Headscratchers / The Good Place

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Portland Trail Blazers

• Okay, I gotta know. Why is EVERY member of the Portland Trail Blazers in The Bad Place? I mean, it's not like the Yankees where so many of the rest of Baseball hates them and hence you lose good points for it. Why are the Trail Blazers of all teams barred from the good place?
  • The vast majority of the human race is in the Bad Place. Janet only brought it up as a random trivia fact. It seems like they were barred due to not being good enough, in contrast to Columbus, who was banned for committing heinous crimes.
  • In the early 00's, the Trail Blazers were nicknamed the "Jail Blazers" because they had a number of people with bad raps on the team and had a poor relationship with the community. This era ended with the trades of the 2003-2004 season (Rasheed Wallace's trade away from Portland led to a championship for Detroit that year) so it makes this a much less familiar touchstone of cultural knowledge and writers rooms usually liked to avoid that, so maybe they're not specifically referring to the Jail Blazers and it's a coincidence.
  • Or maybe the writer's room went too specific.
  • You get your answer in Ep 13. They're really in the Bad Place so all the points are probably meaningless or at least, highly suspect.
  • Simple: It's a Take That! from one of the writers.
  • Yeah, the show is filled with this. "Staying loyal to the Cleveland Browns" is good while liking the Red Hot Chili Peppers is bad.
  • This is answered(kind of) in season 3 , as there hadn't been any human has gotten into the Good Place in 521 years. (circa. 2018) , and Portland Trail Blazers only been exist for 51 years (circa. 2021).....So no matter how you slice it , EVERY member of Portland Trail Blazers are in The Bad Place (for the moment) , as none of them can was even born before the LAST person who got into The Good Place was dead.)

Theology

• The theology is interesting to say the least. Clearly the principle of Justification by Works applies and only the most spectacular works count. Just being honest, honorable and a good family person clearly is not enough. On the other hand if this 'Good Place' is any sample I'd rather go to the 'Bad Place' then spend eternity with this bunch of righteous folks.
  • That's not quite right. Every act is accounted for, from eating a sandwich to reading a trashy magazine. It seems that most people do enough good and bad in their lifetimes that it evens out and they don't make the cut. It usually takes extraordinary actions to get in. Chidi is evidence of an exception, however. He didn't do anything particularly special in life, he just did a lot of low-level good as a college professor and never did anything bad to drag his score down.
  • Real Eleanor seems to be one of the few folks in the Good Place who actually got down and dirty working with the poor in God forsaken corners of the globe. Most of these people seem to be limousine charity workers who 'raised consciousness' or raised money, like Tahani.
  • Chapter 13 clears up a lot of this: It isn't the real Good Place and everyone in it except for Chidi, Eleanor, Tahani, and Jason is fake. Everything we were told about how people are selected for The Good Place is suspect at best and an outright lie at worst, so who knows what the theology is really like?
  • Chapter 13 implies some things about the theology of who goes where: our four protagonists share the same basic flaw; extreme self centeredness. Apparently selfishness and lack of empathy are mortal sins.
  • The fact that the theology of getting into the Good Place is fundamentally flawed becomes a plot point for the end of Season 3 and into Season 4. The theology is indeed suspect, and the writers made it that way on purpose.

How did Bragging not bring Tahani down?

• If bragging is specifically listed as a fairly big negative (it says "never discussed veganism unprompted" is worth +9884.8), then how did Tahani make the cut? Tahani is a very good person but she does toot her own horn quite a bit and the number of times you repeat an action is multiplied by the value of the action, so that should have impacted Tahani's score quite a bit?
  • Being a vegan still gives a hefty bonus—not bragging just gives you more. Most likely, while Tahani's bragging brought her score down a bit, the massive amount of good she was doing more than made up for it. Besides, she did have the second lowest score in the neighborhood.
  • Depending on if they factor in context, situation, and intent, one must remember that Tahani spent most of her life being a front woman for charity. This necessitates some amount of 'bragging' and other actions if only to get other people to jump on board. You're not going to give money to someone who won't talk about where and how that money's going to be used, after all.
  • Developments in Chapter 13 show that her bragging did bring Tahani down. She did a lot of work for charity but only did it and relentlessly promoted herself because she wanted others, especially her parents, to acknowledge the work she was doing. Her impure intentions completely negated her actions.

Why would ethical people not worry about the fact that most of humanity is being tortured?

• Michael says "don't worry about it" when explaining the fates to everyone who's not in Heaven. How could someone like Chidi just be content with eternal torture for everyone who didn't clear such an impossible bar as being the top 0.1% of humanity. As an ethics professor whose stomach squirms with Eleanor's sins, how could he not get worked up about that? For that matter why doesn't Heaven have a bit of a higher capacity?
  • Chidi is simply busy with Eleanor. It will be a miracle if he saves her and Jason, he doesn't have time to worry about everyone else. As for why no one else worries about it... yeah. It is odd. Most likely it's actually a plot point. Michael's dismissal seems like it's setting it up for later. It also feeds into his ridiculously horrific "retirement." On the other hand, when we finally do see people from the Bad Place, they don't seem that bad. Very very petty evil, yes, but not "rend the flesh from your bones because you were a bitch" kind of evil. Maybe there are different layers of the Bad Place, so Eleanor is going to a section that is basically like being alive but more annoying, while Hitler is in the deepest depths getting the worst tortures anyone can come up with.
  • Fridge Brilliance: Chidi isn't just busy with Eleanor; he was deliberately stuck with Eleanor to prevent him from turning his attention to the ethical implications of everything else.
  • Part of this might also be the band-aid of hell conundrum. Ok, so apparently all religions only got 5% right about how it works, but what I'm also going to go out on a limb for saying that there is also a theory of "forever" that this show borrows some from for when people go to the good or bad place. Namely, that it's not just about being blessed or punished for what you did in life, but about what those deeds will do to you if your character goes on forever in the same way at the point of death. The fact that Eleanor gets a chance to make herself better is already extraordinary in that sense, but more to the point, part of the reason the bad place IS is because more often than not, the people of the bad place want what they want forever, and will refuse being rescued from themselves. They won't change how they're acting or why they're acting how they're acting, so what else can the people of the good place do? Eleanor's "mix up" and work to become "most improved" is already problematic enough for her part of the good place. So what else could the people of the good place do for the bad place if the people in the bad place would keep hurting others forever? Sure, they could do visits, or exchange programs, but then the rules of this afterlife are a bit wonky as is, so it's hard to say why this hasn't come up at all.
  • The above only works if The Bad Place works on a series of levels, a la Dante's Inferno. As of Episode 9, it is confirmed that yes, they do in fact go out of their way to torture everyone there: both personalized torments and generic torments (four-headed bears, food that turns into spiders when ingested) alike. Since it's further confirmed from the start that the vast majority of people who would be quite amicable and open-minded by modern standards don't make the cut, it doesn't quite work to assume that people go to The Bad Place because they're just too set in their ways.
  • Chidi is actually terrible at ethics and really wants to believe the system is infallible. The fact it's highly-HIGHLY fallible is basically the show's premise.
  • You get your answer in Ep 13. They're really in the Bad Place and there is indeed a Medium Place.
  • The finale reveals that the four main characters are actually in The Bad Place. We therefore have no objective idea of what the "real" Bad Place is like. All the information we receive comes from non-reliable sources. Even Trevor and his minions were playing a role — we never see them out of character. In fact, for all we know, Trevor could pass for as benign as RealEleanor or as harmless as Glenn. There is some mention to the traditional concepts of hell during Michael's flashbacks but that's about it. When Chidi argues that Eleanor has grown and become a better person from her time in "The Good Place," Michael initially dismisses this but he's evil so obviously wouldn't "really" believe people could change. It's possible that in the actual Good Place, there are regular arrivals from other Bad Places of people who have changed and deserve to leave. A consistent theme from the bad guys (especially Trevor when he had drinks with Eleanor) is that bad people can't change. Perhaps we'll see that they can and thus aren't doomed to an eternity of torture.
  • This has been an issue for as long as the idea of Heaven and Hell has been around. Classical Christian writers actually tried to say that watching damned souls suffer would be the primary entertainment in Heaven.
  • Indeed. For as much as this show enjoys Reconstructing the classic ideas of heaven and hell, there also seems to be a bit of religious satire to it (or at least the hell part), showing how philosophically horrifying such a concept is. As Eleanor points out early on, as bad as she was, she in no way deserves eternal torment, which she and the majority of people on Earth would have gotten even if the system was working properly.
  • When we finally see the actual Good Place in Season 4, we aren't actually shown whether or not its residents are told what happens to the people who didn't make the cut. Possibly they were told there was a 'Bad Place', but not the details. And as we do see, TGP quickly turns even the sharpest mind into a "glassy-eyed mush person". So even if people are aware of the horribly injustices, they're soon rendered incapable of recalling what numbers are, never mind attempting to bring about reform to the afterlife.

Michael and Friends

• In Episode 6, Michael tells Eleanor that to better understand human friendship, he watched the entirety of Friends. With the reveal of the Good Place actually being the Bad Place, does that mean this was another one of Michael's lies? Did he only watch the episodes necessary to understand how illogical the rent control was? Did he actually watch Friends after his Heel–Face Turn?
  • Well, he talks about them in Season 4, so presumably he did watch it at some point. As we see from his reading Les Miserables in season 2, he just doesn't understand humans at first.

Why are Chidi's actions treated as murder?

• It was heroic manslaughter at best.
  • Because no one knows the full circumstances. Janet's message was clearly pre-recorded, not an accurate summation of the situation, and everyone was going off of that. Chidi himself, of course, gets ulcers at the thought of lying, so of course he would see it in the worst possible light.
  • I imagine as well that in most normal circumstances, the only reason someone would even be near Janet's kill switch is to intentionally cause harm. After all, why would there even be any sort of unintentional killing in The Good Place.
  • In normal circumstances, there would be no one in the Good Place that would intend to cause harm. The kill switch was really meant more as a factory reset, since her manual shows that it was known that Janets could wind up with glitches. Presumably, the prerecorded message would have been different (or wouldn't exist) in the actual Good Place.

Why aren't Chidi and Eleanor cognizant of half-truths

• In the murder instance, they could say "we thought if we stopped Janet it could save you from leaving which is good for the community." In the episode with the garbage, Eleanor could have said to Michael, "It happened because I finished clearing out the trash too early and wanted to fly. Sorry, it won't happen again." You can say those things without revealing anything and everything.
  • Because it would draw attention to them, and when more problems occurred, Michael would zero in straight on Eleanor. Chidi also explicitly ascribes to the belief that all lying is bad. Eleanor was barely able to convince him to hide the truth, but he simply doesn't have enough experience lying to come up with half-truths like that.

Is Janet sworn to secrecy?

