his faults and is more interested in concrete facts than ethical questions. She's also interested in science, while the other characters have a supernatural perspective of events.

• Brent:
  • To Eleanor. Eleanor, while doing horrible things, knew that she was committing wrong and was extremely guilty upon realizing that she was causing chaos in Season 1. She also reformed in part for Chidi's sake before admitting that she fell in love with him and stepped aside when he seemed interested in someone else. Brent, on the other hand, practices Selective Obliviousness and doesn't realize that he is quite terrible. He's interested in Janet, who is "not a girl or a robot" and is already in a relationship with someone else, treating her as a sex object. Janet, who can't even have sex, broadcasts her disgust with annoyed politeness. Their backgrounds also differ greatly: Eleanor's family seems to have been lower middle class, she had neglectful and unloving parents, and she was well into adulthood before she found anyone who genuinely gave a crap about her. Brent, on the other hand, was wealthy since birth and spoiled rotten. Eleanor's selfishness stems partially from having to fend for herself from day one, while Brent's stems from the fact that he had everything handed to him and thus never had to fend for himself, and just thinks everything he wants is his birthright. The two also have radically different reactions to being in The Good Place with Eleanor eventually using it as a chance to sincerely improve and earn her spot there while Brent dismisses it and believes he deserves somewhere even better. And Eleanor, even at her worst, was capable of at least some genuine kindness, empathy and gratitude awhile alive and during her early days in The Good Place, Brent never shows concern for anyone but himself.
  • Much like Jason, he is a Manchild who has lived his entire life out of short-sighted ignorance and ended up in the afterlife due to his own ineptitude. However, Jason has many of the more positive traits of childhood (blind optimism, curiosity, desire for friendship, fantastical idea of what love is), lived a life of street crime, and was born into a lower socioeconomic class; meanwhile, Brent behaves more like a Spoiled Brat who throws tantrums at the first sign of conflict, has committed (and gotten away with) various white collar crimes and was born into wealth. And while Jason showed himself to be very sweet-natured and loving, Brent is incredibly obnoxious and selfish. Best summarized by how Brent thinks of Janet as nothing but a glorified secretary who exists solely to serve his needs while Jason eventually fell in love with her.
  • In terms of their backgrounds, Brent is a foil to Tahani. Both of them were born into wealthy upper class backgrounds and thus have high expectations and expensive tastes. Both of them constantly crave attention and tend to bring their status into conversations, Tahani with her constant namedropping while Brent constantly brings up having gone to Princeton. The difference is that Tahani's parents messed her up by constantly pitting her against her sister in competitions which made her feel like she had to earn their love and approval and subsequently corrupted her motives for any good things she did. Brent is messed up in the complete opposite direction, having been given everything in his life on a silver platter and thus never actually struggled or earned anything in his life on his own merit. And while Tahani used her wealth and privilege for altruistic purposes, even if they were selfishly motivated, Brent is never mentioned as having done anything kind and doesn't seem to think his privilege brings with it any kind of higher responsibility. Furthermore, Tahani is genuinely kind and sweet-natured while Brent is incredibly boorish, insulting and obnoxious.
  • To Chidi with regards to them both being Innocently Insensitive. While Chidi spent his time on Earth obsessively pondering the ethics of each choice and worrying about them having a negative effect on others and such an attitude ruined many of his close relationships, he ultimately just wanted to live a morally good life and was otherwise a caring person. Brent on the other hand is completely oblivious to the feelings of others and never expresses any concern about the effects of his behavior, nor is he interested in trying to improve.
  • Like Jason, he is pretty clueless and unaware of what's going on around him and mostly focused on his own simple pleasures. However, Jason is a sweet and loving dimwit from a troubled background whose father treated him like a best friend to steal things and do drugs with, while Brent is an entitled jerk who had every opportunity to be the best version of himself from day one.
  • By contrast, unlike Chidi, John, and Simone, he has absolutely no genuine desire to improve nor does he even seem capable of the introspection required to do so.
• Tahani's parents to Eleanor's parents: They're wealthy, snobby and refined in sharp contrast to the poor, loutish and immature Doug and Donna. While Doug and Donna were immature people who were completely unfit to be parents, they don't go out of their way to make Eleanor miserable, they're just horribly irresponsible. Contrast Manisha and Waqas, who openly prefer Kamilah to Tahani and think nothing of degrading her to prop up Kamilah.

The Afterlife

• Judge Gen to Shawn, the Accountants, and the Good Place Committee
  • Shawn explicitly states he has no desire to fix the broken system because it gives him more souls to torture—all of humanity, in fact. And unlike the Judge, he will cheat and otherwise resort to underhanded methods to keep the broken system in place. The Judge is at least willing to hear out the humans despite them lacking paperwork, hates cheaters, and is curious to see if Michael is right that people can change.
  • The Accountants are even more inflexible than she is by insisting their system is perfect and ignoring suffering by those who die, as well as ignoring Matt's trauma of seeing too many Weird Sex Things. Gen is Nice to the Waiter with her doorman and goes to Earth to witness the broken system for herself.
  • Finally, the Good Place Committee believes Michael when he says the system is rigged but won't bend the rules that require a millennia-long investigation and ignoring how many people will get unjustly tortured. The Judge is understandably more cynical but when she finally sees how hard it is to be good on Earth, she immediately says something needs to change.
• Shawn is essentially Michael if the latter grabbed hold of the belief that humans are always evil and not capable of any change at all, and the point system isn't flawed, thus defending it and damning billions of humans for no reason.