• I'm assuming either she is or Michael never thinks to interrogate Janet.
  • Yes, she is. Well, sort of. She explicitly says no one can see anyone's search history, so that makes it clear that there are some things she can't tell Michael. Maybe asking Janet questions about the neighbors is forbidden (outside of basic location data). Or maybe Michael is just terrible at asking the right questions.
  • One of the things that can make a dystopia [read the Bad Place] is surveillance (for example 1984). I find it interesting that Chidi's blackboard mention Jeremy Bentham as an example of Utilitarianism (although he did stated that it is not always optimal).
  • Good point; this idea of privacy/lack of surveillance is emphasized elsewhere too (Michael has to find out what the error is, for instance, and otherwise asks questions that you'd think an all powerful being could just find out) and it makes sense to avoid the idea of a dystopia.
  • In hindsight, Episode 13 makes it obvious why he never interrogated Janet: He never had to because there never was any mistake. His "investigation" was just a way to screw with Eleanor.
  • I'm trying to wrap my mind around why "Good" Janet isn't Bad Janet — I get the plot necessity for this, but when Michael says in his flashback that the Bad Place had "stolen" a Good Janet, I wondered why it was impossible to program Bad Janet to behave like a Good Janet. Why is that impossible? Michael and Vicky especially are able to pose as perfectly benign people, and Janet isn't even a "person," so Eleanor and the others would likely just dismiss any weirdness from her as She's a Weird Computer.
  • When Micheal asked Bad Janet to pretend to be a Good Janet, she malfunctioned and her face melted.
  • Regarding this point, recall Michael's attempts to reprogram Janet to have a different personality, as well as her own claims that she is constantly learning and growing as an individual (which turns out to be true when she gains the ability to love). Presumably reprogramming Janets is a very difficult prospect, to the point where stealing a Good Janet and simply putting in some security locks is an easier prospect than reprogramming a Bad Janet to seamlessly fit into a faux-Good Place.
  • Episode 7 of Season 2 expands on this, Michael did try to have a Bad Janet pretend to be good, the effort sends them into literal meltdown.

The Bad Place

• Whyyyyy? Just why? We've learned precious little about the cosmology of the show thus far, but as of episode 9, we know that everyone who goes there is actively tortured by the asshole equivalents of Michael and Janet. Unless the "Immortals" are in no way supernatural, but instead Sufficiently Advanced Aliens operating on Blue-and-Orange Morality, I can't wrap my head around why the people in The Good Place are there while literally everyone else—99.99% of all people who have ever existed— has to endure an eternity of torture at the hands of stereotypical (and sadistic) frat people.
  • Then again like the good place there are variations of it and perhaps a mild annoyance once in a while ( similar to Limbo and flies in Dante's Inferno)
  • You get your answer in Ep 13. They're really in the Bad Place. Your whole point was intended to be Chidi and Eleanor's Hell for all Eternity.
  • The fact that the entire afterlife system is fundamentally flawed later becomes a major plot point. Yeah, it is unfair and awful that 99.99% of people who have ever existed get tortured for all eternity. That was why they overhauled that with the new system.

Why not just have Janet procure a new bed?

• Minor nitpick but when the two Eleanors and Chidi (along with Trevor) and they all argue about who should sleep in which bed, and all three are heroically offering to sleep on the couch (or the floor or bathtub), why not just ask Janet to procure a new bed? If she can procure a cactus or hot wings, is it that much harder for her to procure a bed? For that matter, why didn't Eleanor ask Janet to rearrange any of the elements she didn't like about her house?
  • For the latter point (change the house), I imagine at first it was to avoid suspicion. It was supposed to be designed to be her perfect house so she may have though changing something would look odd. For the former, probably just habit (such as it is); it's not like they're use to the idea that their every need will be catered too (by an all powerful computer thing no less), never mind instantly.
  • You get your answer in Ep 13. They're really in the Bad Place so they would have probably figured out a way to avert that to cause them harm.

Why is resetting a bad thing?

• By the opening episode of season 2, Shawn, the overseer of the Bad Place makes it clear to Michael that "there will not be a 3rd attempt". After Michael has already done a second reset. Why is mind wiping 4 bad place residents such a big deal? Wouldn't it be a good idea to occasionally reset people even in a "regulation" bad place with physical torture. After all, wouldn't resetting someone once in a while make them freshly terrified of the tortures, instead of having them get used to the torture at some point?
  • There's nothing wrong with the act of resetting. The problem is the reason for resetting and what it means. Michael is trying to convince everybody not only that his "Good Place" experiment will work, but also that it will actually be a better than the traditional methods. His scheme is very delicate, with lots of moving parts and potential complications, requires hundreds of demons actively working to torture only four people, and uses a slow burn approach where the initial parts of the torture aren't much worse than a bad day on Earth while the targets still live in relative comfort. If everyone believed Michael's idea would work and would be worth it in the long term, a few resets would be no big deal. With everyone being unconvinced, especially after the first failed iteration, each reset just comes across as time that would have been better spent with traditional torture as well as evidence that Michael won't be able to pull off what he promises.
  • The resets, by themselves aren't a problem in terms of The Bad Place itself; the problem is that Shawn, as the boss, said there won't be anymore attempts and the project will be scrapped. Micheal ignored the directive and kept resetting, if Shawn found out that his order was violated, it will result in everyone (demons and humans) being tortured.
  • Plus, resetting torture victims means they're no longer tormented by the memories of their torture, which the Bad Place would see as a huge waste.
  • On this point there's actually a SCP Foundation article that uses the "memory reset" trope as part of a containment procedure for an eldritch horror, where a young woman has to be tortured to a certain level of fear to prevent the horror being born. By resetting the memory of the young woman who is stopping the horror from escaping, her fear of the unknown & the dread after the first few "new" tortures far outweigh the level of fear after she goes through the torture procedure again and again for months on end.
  • If you have to reset something once, that's a tacit admission that what you were trying to do didn't work and you have to start over. The more times you have to reset to try again, the more it looks like either you're incompetent, what you're trying to do simply isn't worth the effort you're putting into it, or that what you're trying to do simply isn't going to work.
  • Also, Shaun unambiguously says that he wants Michael to fail in order to show that the old ways are better. He could give Michael unlimited attempts until he gets everything right, yes. But he doesn't want to.

Tahani/Knowledge gaps

• Tahani was friends with Kanye West, Taylor Swift and Beyonce; and seemed like she reasonably kept up on pop culture, so how does she not know who Ariane Grande is? For that matter, how does she not know what Wal-Mart is? Even her being rich doesn't excuse never hearing of a billion dollar corporation.
  • A possible reason for this is that Wal-Mart doesn't exist in England.
  • Paris Hilton didn't know about Walmart at one point, it's probably a Take That! at her
  • She might have heard of Ariana Grande but just wasn't able to recognize her from a photograph.
  • She might be lying about how close she is to pop cultural icons and just parrots the most famous names she can remember.
  • Secondly, with all due respect to Ariana Grande, she is not quite on the same level of fame & celebrity as the three mentioned above, so Tahani may be telling the truth and still not know who Ariana is.
  • Lastly, how much do we know about when they all died? Beyonce has been popular since the late 90's, Kayne since 2003, with the 2009 VMA incident making both him and Taylor Swift globally recognised. Ariana Grande has only been globally popular since mid 2015, Tahani may have died before she became a household name.
  • So, the day Eleanor died, there was a magazine in the grocery store checkout line with Tahani on the cover, and the headlines implied that she was still alive. So even if she had already died, it wouldn't have been earlier than the magazines had gone to print, which probably wouldn't have been more than a few weeks before. Also, Eleanor made it at least to October 14, 2015, because that's when her "29th" birthday was (according to what she'd been telling people), and her coworkers surprised her with a cake. So it's maybe possible, but a bit of a stretch.
  • Neither Wal-mart or Ariana Grande are very well known outside of the US. I'm Australian, and I wouldn't even know what Ms Grande looked like if I hadn't seen The Good Place. I only know Wal-mart because I used to live in the US. Tahani is English.
  • I'm English. Walmart and Ariana Grande are well known in England. I'm English and everyone I know has heard of both. Tahani hasn't heard of Walmart because she's too posh to care about supermarkets. Ariana Grande is the one who was playing at Manchester Arena before the bombing.
  • The Manchester Arena bombing during Ariana Grande's concert happened May 2017, and the show premiered September 2016, which means Tahani died before the bombing. Tahani asks who the girl on the poster is, and once Jason says Ariana Grande, Tahani doesn't ask for further clarification beyond that. Tahani knows the name Ariana Grande but can't recognize her on sight.
  • I think this is a legitimate continuity error

Chidi, French, and "bud hole"

• Chidi apparently understood "budhole" as "butthole" like Eleanor did, even though he's allegedly speaking French. Is there any way this could have been translated into French that would make sense both ways? If not, maybe he just switches to English sometimes — he's an academic, so he's likely to know English even if it's not his primary language.
  • In the first episode, Chidi says "I'm actually speaking French. This place just translates whatever you say into a language the other person can understand." If we go by Exact Words, "a language the other person can understand" doesn't necessarily mean "the language the other person is speaking." It's plausible he knows English well enough that the neighbourhood doesn't have to translate for him even though he's speaking in a language he's more comfortable with. Though the "sacrebleu, I peed in m' pants" from The Trolley Problem seems to imply he wasn't primarily speaking French for at least that line, so him switching to English sometimes is certainly possible.
  • As revealed in "The Eternal Shriek", Chidi worked in Australia for several years (the hospital in the episode is Sydney General). He is definitely fluent in English.
  • In "Someplace Else," Eleanor finds Chidi in Sydney and speaks to him in English without trouble. So yes, he definitely speaks English.
  • He could have still been speaking French in that moment, but since there's not exactly a French equivalant to the word "budhole", that specific word was just never translated. That entire exchange would still make sense to Chidi because, as stated above, Chidi speaks English fluently, he'd know what the words "bud", "hole", and "butthole" mean.

Chidi speaking French

• In the first episode, when Chidi and Eleanor meet for the first time, she tells him his English is really good (he said he was from Senegal and had been all around the world). But in later flashbacks to Chidi's life (the boots, the best man situation) he's speaking English when talking to his friends and co-workers.
  • It is possible for humans to learn more than one language. French just happens to be the one Chidi is most comfortable with.
  • Yeah, but there's a flashback of Chidi as a young kid playing football in Senegal. He should have spoken French in that flashback, right?
  • This is simple Translation Convention. The show is filmed in the US and written by English-speakers. We are meant to assume that Chidi and his friends are speaking French (the official language of Senegal) or Wolof (the actual most-spoken language). In other flashbacks, he's probably speaking French to his friends as well. Translation Convention.
  • Of course, no explanation given for either this or the previous Headscratcher explains why he speaks English with a flawless American accent.
  • To make Eleanor "comfortable". It is Lampshaded that Tahani is the only one with an accent, to make her annoying.
  • Given that I don't recall Chidi's language ever being brought up outside of the pilot, it's likely that the writers simply forgot or chose to ignore the concept of Chidi speaking French.
  • Explained. He learned English in America, moved to Australia later. Chidi being Chidi, he of course learned to speak the language perfectly at least as defined by the people teaching him, resulting in an American accent.
  • It is brought up very briefly when they return to Earth and he speaks French to a co-worker, basically as a handwave to the idea by acknowledging it. Still, would it really have been considered all that impossible to get four or five french speaking actors for his childhood flashbacks? They managed to go to the effort of getting people to do African-English accents. I think it would have been a nice touch. The show made at least some effort to be international and not America focused, but apparently having less than half a dozen scenes in another language would have been too much :/
  • And no offense to William Jackson Harper, but Chidi's "French" in the season 2 finale corresponds to no existing real-life dialect, European, African, North American or otherwise; it's painfully obviously "American speaking French as a second language."

What does The Bad Place use their Janets for?

• The Bad Janets obviously aren't any kind of assistant like the Good Janets, since they are programmed against being helpful in any way (as shown in "Janet and Michael"). Are they part of the tortures? Because so far, all we've seen them do is be needlessly rude to people, which probably isn't much of a torture compared to having spiders shoved up your butt, being chased by two-headed bears, or whatever else The Bad Place does to people who aren't the main cast. It raises the question: What are The Bad Janets for?
  • It's mentioned that while the good Janet's does act as assistants to humans they also run the entire neighborhood and the bad Janet's do take orders just not from humans safe to assume that they serve the same purpose in that they make the torture happen
  • Have you ever gone somewhere, say a hotel without wifi? It’s annoying right (and very much a first world problem, but hey). Now have you ever stayed in a hotel with terrible, slow wifi that sometimes loads and sometimes disconnects just in the middle, you start to watch a video and you’re getting into it, then it stalls. I would argue that is more of a torture than no wifi! I imagine that is the thought behind Bad Janet.
  • Janets are the only ones who can call a train, so there is at least one functional use for them. And Bad Janets do sometimes follow instructions, seen when Michael ordered one to scan the neighborhood for the main characters in "Leap to Faith". We only see a Bad Janet directly disobeying an order when Michael is pretending to be a Good Place architect, so maybe they're programmed to listen to Bad Place people and not someone they think is from the Good Place. This troper's theory is that the Good Place came up with the concept of Janets first, and the Bad Place, being full of petty and jealous demons, demanded to have their own version. (The fact that they're called "Janets" and "Bad Janets" implies that the Good Place ones came first and the Bad Place ones were modeled after them.)
  • And as we see more of the Bad Place, it's suggested that Bad Janets actually do much of the same things as Janets. They just do it rudely and poorly such as making all the trains 3 hours late and insulting waiting passengers (demons). It's possible that while they can openly defy humans and twist the wishes of lower ranking demons, they still have some high level cosmic rules that they have to enforce much like regular Janets, almost like inverse three laws.
  • In "Rhonda, Diana, Jake, and Trent", Bad Janet insults a demon, and both the demon and Janet immediately laugh about. So it seems the demons get masochistic pleasure from Bad Janet.
  • Yeah, Bad Janet is less torturous than having spiders shoved up your butt, but one of the traits about the Bad Place is that Evil Is Petty. If they see an opportunity to torture or even just annoy someone, they will take it.
  • In addition to what others have said - when he is apprehending Michael, Shawn intends to use a Bad Janet as muscle. So it seems likely that that's part of their purpose; if the Bad Place didn't have them then Good Janets could just do whatever they please there (they wouldn't, most of the time, but it's clear why the Bad Place wouldn't trust this, on account of being, well, bad.) The fact that they do generally listen to higher-ups like Shawn also helps keep Hell's hierarchy in line.

Bicycles

• Why do the bicycles in Chapter 14 have chainwheels on the front wheels? Jason removes the front wheel from his soulmate's bicycle and the useless chainwheel falls off too, which he subsequently gives to Eleanor. Why was it there in the first place?
  • Plot convenience, and maybe in the good place the bikes have front wheel drive.

What the fork?

• Since Ep 13. reveals that They're really in the Bad Place, shouldn't all characters be allowed to say 'fuck' and 'shit'? Profanity is allowed in the Bad Place, right? So why resort to 'fork' and 'shirt'?
  • The place is supposed to be torture. Being unable to swear ever sounds pretty forking torturous to me.
  • Also, it would have ruined the deception and illusion.
  • The swear-filter seems to be designed to torture Eleanor specifically. When they can finally swear again, she expresses relief, and she's the only one who bothers to swear from then on out.

Chidi, why??

• Chidi, who is incapable of so much as selecting a soup at a restaurant, chooses to study ethics and morality of all things. There are no cut-and-dry answers in ethics, no "This is the right thing to do for everyone, so do it". Every ethical conundrum has a HUGE amount of factors that determine what the right and moral course of action is...so why on Earth is that what Chidi chose to study? Why would the man who can't make a single decision study a field of philosophy that's nothing but choices and their consequences???
  • Because he is teaching the why part of the philosophy. He is teaching the how part of the philosophy. Why do we act in a moral way? What motivates us to act in moral way? Why we should act in such a manner to another human being. Who taught that method of morality or ethics and what they based it upon. He is not choosing , or being forced to choose. He is teaching whys of thought and the whys therein.
  • It's because he needs that understanding simply to have some sort of methodology to base his decisions on, otherwise he'd be even more paralyzed. Framing a problem as a question of ethics gives him some kind of basis to approach the decision from. When he can't consider something as an ethical issue, that's when he gets into trouble.
  • It's precisely because he is an indecisive overthinker that he went into ethics and morality. The flashbacks show that he's been thinking like an ethics professor since he was a child, so really he chose the perfect career for himself. Sure, it wasn't healthy, but his own well-being is obviously not a priority to him.
  • The way I see it, the study of ethics made Chidi crazy. He was an overthinker already and then he learned to see the world in an overly complex way
  • Answered definitively in "The Answer," three seasons later. Chidi had a trauma reaction that convinced him that all questions had definitive correct answers that you can arrive at by thinking, so he went into the field that provided (what he saw as) the biggest questions with the most important answers. Basically: he's crazy.

Were the souls originally intended to have lived and died at different times?

• In her early appearances, Tahani makes a number of references to the 90s - working with Princess Diana, her friendship with the Spice Girls. Later, her namedropping is more contemporary. Mild sort of retcon?
  • Maybe she was born in about 1980, making her an appropriate age to associate with the people in both periods.

Cacti

• Seriously, why so many cacti in the neighborhood? Maybe because Eleanor is from Phoenix and cacti will remind her of how shitty her life was, but they're also pretty cool and could be happy nostalgia. And it's for everyone else, too, not just her.
  • It might not have a point and just be set design, possibly a result of filming in Southern California. It also might be a subtle indication that that place isn't a nice as it's supposed to be. The neighborhood was designed to seem like the Good Place but be secretly frustrating and uncomfortable. Just like frozen yogurt is something that people think they like but really don't, the show might be saying that people think they like spiky plants but they're really not that great. Like most things in the show, this would be based on the writers' prejudices (Beyonce good, Portland Trailblazers bad, etc.)
  • When Janet is resetting, she produces huge numbers of them. So it's possible they're her "perfectly generic object" and the thing she produces when she lacks more specific instructions - if you tell her to create a town, she'll fill any areas you didn't give specific instructions about with cactuses.
  • Another possibility is that, like frozen yogurt, cactuses are something that fits Michael's goals - when used for landscaping, they seem high-class and beautiful, so people can't complain about them without seeming petty, but they're also annoying and prickly.

How did Jason stock his "budhole" without speaking?

• Jason confirms that they very first time he's spoken since arriving at the "Good Place" is when he confronts Eleanor. However, he later says he had Janet give him all of his budhole toys and furnishings. How did he ask Janet for anything without speaking?
  • He wrote it down on a piece of paper.
  • It's also possible that he realized that Janet would never blow his cover after watching other people use her and realizing that she's basically a robo-genie. So he called her and spoke when he was sure they were alone.
  • Not a robo-genie.

Why would a Buddhist monk be brought to that version of the good place?

• The crux of Jason's cover story is that Jianyu died, but didn't die, the same moment he did. So why would a monk be brought to basically an upper class effete middle-American suburbanite version of heaven instead of one more in keeping with his own philosophical background? No other characters are shown to have the same social differences, despite presumably coming from all over the world, There weren't people depicting other religions, or cultures aside from himself and Chidi. I am aware the cover was designed to torture both himself, and Tahani, but even before then made the character seem like an odd fit for the neighborhood.
  • A drawback to this being version 1 perhaps. Everyone else getting a far bigger and nicer house than Eleanor's would torture her and knowing at least one person with a smaller house might ruin the effect. Michael does lean to correcting this in attempt #2 and others by giving Jason a yurt and another silent monk for a soulmate.

Misplaced Soulmates

• In the conceit of the good place, it states that not only is person A a high ranking good person but so is Person B, who is their soulmate. but what if, as experienced by Chidi and the 2 Eleanors, a good person's soulmate doesn't actually qualify to be in the Good Place either by just missing the bar, or because they weren't actually deserving? or, are soulmates basically just roulette spins after death?
  • After the first season finale, it's likely that soul mates don't actually work as they were described early on, if they exist at all.
  • It's confirmed in a flashback in "The Worst Possible Use of Free Will" that soulmates don't actually exist. Presumably the logic was like the frozen yogurt shops; something that sounds good but is actually a bummer.

Why did Michael ever think his scheme would fool them forever?

• Even the dumbest, most self-centered person imaginable would figure out such a basic Twilight Zone episode scenario eventually. His scheme needs to work literally forever. It was always obviously doomed.
  • Because Michael doesn't really understand humanity, and also has a very low opinion of humans. Him learning that is his character arc over the course of the show.
  • In fairness, Eleanor, who has a pretty strong 'bullshirt' detector, still takes at least a few weeks to twig. Chidi in Season 4 takes much longer, with far stronger evidence that he's not in The Good Place.
  • Jason! Jason figures it out.
    • Jason figuring it out was just a one in a thousand type thing (literally, as there were 802 attempts and Jason only figured it out once).
  • He actually expected it to last a thousand years, not forever. And a thousand years probably doesn't seem like all that long to such immortal beings.

Rules for the Middle Place

• Mindy resides in The Middle Place due to her sister fulfilling an idea for a charity that helped people across the world and after she passed, though she herself would've probably ended up in The Bad Place. Tahani worked for charities and tried to be a philanthropist, but her motivations for her "selfless" acts qualified her for The Bad Place. Why are these cases treated differently? The Middle Place seems to be a real thing not developed for Michaels trick, so what's the deal?
  • Mindy's epiphany and planning was done out of a genuine desire to do good, not for revenge or fame the way Tahani's efforts were.
  • Which is part of the deconstruction of morality the show engages in. Mindy briefly becomes a highly moral person because she's stoned out of her mind, and manages to mostly mitigate a life of selfishness. Tahani performs a lifetime of moral acts, but does so out of communal-narcissism and goes to the Bad Place.
  • Mindy being sent to the Medium Place was also not because her good points balanced the bad, but because the system couldn't decide whether or not she should get points for events that happened after her death. Tahani's actions were all carried out while she was alive, so Mindy's exception doesn't apply to her.
  • After the revelations about the points system in Season 3, it would seem Mindy received a massive influx of positive points for her intention to start her charity, but then died before she could begin receiving negative points from the unintended consequences of running said charity.
  • In all likeliness, the only reason Mindy was treated differently was because the peculiarities of her case meant that it ended up before the judge, resulting in a bespoke solution that didn't really care about the established rules. The bigger question is why nobody else in the past 500 years has gotten their case before the judge (or, if they have, every single one of them except Mindy failed to get an argument that would put them in the good place.)
  • Another thing to consider: The Good Place is deeply flawed itself and the architects there probably do not want any more people arriving because of that. So they've been avoiding challenges to the Judge, and when whatever freak sequence of events resulted in Mindy's getting there (possibly even a Bad Place architect realizing taking it to the judge would annoy the Good Place architects), they deliberately pushed for a bespoke Medium Place solution rather than pushing to put Mindy in the Good Place, which they realized would actually be worse for her in the long run.

Chidi and the philosophers in the Bad Place

• In Attempt #2, Chidi's first reaction on being told that he's going to the Good Place is excitement at the prospect of getting to meet all his favorite philosophers, and he's disappointed when Michael tells him that they're all in the Bad Place being tortured. Chidi being Chidi, it seems likely that some version of this conversation happened during the initial attempt. Either way, why does he maintain his faith in ethics and attempt to teach Eleanor to be worthy of the Good Place using the writings of people he believes are burning in Hell?
  • Plenty of philosophers had their eccentricities, vices or were just plain cynical. Chidi's knowledgeable enough to know of several philosophers whose views conflict so the why of ending up in eternal torture seems more an unfortunate circumstance than a condemnation of the study of ethics. It's a bummer a given philosopher is in eternal torment but that doesn't mean they were wrong.

Chidi's degree

• Chidi was a professor of ethics and moral philosophy; before he died, he was writing a book (not thesis) which he never finished his book because he was constantly revising and adding to it; and he once compared Eleanor to mean kids who told him he'd never get tenure. All this implies that he already had his doctorate. However, in season three, he's working on his thesis. Does he have his PhD or not?
  • On a similar note, is Simone actually Chidi's new thesis advisor, or did it just come across that way because of the transition between him saying he had to meet his advisor and him talking to her? If she is, why is she advising someone in a different department?
  • He's working on an additional thesis after the one that got him the PHD, and he's meeting someone outside his department for peer review as advising, who would be able to point out issues that someone in the department would simply gloss over. it does happen in academic circles.
  • It's likely the writers thought "thesis" is exchangeable with "research paper" (both work the same but papers are done by official academics/researchers and get published, whereas theses usually specifically refer to papers students write and get assessed on for their academic degree). People working in academics/research like Chidi are most certainly expected to write at least a couple of papers throughout their career.
  • Also, if he was first in France, it is possible that he was doing his Habilitation (Habilitation à diriger des recherches in French) degree, a degree after the Ph.D./D.Phil that in several European countries, including France, is required in order to advise doctoral students. Not every country has the Habilitation; Australia doesn't, but he may have left the Sorbonne and taken up the teaching position in Australia, while still working on his Habilitation (which requires several years of research after being appointed a professor, publications, and graduate student mentorship, and the defense of a new thesis (what in the US is referred to as the dissertation)), with the intention of returning to the Sorbonne to defend it and receive that post-doctorate degree.

what happens to babies/small children?

• What happens to those who die before they could possibly have developed any morality? Do they all go to the bad place?
  • "Original Sin" and as such are used to torture those who can't stand kids in the bad place. or it could be based on the age of one's soul. with spirits just manifesting as 20-40 somethings.
  • If the system is FAIR...you start with a net positive points. If not? It's unfair and that might be a plot point.
  • Chapter 36 implies that the score needed for entering the Good Place depends on age. It also, however, confirms that no one has earned the Good Place in the last 521 years.
  • It never implies any such thing. The line about Doug's point total being awful and him being doomed works equally well if the score depends on age OR if there's one static threshold that is just way higher than Doug's point total.
  • It's possible that people who die particularly young reincarnate. Michael mentioned that every religion was "about five percent" right, and several modern religions believe in reincarnation, so that might play some part that we haven't seen yet. Of course, if they live long enough they'd just fail to get into the Good Place anyway, but it's still better than dismissing them altogether because they never had a chance.

Who's older?

• Is Tahani older than Kamilah, or the other way around? This troper thought Tahani was supposed to be the over-shadowed older sibling upstaged by her younger sister?
  • Tahani is older. Some people probably get confused because it's usually the older sibling that upstages the younger one in fiction, instead of the other way around. Doesn't help that Jameelah Jamil (Tahani) is 9 years younger than Rebecca Hazlewood (Kamilah).

What happened to the reset buttons?

• Both Janet and Derek's reset plungers? did his get put on the train in case Mindy needs to reset him? or do they no longer exist, meaning they can't be upgraded further? and if so, how did that not severely damage Janet's functionality? (like removing a laptop's power button.)
  • It's not the equivalent to a power button. It's equivalent to taking out the battery for a hard reset, or the equivalent to that little area you can put a paper clip in to reset your computer. You can weld that shut without damaging the computer, or you can have an irremovable battery. (Which my laptop has)
  • It's been revealed that the reset spot is behind Janet's ear, not the beach plungers though. which rasies further questions of what the plungers are for in the first place, and if they still have functionality?
  • The spot behind her ear is for killing her permanently (or marblizing her indefinitely), not resetting her. The reset plungers are likely just deployed when she makes a neighborhood and undeployed afterwards. She could make another one if she wanted, but she probably doesn't - it's likely she's developed enough that she can now make progress without having to be reset.

Walking the train tracks?

• It's shown that the train tracks take you to "The Good Place" "The Bad Place" and "The Medium Place" so why cant the denizens just use them to walk out? I get that distance is a factor, making the train necessary, but the tracks would seem to still exist. If Stand by Me taught me anything is they can be easily traversed. Just watch out for trolleys.
  • Who says the tracks are always there? Maybe they only materialize when in use, and Janets have to make them form. If they are always in existence, maybe it's like that long bridge leading up to the door and the doorman: surrounded by a blank void, except without handrails, and you run the risk of falling off into nothingness.
  • It's a metaphysical train track. Chances are, you could walk as far as you wanted and not actually get anywhere.
  • Answered in Season 4. The train tracks do allow you to navigate between the Bad and Medium places, but it's shown to be a huge distance (it takes Michael and Jason on a handcart absolutely ages). The Good Place is not on the train line - we never see anyone arrive from there on the train - and the Soul Squad reach the Good Place via balloon.
  • Presumably, the Bad Place denizens are guarded or imprisoned in some way so they can't simply walk out of Mordor...er, the Bad Place.

Jason got arrested

• ...And then left the country. He admitted to attempted robbery in front of the police, so there's no way those charges were dropped. He has mentioned going to court before in "Rhonda, Diana, Jake, and Trent," so he almost definitely has prior convictions, which means he won't get off with a light sentence. His year recap to Michael ends with getting bailed out of jail, not with a trial or finishing up serving prison time, so he hasn't had his trial yet. Is it even possible for him to make it out of the country with a pending trial? Wouldn't they deny his application for a passport? And is he ever able to go back to America?
  • The subplot of the episode is how much Michael is meddling. Take it from there.
  • Michael doesn't have any of his powers, and has to do things like take the bus to get around. He can't exactly convince a judge to drop all charges.
  • Immigration and customs enforcement AFAIK doesn't mull over everyone's arrest record when you enter the country?
  • Maybe not their past arrest records, no, but upcoming felony trials, yes. There's a reason most parole agreements stipulate that you can't leave the country, and passports do get denied or suspended. Jason might have been able to leave, but he would've been immediately arrested upon his return.
  • Probably Michael (with no experience of the human justice system) and Jason (being, well, Jason) wouldn't think of that.
  • Janet probably had a trick to get around it with all her knowledge, the way she used her knowledge to get Eleanor a winning lottery ticket. She wasn't with Michael on the trip where he convinces Jason to go, but he could've just asked her before he came to Earth.

How is Eleanor pronounced?

• Most characters say "ell - eh - nurr". Maybe a few times it's been said "ell - eh - nor". Which one is it?
  • It's a regional thing. To-May-toe, To-Mah-toe.

Wasn't Tahani famous?

• If her friends included Kevin Costner, Elon Musk, Taylor Swift, Ben Affleck, and Matt Damon, wouldn't Tahani be somewhat well-known to some of the people she's encountering on Earth or the Good Place? Maybe not Chidi but Chidi's S3 girlfriend, Eleanor and possibly Jason might have known her from tabloid magazines.
  • She's recognized as Kamilah's sister. When Eleanor and Tahani met in s3, Eleanor specifically recognized her, and Chidi was certainly aware she was famous.
  • It's implied that Michael erased the group's memories of any association on Earth, specifically to exacerbate the torture in the neighborhood; the Judge does the same thing so that Simone knowing the Soul Squad won't compromise the season 4 experiment. Eleanor is much nicer to Tahani in Season 3 than she was in any of the reboots because she knows that Tahani is the real deal and has sibling issues. Meanwhile, Chidi goes Squee when Tahani personally answers the phone about his study group, saying he can't believe he actually reached her.

Jeremy Bearimy plot holes

• If time doesn't move forward in the first place, isn't that contrary to Michael's progression of getting his very first neighborhood and facing real consequences for it?
  • Time does move forward—and back, and in loops. It's in comparison to Earth's timeline; on its own, the afterlife moves in a fashion that is linearly understandable, and would result in Michael facing real consequences.

Why are Michael and Janet doomed in Season 3

• Judging by his misunderstanding of human anatomy in the episode where Eleanor visits her mother, I don't think Michael or Janet are human in any sense. So who's to say they will die and end up back in the afterlife?
  • They're not worried about dying. But sooner or later they'll have to go back (either when the humans die or when the Judge comes after them), and then they'll be punished.

What are the rules for mentally disabled people in the good or bad place

• In the U.S. legal system, if you're too disabled to account for your actions, then you don't get fully punished. Doesn't Jason Mendoza fit that description?
  • Jason is aware that his actions are illegal, which is more than enough for culpability in the US legal system. The afterlife is slightly weirder since part of the point is that people don't know the exact way the points system works, but he's been shown several times to be aware that what he is doing is wrong, he's just too short-sighted to rethink his actions.

Lack of Communication and Completely Westernized Pakistani Family?

• Writing this from the POV of a Westernized Indian woman who's on Season One of the Good Place. It's revealed that Kamilah felt the pressure from her parents to be the better sister, even as she and Tahani suffered, and implied to the audience that she must have felt horrible about causing her sister's Freak Out that indirectly led to Tahani's death. (Not to mention the bad publicity of her insulting her sister in front of her friends and then witnessing her die in a preventable accident.) In Indian culture, there's a clash between the younger and older generations that's fairly common, and Pakistani-English culture may be the same regarding expectations of growing children reaching their potential. Why didn't she and Tahani just talk it out, ideally over a couple of drinks, or with a therapist after their parents died?
  • The social stigma of therapy in that family might have been too high.
  • The family looks to be highly Westernized after immigrating from Pakistan; the parents praise Kamilah and ignore Tahani for doing Western style art as children. If Tahani wanted to step out of her sister's shadow, why didn't she try to get back in touch with her family's roots and try to be her own person on that front? And why didn't she realize earlier that her parents were emotionally abusive and that she would never please them?
  • Re: the last point, without trying to spoil anything else, Tahani does eventually get some closure/epiphany of sorts with her parents later on in the show.
  • By the time their parents died, Tahani and Kamilah had been so conditioned into seeing each other as rivals that they didn't know how to behave otherwise. Again, no spoilers, but this is addressed later in the show.
  • Keep in mind that we don't know how long the family has lived in Britain, though certainly at least since the parents since they have British accents. Given this plus the few times that Tahani describes herself as British, we can't say how much - of any - they retain of Indian culture. As soon as third generation immigrants (so grandchildren of immigrants depending on how you measure) have been shown to lose much if not all of their association and connection with their historical background, identifying as being of the country of their birth.

Chidi not realizing he has an anxiety disorder?

• Speaking as someone who is indecisive, usually anxiety is the root of wanting to make the right decision. Chidi seems to have an anxiety disorder, which means that he'd be suffering from a mental illness. This obviously doesn't excuse the harm he's caused, especially with how many people call him out for it but why didn't he realize and get help for it, especially since he was a university professor with access to the campus counseling?
  • Chidi's main flaw isn't just that he's indecisive, but that his indecisiveness hurts others without him noticing it. He may not realize it's evidence of a disorder because his anxiety doesn't manifest in more obviously harmful ways—after all, he's an accomplished academic and is overall pretty high-functioning despite his anxiety.
  • One of the themes of the show starting in the third season is that existing concepts of Heaven and Hell are flawed. The idea that Chidi's a terrible person because he was indecisive and doesn't deserve redemption or happiness in the afterlife are challenged.
  • This isn't about if Chidi is good or terrible. It's that he's not well. Therapy isn't a cure-all, unfortunately, but it does help with tracking, with being aware of your triggers and such. I'd like to think that Chidi would have been happier at least if he got help for his anxiety.
  • This assumes a number of things about mental illness and the people that have them that may or may not be true. And we'll leave it at that.
  • Dude. I'm the OP of this question and I have general anxiety disorder. I need therapy because otherwise my fears and worries would not allow me to function.
  • This is part of the whole point of the show; the gradual realisation that the current system is grotesquely unfair precisely because it fails to account for nuances like possible mental disorders and how they might affect human behaviour, and thus human ethics, without the human in question even being aware of it. It is made abundantly clear that someone like Chidi, who clearly attempts to live as ethical a life as is possible, still being deemed worthy of eternal damnation and torture simply because his indecisiveness hurt or frustrated other people is an injustice.

Abraham Lincoln (Chapter 36 spoilers)

• Early in Season 1, we learn that Abraham Lincoln is the only US president to make it into the Good Place. However, late into Season 3, we find out that nobody has made it into the Good Place for over 500 years, and Lincoln was only born about 200 years ago. Was this a retcon, yet another one of Michael's lies, or something Michael actually believed?
  • Given that he's shown to have no access to the accountants' records, it's most likely that he was making it up.
  • I immediately copped this too. Michael might not be lying. True he doesn't have access to accountant records, but he is likely to know what famous people are and aren't in the Bad Place. However it can be explained away with Jeremy Beremy time. No person born in the past 500 years of Afterlife time have gotten in, which translated to Earth time is about a hundred and fifty years or so since globalization.

Aliens?

• The existence of Gen, the Demons from the bad place, the Accountants, and good place denizens leads to a question: Do extraterrestrials exist in the dimension of The Good Place? and do they also subscribe to Western philosophical mores even if they've never fully come in to contact with humans? or do they have a different moral code that still would qualify them for TGP/TBP?
  • It's impossible to answer, because we really don't know. It's possible every world with sentient life gets its own afterlife system, or that Earth is the only place in the universe with sentient life. There's really no answer given in the show.

"Good" people

• If no one has made it into the Good Place in 521 years, those who made it to the Medium Place should have been the best people to exist. Why did Mindy get in to the Medium Place when she'd done numerous bad things if even the absolute best people are condemned to the Bad Place?
  • Mindy didn't get to the Medium Place by her point total. She got there because her case went in front of the Judge. As we saw in The Burrito, the Judge isn't necessarily bound to the usual system and can be more lenient.
  • The accountants imply that age has something to do with point goals, when he said Doug Forcett was on track until he saw his age. Mindy died relatively young (Maribeth Monroe is forty), and then got points for her sister following her plans after her death. So she sort of accidentally cheated the system, getting credit for decades of good deeds without any possibility of bad deeds to drag her score down. That, presumably, is why her case went in front of the Judge instead of just being given the points and being allowed into the Good Place.
  • The accountant's statements don't imply that age is a factor. Say there's a static point goal of 1,000,000 that you need to reach before you die and you're told somebody alive currently has a score of 500,000. Is that good or bad? Well, if they're near the beginning of their life, being halfway there is amazing! If they're about halfway through their expected life, they're on track. If they're near the end of their expected life, halfway is not nearly good enough. That's presumably what happened when the accountant looked at Doug's file: he initially assumed Doug was younger and thus on track to reach the threshold, but then saw his actual age and realised that it's unlikely for Doug to reach the appropriate threshold with his relatively few remaining years.
  • Also keep in mind the late season reveal of S3 that because the world is more interconnected and thus making unintended consequences increasingly count for/against you. Mindy coming up with a great plan to save a lot of people and then IMMEDIATELY dying means that she NEVER had to deal with any of the consequences of that one great other than inspiring her sister to start the charity. Any bad stuff would have been 'passed along' to other people. This is probably what happened to get her point total zero-ed out - that one act had so few, if any, negative consequences for her directly and so many good ones that it was probably one of the few positive point additions to her score. And possibly some of her bad actions beforehand may have even become 'good' because of the unintended consequence of inspiring her to write the original idea for the charity.

Doug Forcett and Tahani

• It's obvious that Doug's motivations are similar to Tahani's, albeit taken up to eleven. Tahani only did good actions because of the fame it would bring her. In a similar way, Doug makes it clear that he only started doing good actions because of an epiphany he had about the afterlife, which made him aware that doing said actions would bring him to the Good Place. Both only tried to be "good" people because they expected being rewarded for it, not because they felt it was the right thing to do, which means that their motivations are corrupt. Why Michael didn't considered all that about Doug Forcett? Why nobody (Janet, Shawn, the Accountant, the Judge) pointed this out to Michael? It's even more jarring considering that Michael personally selected Tahani to Neighborhood 12358W because her pretension of being "good" would play along with the other characters issues.
  • Doug isn't pretending to be good. He is a good person, doing the most good he possibly can, just with a rather screwed up understanding of what that means due to his brief vision of the afterlife.
  • Doug followed through on his actions much more thoroughly so they weren't surface-only. A charity ball where you're name-dropping and being exclusive in your guest list and spending lavish amounts of food (some of which are surely produced in unethical ways from non-free range animals) might produce you negative points to go along with your positive points
  • I think they discussed this on the podcast: Doug doesn't know for sure that his theory is right, because he's never had direct confirmation. He's working off his own certainty, which counts as faith, so he can get points for it, the way any religious person who believes in God and heaven and hell does in the universe of the show. The metaphysical nature of it apparently makes it non-corrupt, whereas Tahani was only looking for rewards from other people, thus making her motivation more material and worldly.

"Apparently I'm Black"

• After the Judge goes to Earth, she says, "Apparently I'm Black, and they do not like Black ladies." The thing is... she looks really Caucasian. Is she supposed to be mixed race?
  • The actor who plays the judge, Maya Rudolph, is of mixed race African-American/Ashkenazi Jewish background (Jewish father and African-American mother). Looking at her out of makeup and costume picture on her wikipedia page◊ then it is quite obvious that she has African American ancestry.

The Ages of the Dead People

• Why are all of the dead people between the ages of 25 and 50? I know that they're technically actually almost all demons, but still, why do none of the four mention all first season how WEIRD it is that no old people went to heaven? Michael Schur kind of addressed it in an interview, but the interview was from before the S1 finale aired so it was obviously BS to cover up the fact that most of the people in the "Good Place" weren't actually people... I also didn't like his reason (that most of the big red-letter things that get people into the Good Place are more impressive when done by younger people).
  • It's possible that they simply made a few assumptions based on various movie depictions of what a heaven might be like. For instance, they might have assumed that heaven puts people at an age in one's prime that one felt most accomplished and comfortable as being over 70 and potentially in physical decline to one degree or another would hardly be pleasant for eternity.
  • There are only 322 "people" in the neighbourhood, so the assumption wouldn't be that no old people went to the Good Place, but just that no old people ended up in that neighbourhood. That's not too unreasonable, especially if people were supposedly chosen to be compatible in some way.
  • Perhaps they assumed that in the Good Place, everyone would be their personal ideal age—either the age when they were their best possible selves, the age that was their happiest time in life, or any other arbitrary reason. As for why everyone in the neighborhood is within a similar range, since the place is (allegedly) designed for maximum happiness, perhaps part of that happiness means having a group of similarly aged peers. It's possible that someone whose "personal best" age was 60+ would find themselves in a neighborhood of older residents, or that someone who remembered their childhood fondly could choose to be young forever and in a neighborhood of similarly-aged playmates.
  • The Grand Finale shows that at least at that time you get to choose your age and appearance when you to the afterlife. Doug Forcett is played by his younger actor not his older one.

Babies

• What if someone's greatest wish in life was to have a child, and they never got to while on Earth? As described, in the Good Place you can have anything you want, but would that be something people would just have to accept as not being possible?
  • Well, first of all, our conception of the good place has been revealed to be fraudulent since the end of Season 1, so we don't know what the rules of baby creation are in the good place. I'm assuming someone Janet would give you a crying facsimile of a baby but not an actual living being, but that's just my guess.
  • They could be given an actual kid who died young to take care of.

Chidi's memory reset

• Having Chidi's memory reset to "the exact moment when the air conditioner fell on him" brings up a few things that confuses made. 1. If Chidi's memory reset makes him forget EVERYTHING that has happened since the air conditioner, does that mean nothing that each of the main characters did in their second chance on Earth erased such as Tahani's and Eleanor's reconciliations with their family members actually happen. That is very sad, but at would explain why Simone did not recognize Eleanor. BUT if that is true that them leaving Earth from the bar fight to Janet's void means that Chidi dating Simone never happened..because it required a push from Eleanor. Sure the main cast (including Chidi if he didn't get his memory reset) would remember that reality, but if Janet teleporting the cast to her void, means that they died when they died first, resetting Chidi's memory would be pointless in the first place. But if Janet's teleporting means them dying the moment they're in the void, why didn't Simone recognize Eleanor?
  • Simone doesn't recognise Eleanor because her memories of all four humans were erased (with Gen's permission), so that she wouldn't recognise them and therefore not stress them out and jeopardise the experiment. The four humans' "second chance" on Earth still happened — Simone and Chidi just don't remember, due to their memory wipes.

Why is Mindy always dressed up?

• Mindy seems to not care whatsoever if visitors like the cockroach team see her naked or how she presents herself to the world. So when she does wear clothes, why is it always that business casual lawyer outfit (that must not be the most comfortable thing as opposed to sweats) and why is she wearing make-up?
  • Some people enjoy wearing makeup even when at home, regardless if anyone sees them or not. If that's not what Mindy's doing, then it's probably just the case of Wakeup Makeup (character wearing makeup when they normally wouldn't need to, so that the actors look presentable on camera).
  • It is the Medium Place, so it would make sense that things are kinda so-so. Her clothes aren't like silk, but they also aren't on fire.
  • She dresses like that because it’s in-keeping with her character as a stereotypical’80s shark lawyer, to remind the audience what kind of a person she was. (It’s one of those things that really lends itself more to a Doylist reading than a Watsonian one.
  • And Mindy does care if people see her naked. She spent her time naked when she was spending eternity alone, but freaked out and covered herself when people showed up. As for the clothes; they're probably a little uncomfortable, which is very Medium.

Derek and Martinis

• If Janet can't eat, why is it Derek can consume martinis since they function the same.
  • Several possible explanations: Janet might have designed Derek differently; he might not be drinking an actual martini but it looks like one from our puny human perceptions; Janet doesn't have a function of eating because it's not a necessity for her, she has a job to do, Derek's job is just to lounge around.
  • Also, Derek canonically works at least a bit differently than Janet, since he's capable of having sex (or at least an approximation of it). So maybe he can eat too?

The scope of Mindy's charity

• How big could the foundation Mindy designed possibly be to justify her entry into the Medium Place? The show itself brings up Abraham Lincoln and Jonas Salk at different points as examples of surprising Bad Place residents. How could one charity possibly have a bigger impact than the ending of slavery and the development of the polio vaccine?
  • At no point did anybody actually establish that it did have a bigger impact or that it was worth more points or anything of that nature. The things we know for a fact are that the Good Place & Bad Place argued over whether Mindy earned the points for the foundation, that the Judge heard Mindy's case, that the Judge is able to override the points system, and that Mindy ended up in a Medium Place. It seems that she ended up in the Medium Place more because she got lucky that the Judge got to make a decision and the Judge decided to do something off book than because of where her point total landed.

Mindy turns down fake paradise?

• Mindy doesn't really like hosting the Soul Squad, but she didn't ask for a cut of the benefits of the new neighborhood when they asked to use her backyard in Season 3? Sure, frozen yogurt may not be as useful as cocaine and Derek, but Janet is essentially there, who can give Mindy whatever she wants. Including more cocaine and more sex toys. Has being isolated for thirty years done a number on her with only the four humans and Derek for company?
  • Best headscratcher I've seen all day! Only plausible answer is that maybe the other residents don't get to live the full life and are only used as background like the characters in Truman Show. In one episode, they all shut down.
  • One possible explanation: Mindy was an ash-hole on Earth, and the only reason she wasn't sent to the Bad Place was because she was about to do good right before she died. It is possible that one of the humans could recognise her, and remember her actions and behaviour on earth, and question how she got to the Good Place.
  • In the S4 finale, Eleanor approaches Mindy to persuade her to go through the new system. Mindy is initially resistant. She's grown used to her mediocre existence. Being put through the wringer, having all your flaws exposed, and having to work on overcoming them, is a scary prospect when there's an easy, comfortable alternative that you're used to, even if it's extremely medium.
  • The judge probably forbid her from getting any of that stuff because it would be 'good' in her particular classification instead of 'medium.' Just because they're using her backyard doesn't mean her own afterlife sentence changed.

Why not use the Janet babies for points data or even as a replacement for Linda?

• After The Good Place woman turned out to be a demon in disguise, why not use one of the Janet babies? Chidi might produce inaccurate data considering his involvement with Simone anyway.
  • The point of the experiment is to see how humans can (or cannot) improve, using a Janet baby to replace Linda wouldn't mean anything. Chidi got his memories wiped specifically so that his interactions with Simone wouldn't affect the experiment, making him a convenient candidate as the fourth human subject.

Who's in danger of being wiped out?

• I'm not completely clear if Judge Gen simply planned to wipe out all human souls or if she intended to wipe out humans, demons, Janets, Good Place agents, etc.
  • The latter. She tells Michael, Shawn and Janet that she'll maybe see them again in a few billion years, so she does plan to wipe out the afterlife beings on top of the humans.
  • Nah, they just don't have any reason to see each other unless there are humans around to judge.

Motivations and unintended consequences.

• It's a major plot point in Season 1 that Tahani was sent to The Bad Place because, despite the unquestionable amount of good that her actions caused, she was acting out of a corrupt motivation. However, it's a major plot point in Season 3 that unintended consequences of an action can negate them even if they are ostensibly done out of a good motivation. Isn't that a contradiction? Why do bad motivations negate good consequences, but not the other way around?
  • The point is that the system is inherently flawed. Hence why no human has gotten to the good place in over 500 years.
  • But even if that system wasn't flawed, the idea is that motivations and consequences *both* matter rather than being just about motivation or just about consequences. To use a terrible analogy, it would be asking like one person who had food and no water died but another person who had water and no food *also* died.
  • Could you clarify the above please? The analogy was not very clear. From what I gather in season one Michael was going from a misconception that despite Tahini good deeds her motivations lead to her going to hell. However he and the audience later learned that was not that cut and dry. Her good deeds lead to good points yes, but while Tahani was penalized for her motivation. The penalty was even more severe as not only did she lose points due to motivation she would have also have lost points due to unexpected consequences due to her actions. Remember thanks to a broken point system you could lose points just for buying an apple due to pesticides. No matter the good done the broken point system would have made any point gain either moot or she would suffer point loss due the unintended consequences. Her best case scenario is no points gained or loss. Worst case she would gain negative points. In either case she would not have gained any good points, which would not have mattered as the threshold for Good Place entry was so high that it was impossible to reach anyway due to consistently losing points daily due to the broken system.
  • A minor line from Gen when she rejects the Soul Squad's argument that the system is broken has her declare that people choose their actions, and should simply do enough research to ensure they make the most ethical choice. This could suggest, then, that the system assumes that every action is performed with full knowledge and understanding of the consequences, as well as taking into account your motivation for doing said action. The trouble is, the interconnectedness of modern life means that no matter how pure one's intentions, there will always be too many negative consequences.
    Returning to Tahani, it's probable that even if her motivation for her philanthropy were driven entirely by a selfless desire to do good for no reward or recognition, it still wouldn't matter, as the various negative consequences of all her choices and actions, major and minor, would cumulatively drown out the good she did and the purity of her intentions.

Michael the Human

• In the finale Michael becomes fully human and is living on Earth. He was incarnated on Earth as he appears in the afterlife as an old man instead of being born and going through the whole human lifespan. Does he have his memories of the afterlife and being a demon? What happens when he dies and goes to the afterlife? Will Michael get his demon powers back?
  • Yes he retains his memories, we get a montage of him gleefully exploring the ordinary things of mankind. No, he doesn't get his powers back when he dies. They explicitly say he is going into the system as a human. He'll one day die and go to the testing, and then onto the Good Place and eventually the forest door just like any other human. That is part of the selling point to the Judge to allow it.

Globalisation's sending everyone to Hell

• Apparently, it used to be possible to get into Heaven, but ever since Columbus conquered the New World, imperialism and, later, global capitalism have made it impossible for your actions not to have negative repercussions. How does this work? It's only within the last fifty years or less that ethical consumption has even been possible: vegan products, carbon-neutral products, Fair Trade products, recycled products, and so on, have only begun to appear recently. And in feudal times, it wouldn't even be possible to acquire products not produced through slavery, or serfdom at best. Given how often the show invokes support of slavery as a reason for various figures going to Hell, this gets especially weird.
  • Even prior to the increasing interconnectedness of life, it was still really hard to get into the Good Place. It was reserved for the very best people. The difference now is that even doing something incredible - like stopping slavery - will still not earn you enough points, since all your other, more innocuous actions, will lose you a steady stream of points.
  • But innocuous actions in the past, by that logic, should have lost you even more points. Globalisation should be making it easier to get into The Good Place, not harder.
  • Not at all. The point is about far-reaching, unintended consequences. Buying a sack of potatoes in 1321 would have had far fewer consequences, negative and positive, compared to buying some in 2020. The potatoes in 1321 would almost certainly have been grown without pesticides, and would not be transported very far. Maybe you would have lost points overall because you were indirectly funding a brutal feudal lord, but you might not have lost many.
    In 2020, however, you might drive in your eco-unfriendly car, to the supermarket, owned by a corrupt businessman and which was built with damaging environmental consequences, to buy a sack of potatoes grown with pesticides that were shipped from 1000s of miles away and grown by exploited workers. That will lose you more points, making your virtuous actions count for less.
    Janet(s) explicitly shows that Doug Forcett, who has lived for decades trying to lose as few points as possible, is still not going to get in. The point being, even living off the grid, attempting a carbon-neutral lifestyle and being kind, helpful and generous with one's time, money and actions, is not enough. So, returning to the potatoes, if you cycle to a local, independent farm which grows them organically, this may gain (or at least not lose) you points. But all your other purchases, actions and decisions have just as many consequences.
    Owning a smartphone must lose you hundreds, since they're invariably produced in sweatshops, using components that trash the environment, and rack up 1000's of miles of travel just being made. That's before considering which OS and apps you use, meaning which developers and businesses you're supporting. The clothes you wear, the shoes you buy, what websites you subscribe to, the company you work for, how you get to work, etc etc etc. Think about how many ripples each of those choices and actions have today, compared to 800 years ago.
  • "if you cycle to a local, independent farm which grows them organically, this may gain (or at least not lose) you points." That's precisely the point here; in 1321 there would be no way of buying potatoes ethically. In 2020 it's at least possible, even if most people don't shop that way. It should be the other way around from what's presented; in the past, no-one ever got to The Good Place, while nowadays it's extremely rare, but not impossible.
  • Of course it was possible to buy potatoes ethically in 1321. The premise that every single transaction before a certain point in history automatically lost you points is fallacious.
    In 1321, everything was organic, and the carbon footprint of a meal was minuscule. An independent homestead, growing all their own food, having roast chicken, potatoes and carrots for dinner would almost certainly not lose points. There's no question of pesticides, of supporting unethical businesses, of excessive food miles, or anything else like that.
    In 2020, people eating this same meal would have to make a real effort just to not lose points. Most people don't have the luxury of choosing where they get their food from, so will invariably end up supporting corrupt businesses, buying products made in sweatshops, and using services that exploit vulnerable people. They don't intentionally do so, but they can't really do anything else.
    All this ignores the larger point, which is that even if you make the most ethical choices possible in every single situation presented to you in modern life, you still won't get into the Good Place. Again, this is explicitly pointed out by the closing episodes of Season 3. Doug Forcett, who has lived the most ethical life possible in all senses of the word, is still falling short. Because while his lifestyle may be earning him points, it's not earning him enough. It's two steps forward, one step back, but he needs to be taking 5 steps forward all the time to reach the finish line.
  • "Ethical consumption" is an invention of late-stage capitalism. It's only because late-stage capitalism has introduced so many hidden ethical dilemmas in our shopping habits that it's become a necessary thing to question at all. There was "no way of buying potatoes ethically" in 1321 because it simply wasn't a factor in 1321; most people grew their own food or sourced it from a farm which was a day's walk away at most, so most of the hidden ethical dilemmas we fret over today regarding food supply weren't a concern at all. Your clothes weren't purchased cheaply at high-street retailers which almost certainly used sweatshop labour; you likely knew the local weaver, would buy the fabrics at the local market, and made the clothes yourself.
  • In any case, as noted above, this is missing the wood for the trees. The whole point is that the system is simplistic, overly prescriptive, lacking nuance, and reduces human morality to a points system which is in no way equipped to handle it. The problem is not that modern life is more or less ethical than, say, medieval life; it's that the system is unfairly rigged from the start because it overlooks any kind of nuance, motivation or sincerity in how someone tries to live an ethical life and reduces it to numbers.

Janet in the penultimate episode

• In the penultimate episode, our heroes finally arrive in the real Good Place. Janet gets a new update, and has all the answers. She even meets another Janet, a Good Place-born and raised Janet. So, "our" Janet, the one we know and have known since season 1, finally enters The Good Place together with Michael and the protagonists. But: season 1's Good Place was actually The Bad Place. (first season finale revelation) Does this mean that "our" Janet - the one we know and have loved for four seasons - is actually ... a Bad Janet? Because she hails from the fake Good Place, a.k.a. The Bad Place? Shouldn't our Janet then be constantly checking her smartphone, being snarky, and having lots of flatulence?
  • No. Michael stole a Good Janet.

How long is a Bearimy?

• We know that time doesn't work the same in the afterlife as on Earth, but we do see that it's possible to pinpoint the beginning and end of a 'Jeremy Bearimy' loop, since it's repeatedly used, both by characters and the show's transition title cards, as a countable unit of time. Since there's a day/night cycle, there must then be a way to translate a Bearimy into 'Earth Days', if only in the sense of how it's experienced by the humans in the afterlife. So, do we know how long that is?
  • It's deliberately unclear. My conjecture, derived from the rough sketch Michael used to illustrate the concept, is that a single Bearimy encompasses a span of Earth time roughly equivalent to the number of earth years that any given deceased lived before passing on. In this vein, the dot of the i is the spot where it switches gears into a new generation on earth. Furthermore, the reason the "second chance" was still possible is because Seasons 1 and 2 were within a singular Bearimy.
  • Actually, it's more complicated then that...basically? Time in the afterlife flows in an entirely different manner then Earth...and time on Earth can 'cycle' in the time it takes something to happen in the afterlife. Basically? A Bearimy could, in fact, be the amount of time it takes for all of human existence to occur, then you reach the exact point it started...or it might not. Part of the joke is how INSANELY confusing and nonsensical it is.

Could Michael have rejected Eleanor's confession?

• Perhaps it wouldn't have been permanent, but would Michael have been able to prevent the rapid collapse of his experiment by merely pretending not to believe Eleanor and reassuring her that she isn't the problem? Invalidating her entire character growth and refusing to hear her case could keep her trapped in torture for longer, right? Perhaps the established premise of "something is ruining the neighborhood" would prove to be its own undoing because something would have to be pegged as the cause, but Michael didn't have to accept Eleanor's confession.
  • The point was to torture Eleanor. If he'd shrugged off her confession by either not believing her or ignoring her, or 'deciding' that she wasn't the cause of the problems, she wouldn't have felt guilty any longer. It was also a completely unexpected development that Michael hadn't prepared for, meaning he had to improvise, so he couldn't devise a perfect response.
    This is also ultimately a moot point, as we see that Eleanor works out the ruse around 800 times, whether or not she ends up confessing. Even if Michael had come up with a different response to her confession, she'd have eventually worked it out.

If Brent's last-second goodness was used as an argument...

• Then why wasn't Simone and John's desertion? Wouldn't that have given Shawn a pretty good counter to the whole "moral choice not counted by the points" angle Michael was using? Simone and John abandoned Brent and Chidi without it affecting their points, so wouldn't that have been a compelling counter to Michael's argument about Brent?
  • Michael's closing argument is this: "People improve when they get external love and support. How can we hold it against them when they don’t?". Simone and John improved massively when they were given a framework in which to do so. Their behaviour deteriorated when the afterlife went off the rails, and they realised they were the subjects of an experiment or study, and certainly not in the Good Place. This was also happening at a time when the focus was massively on getting Brent to improve, at the expense of everyone else. The external love and support they'd been getting for the past year vanished, so how can we hold their actions against them?
  • Different acts have different point values. It's possible that them deserting Brent simply wasn't a significant point loss because you're not required to risk your life for someone who has been a jerk to you - they'd have gotten points if they saved him, sure, but the point system doesn't require that you be a hero. (A bigger question is why Brent gained so many points for a mere realization and half-apology, when usually the point system seems to care a lot more about actions and their impact.)

Why wasn't Brent shown fully redeemed by the end?

• It's true he was probably the most detestable human in the show, but it seemed like he had a major perspective flip and was headed in a better direction. Did he lose memories of the experiment and regress? It seems like he's back in his old pattern of not realizing the situation is designed to break him into being a better person, but it feels like a reset on his character.
  • If you're looking for a satisfactory in-universe explanation there probably isn't one. Perhaps in spite of his seemingly genuine apology maybe Brent's just an irredeemable person. It's not hard to imagine that some people are like that. Hitler. Mussolini. The guy who invented frozen yogurt. It's possible to feel bad for doing bad things and still be willing to do them.
  • Nobody is irredeemable, Chidi explicitly says that is a feature of the new system; that everybody including all those guys gets a chance to earn their way to The Good Place. It just takes a lot of work. Brent's apology wasn't quite enough on its own, just as Chidi, Eleanor, Jason, and Tahani's realisations weren't enough on their first time around either, it took a lot of resets and memory wipes to get them to where they were at the end. Each time a reset happens, a little bit of life experience carries over, each reset makes you a little better. How much, and how many, is up to the individual and how willing they are to accept change and admit to their faults and privileges. Brent is just taking longer to work through all his ingrained issues and privilege. That is all. He'll get there in the end, no matter how many Jeremy Bearimys it takes. They showed he was on the path, that was enough.
  • His Heel Realization at the end of the experiment probably got wiped from his memory, meaning once he entered Afterlife 2.0, he was starting from scratch. Even if it didn't get wiped, and the experiment data counted as his first run through the new system, he would have only been left with the vague memory of feeling bad about how he treated Chidi. Considering how much effort was required to get him to that stage, he's presumably just not that receptive to thinking he's doing anything wrong.
  • For Doylist? It was a joke at Boomers...for Watsonian? It's because Brent, even if he accepts his issues...has the hardest core issue to deal with. All the others rejected morality. He simply, at his core, does not understand it. But this means he has to learn everything from scratch. (Simply having it explained is, actually, best for this). He's a child...and he needs to learn to adult one step at a time.
  • As a way to make it clear that, for some people, it will take a long time before they're ready to reach the Good Place. That had kind of been shown with Tahani and Kamilah's parents, as it took them about 3,000 Bearimies to pass their tests, but actually seeing someone be on version number 15,000 has a different effect. No one is irredeemable, but the tests aren't just a free pass into Heaven. Someone who was a fundamentally terrible person will have to spend eons before they're ready to move on.
  • Remember, Brent's apology was enough to get him back to where he was when he entered the experiment: a massive, entitled douche who barely understood that he even had been a jerk, let alone why.

Why do people need to eat and sleep in the afterlife?

• I can see eating for pleasure, but why bother sleeping if you don't have to (most people do consider it a nuisance in real life.)
  • No Exit, which influenced The Good Place, actually uses the lack of sleep as a torture in Hell, taking the view that sleep is a chance for a person to take a break from themselves and life and the way people see them. Even if sleep isn't biologically necessary for those in the afterlife, there's an argument to be made that mental health would be damaged by the sudden removal of the shutoff sleep provides, and some people enjoy sleeping and dreaming. In the end, sleeping and eating are things humans are used to and rely on, so to no longer have them would feel strange in an afterlife, even if you knew they weren't necessary.
  • Okay, first off... most people consider sleeping a total nuisance? That is just flat out untrue. Tons of people enjoy the sensation of sleeping.

Why does everyone just accept that a permanent death is necessary?

• Philosophically, there are many reasons why it wouldn't make sense to end one's existence. For example, Epicurus said "Why should I fear death? If I am, then death is not. If Death is, then I am not." This should apply just as much to wanting death. How can someone want something that can only exist when they don't? Also, there are so many other potential solutions for the happiness-zombie problem. Michael suggests rebooting, but Chidi points out that that was originally done to torture them. What does the reason something was done at a different time have to do with whether it's right to do it at a different time for a different reason? In addition, if Janet can materialize a baby elephant made of pure light that tells true secrets about the universe, why can't she give everyone magical anti-ennui pills or something?
  • The thesis of the new afterlife is "all the time you need; nothing more, nothing less." The paradise factor of the modified afterlife system is not eternal existence having fun (at least, not completely), but rather that it grants people the time to do everything they never got to or always wanted to do: any adventure, pleasure, reconciliation, achievement, or activity...and when that's done, the person can leave satisfied. Because when they feel truly fulfilled, they don't need to stay around and repeat things or struggle to find something new. It's a completion and a positive reframing of oblivion that encourages audiences to do what they need to before they die as well. Chidi's argument about reboots being torture is sound: a reboot is fundamentally a loss. Starting a life over in reincarnation fashion requires a loss of the growth and experience from before, which can seem pretty tragic, but even just wiping people's memories of paradise will eventually require they get wiped again because they'll be done with it again. Suddenly it's the same problem but with another step. Ending one's existence is portrayed positively because the Good Place lets them do everything they ever wanted or needed before they do so. It may take Bearimies upon Bearimies for different people, but they leave because there's, in all wholesome positivity, no reason to stay. (And for the people who don't see the reason to leave, well...they never have to. That's the beauty of it being a choice.)

‘Retirement’?

• Shortly before the big reveal in the S1 finale, Shawn while posing as the judge says that due to Michael’s ‘mistake’, whatever choice the Soul Squad makes he’ll be in pretty hot water with his boss, with retirement an on the table...okay, so far this makes sense. But with the reveal Shawn actually is his boss, this falls apart on two fronts. The first is that Michael hasn’t yet made a mistake that Shawn knows of. The second is this isn’t an attempt to guilt the humans like Michael’s retirement party earlier in the season because they’re in a separate room and do not hear, so given Shawn remains in character as the judge who is this conversation supposed to be for the benefit of?
  • Michael has made a mistake: He's created an unsustainable torture system and forced Shawn to get involved in the proceedings when the neighborhood was meant to be independent and effective indefinitely. Michael's setup wasn't supposed to see Eleanor actually improve as a person and confess, but she did and now the torture scenarios are desperate contrivances to keep the humans in torment now that they've entered unforeseen territory. Michael's basically screwed up his first attempt already, which is why Shawn is unhappy with him. The conversation is between Shawn and Michael the demons, not Shawn the judge and Michael the Good Place architect.

Empathic plants

• In the third episode, Eleanor gets a gift of a plant that wilts or grows as her relationship with Tahani worsens or grows better and appears to be an accidental part of the 'broken' good place. Considering it ends of a positive note of their relationship blooming, this seems to make sense for the good place; but given it's really a perfectly functioning bad place under Michael's complete control?
  • The plant wilting was part of the torture, and the plant healing was part of the facade that it wasn't torture. Eleanor had to be given some small moments of apparent success to believe she was in the Good Place.
  • Or perhaps Michael asked Janet to provide Tahani with a plant that would respond that way never expecting it to provide Eleanor with motivation to improve.

Fake good Janet

• In "Tinker, Tailor, Demon, Spy", the main Janet is revealed to have been replaced with a Bad Place Janet. But earlier on in the show, it was shown that bad Janets melt when pretending to be good Janets. How did this one not melt?
  • The show directly explains that Bad Janet went through excessive reboots like good Janet did in order to become advanced enough to mimic goodness.

Michael's plan

• From the Bad Place's point of view, Michael's afterlife plan makes no sense at all; it requires at least a hundred demons to torture just four humans, and requires a lot of planning and careful construction to get it to work properly (which it doesn't even manage). Compared to physical torture, it's far less efficient. Why did Shawn even agree to go ahead with it in the first place, let alone a second time? (Other than 'because the plot requires it'.)
  • I get the impression that Michael intended his plan to be the first of many of its kind, and he makes a good case for why humans are well-suited to torture one another. It would begin with the torture of four humans, but, if successful, it could be used to torture many more.
  • Also, as we see in later seasons, Shawn and the others are pretty much bored stiff with the same old physical tortures that they've been doing for the past God only knows how long. Michael is a breath of fresh air—they would agree to just about anything if it means a change.

Chidi and France

• So, Chidi does not like France for having colonized his country but Paris is his favorite city. How does that make sense?
  • I thought Athens was his favorite city.
  • I see no contradiction. I think it's horrible that my nation's native language was intentionally crushed under the heel of colonialism, but I think it's great that I'm a native speaker of the most functionally useful lingua franca of the world. Colonialism is complicated. A quarter of Comeros is, to this day, desperately trying to remain a colony of France.

Why does everyone accept a biased point system?

• The point system would be somewhat fair if it would either give points based on consequences or on intentions. Instead, it gives points based on intentions and on unintended negative consequences, but none on unintended positive consequences. Therefore, the system leans negative. If points are only awarded for good deeds done with pure intentions, they should only be deducted for bad deeds done with purely evil intentions.
  • It's made clear that positive points can only be earned with good consequences brought on by good intentions, while points are deducted based on a utilitarian system of suffering over happiness. If someone does something good, but it was done for selfish reasons, that doesn't deduct points. It just nullifies the points, thus the act itself was worth 0 points. If the negative consequences outweigh the good intentions (like Chidi or the example with the Doug that bought someone flowers in the 21st century), that's when the points start going down, since there is a bigger net worth of suffering all around. While Tahani tried to do good, whatever good she did was cancelled out by her selfish intentions which rendered them null. Not only that, but the various charities she had established were probably used as money funnels for a lot of rich assholes (like a lot of real life charities), so she unwittingly helped a lot of bad people do bad things both directly and by proxy, thus deducting points. The whole point of season 3 and 4 was that the point system itself was, in-spite of its attempts at being logical and impartial, painted too much of a simplistic picture when it came to human morality, so while it made sense on paper, it failed disastrously in execution.

There are still tribal people living around

• Okay, yeah, yeah, I'm nitpicking the hell out of this. But one plot point is that it's impossible to live an objectively good life in the modern world due to how interconnected the whole system of the world is that leads to every choice having unintended negative consequences. However, people definitely got into the Good Place before this became the norm and, well, the world is a very big place. There are still uncontacted people groups out there that are living primitive lives wherein they can live more "pure" lives making actual decisions with tangible values. Why has no one from North Sentinel island or the depths of the Amazon not managed to make it in in the past 500 years? They're basically playing under the same rules as humans have for tens of thousands of years (the same rules as when the whole system would have been invented in the first place).
  • Remember that in addition to all the other problems with the point system, the bar to get into the Good Place is very high. Maybe one day an actual saint will be born into one of those tribes and successfully accrue enough points to get in. But that wouldn't change the fact that the system is horribly unfair.
  • In all likelihood, the writer's didn't think of that. That said, (and this is a bit speculative), the points system does not make allowances for one's culture, nor the resources one has. Ending slavery and genocide both give and deduct massive amounts of points, respectively, but only a tiny number of people throughout history have been in any position to do those things (or at least singularly contribute to them enough to where one could say "they" did it). It's possible that neither said tribes nor any tribes before civilization could rack up enough points due to cultural practices like hunting or arranged marriages and an inability to affect much beyond their tribe.

Who put the Judge in charge?

• Who exactly gave the judge and by extension the other afterlife beings the right to create, destroy, judge, control and punish/reward humanity? This seems to be a glaring moral and philosophical question that is never addressed or brought up by the characters.
  • It is implicitly addressed by how the judge is shown to be fallible, and a few lowly humans come up with better ideas than her. As to who put her in charge, the implication is that her, as well as the demons, angels and everything else about the afterlife simply existed as they are since the dawn of time (or at least human history), naturally built and inclined to do the jobs they do, and nobody questioned anything until the protagonists come along.

Why have a bad place?

• Before the main characters end up changing the whole afterlife points system and proving that no human is unredeemable, it is established that humans are sent to either the good or bad place. What was the point of having a bad place instead of having humans that failed to get enough points simply destroyed? Why have humans sent to be eternally tortured if there is no endgame?
  • In Season 4, Glenn states that it was his belief that everyone who wound up in The Bad Place was truly deserving of their torture - it was designed to be a punishment for being a terrible person.
    • Michael also states that he used to believe their torture was a way of balancing out justice in the afterlife.

Why wasn't Chidi referred to a psychiatrist?

• Chidi went to Simone to seek answers for his condition. She sticks him in an MRI and finds that brain of his part is red hot. Great! Why was that end of it? Simone should said get out of my office and get some damn treatment. She's in neuroscience, she should know full well where her job starts and ends. I understand that Simone herself couldn't be one as they can't have a relationship at that point ethically, but I still don't know why this was never brought up when it's clear Chidi is profoundly mentally ill.

What about God?

• For a series set in the afterlife, isn't it a "little" weird that no one asks if God is real or where he is, as he seemingly isn't in the Good Place? You'd think this would be most people's first question. Even if they were atheists, they would probably think something along the lines of "I guess the afterlife is real after all. Does that mean God is real too?"
  • This is likely why we only saw the introduction from Eleanor's perspective. Her primary question wasn't "where is God and what does that mean for the nature of the cosmos" but simply "who was right" (basically the same question but with a less useful answer). Chidi is implied to have asked these questions; he lists a number of important cosmological questions that you can ask Janet, which he presumably asked. Again though, Eleanor doesn't care enough.
  • This is a case where the explanation is primarily Doylist. The show itself addresses religion by saying none of the established religions got it all right, with the worldbuilding instead focusing on a secular afterlife still applicable to religious traditions, using universally relatable concepts of afterlives and morality to speak to a completely general audience. Having characters asking about God basically demands one religion or none be confirmed or denied by the story, which this philosophy show is not here to do, and so it presents another vision of a moral afterlife as a grand narrative thought experiment.

Skin Suits

• So, Michael and all the other demons are wearing skin suits, which are basically just costumes they use to better grasp how the human body works so they can most effectively torture it. Okay, that makes sense, but what doesn't make sense is...why do they wear these suits, like, all the time? Even when they're in the demon headquarters, a place where there would be no humans in sight and they're exclusively in the presence of other demons, they still wear the suits. Todd the lava monster and Lance the slug are shown not wearing their suits in the headquarters, and they're treated incredibly casually, so there doesn't seem to be any rule or recommendation that a demon can't be in their natural form. Based on a few comments the demons make, skin suits are rather uncomfortable to wear, at least at first. Obviously the meta explanation is that the budget can't afford to have a bunch of fire squids and acid snakes everywhere, but is there any in-universe reason?
  • All of the nonhumans in the celestial afterlife deal with human affairs, so all of them take human forms to better acquaint themselves and/or interact more productively with the people they're working for. Some, like Janets, are created in a human appearance because they directly work with humans, but for demons, it's practical for their true forms to be monsters humans would he horrified by. All the same, it's important for demons to "cosplay" human culture, to get the experiences of living in a human body and dealing with social minutiae so they can better understand what humans hate about being human—and exploit that. Michael is the epitome of this human-centered torture philosophy, and is also the demon who most enjoys human form.
    • That still doesn't answer why the demons wear these suits literally all the time, even when they're in their own company and not trying to find new torture methods. Michael makes sense because of his fascination with humanity and eventual shame over his true form, but even demons who hate humans do this.
    • It's the Bad Place. Forcing even the Demons to wear suits they hate is entirely on-brand.

Mindy's initial arrival

• Janet explicitly mentions in "Janet(s)" that the main four are the first humans ever to not be immediately sent to the Good Place or Bad Place upon their deaths. So this 100% means that Mindy was initially sent to one of the Places first before they debated her. The problem is, how would have found out that her situation was debatable in the first place? If she was sent to the Bad Place, the Bad Place demons sure as hell wouldn't have noticed that Mindy might deserve to actually be in the Good Place and report it to the Judge out of the kindness of their hearts. Trevor literally says in the introduction video that they still think they should get her. Her being sent to the Good Place and them trying to return her would make more sense, as it's implied the Good Place didn't want new people coming in due to them being unable to keep it entertaining. However, why would Beadie act the way she did if that was the case? The way she says "But neither did we" with a twinge of bitterness implies that they did want and try to keep Mindy.
  • It's possible the bitterness is from the fact that they weren't able to be a proper good place. They did want to keep Mindy either way - it's just that the reason isn't what it seemed at first (ie. she realizes Mindy wouldn't have been happy in the Good Place because nobody is, but she's still bitter about that fact because it shows a very personal failing on the part of Good Place architects.)

Employee of the Bearimy

• Why would the Bad Place still have Michael's Employee of the Bearimy photo up if he's a well-established traitor who everyone hates?
  • It's not a very well-run place. Also, who's to say being Employee of the Bearimy is a good thing down there?
    • Because seeing the photo makes Michael reflect on the evil demon he used to be, which heavily implies that Employee of the Bearimy is a reward for being a cruel demon.

"Lord of the Rings" themed wedding

• When Michael and the head accountant are discussing the weight of the points regarding a couple, the accountant notes the destination themed wedding is bad enough, but instantly gives up hope on them after learning it's a Lord of the Rings themed wdding. So why is a "Lord of the Rings" themed wedding bad enough to instantly doom the couple into the Bad Place?
  • The Lord of the Rings is viewed as a nerdy interest, and most people regard pop culture themed weddings as being kind of weird and cringy. It's a very common joke in the show to reveal actions that are simply treated as annoying in real-life are considered to be objective sins by the points system. This is the same universe where watching The Bachelor gets you damned to hell for all of eternity.

Jason's teen years

• In "Employee of the Bearimy", Michael jokingly tells Jason "If we get out of here alive, remind me to re-erase your teen years." What does he mean by re-erase? The only memories of Jason's Michael has ever erased were his death and his numerous afterlife reboots, both of which had nothing to do with his teen years.

The Judge's "impartiality"

• A crux of the Judge's role is the fact that she doesn't learn about human life to her judgments impartial and thus fair.. but wouldn't bingewatching all those TV shows teach her about human life and its perils? I guess we the viewer are *meant* to ask this question and side against her, but you'd think Eleanor woulda mentioned that.

Who Judges the Afterlife beings?

• Perhaps this is straying more towards the philosophy of Dystheism, but who judges Judge Gen, the Architects, the Demons, the Janet’s, Accounting Office and other immortal beings?, especially since we see on numerous occasions that none of them are strictly omnipotent and are capable of being fallible. So what gives them the moral right to make and impose their judgements on humanity, including our main characters, by either torturing or rewarding them based on their actions and the number of points they accrue on earth?
  • Either there *is* some higher form of judgement that's not explored in the show, or this is just part of the unfair, screwed-up afterlife system. They get to act without oversight, purely because they came into existence as immortal beings on the other side.

Dead people named Janet

It seems reasonable to assume that of the many people who die and go to the afterlife, some of them are going to have the name Janet. So what happens with that? Would Janet appear every time anyone tries to get the attention of a human named Janet, kind of like what happens in real life with people named Alexa?

• As omniscient beings, Janets may also have an innate sense of context that allows them to understand exactly when they are and aren't being called by an utterance of the name "Janet". With the state of the afterlife being the way it starts, it's also possible zero humans named Janet made it to the Good Place, making it a non-issue so far...and in the Bad Place, calling the wrong Janet is an easy, infuriatingly mundane torture!

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