History Fridge / TheGoodPlace

* Consider the disasters that we were told happened as a result of Eleanor's selfish behavior: She stole shrimp, so shrimp fell from the sky. She cracked a joke about Ariana Grande, so Ariana Grande started playing in the neighborhoods. She shirked garbage duty and garbage fell from the sky. She smashed up cake, so a sinkhole opened. Notice: TheLastOfTheseIsNotLikeTheOthers. The first three results were all obviously linked to some action that Eleanor took, but it's hard to see how destroying cake relates to a sinkhole opening until one realises the connection can be justified in that Eleanor punched a hole down the middle of the cake, so a hole opened up in the middle of the restaurant to ruin the party.

* Derek being given to Mindy perfectly fits the nature of the Medium Place. She has a guy who's willing to do any sexual thing she wants, but the downside is that he's a massive {{Cloudcuckoolander}} and has wind chimes instead of a penis.

* Even after the new judging system is implemented and the Bad Place demons don't get to directly torture humans anymore with butthole spiders and four-headed flying bears, they'll still have a lot of suffering to enjoy--that of genuinely bad people in a SelfInflictedHell who are trying to get into the Good Place, but are either improving very slowly or not at all. The last time we see Brent, he's on attempt #15,724, trying to understand why it's bad to tell a woman to smile.

* Even after the new judging system is implemented and the Bad Place demons don't get to directly torture humans anymore, they'll still have a lot of suffering to enjoy--that of genuinely bad people in a SelfInflictedHell who are trying to get into the Good Place, but are either improving very slowly or not at all. The last time we see Brent, he's on attempt #15,724, trying to understand why it's bad to tell a woman to smile.

* Michael making sure to introduce Tahani and "Jianyu" to Eleanor and Chidi right away is actually a brilliant bit of torture, by showing them a (seemingly) perfect couple and thus making both of them jealous and insecure.

* Michael doesn't seem to know that Janet regenerates after she "dies". This could be just him pretending not to know to make the others feel more guilty, but it also makes sense if you realize bad!Janet probably wouldn't have a kill switch, since it's only there in case good!Janet goes bad. Therefore, Michael, a bad place architect, probably never learned about what would happen if Janet ''were'' to die, like an actual good place architect likely would've.

** We see Michael trying to match Eleanor with Chidi, Tahani, lots of different demons, and a dog. But we neevr see him trying to match her with Jason--because both of them would quickly realize that the other person doesn't belong in the Good Place as well, and from there it would be a short hop to figuring out they're not actually in the Good Place at all.
*** Or he simply realized that Eleanor and Jason would be the worst possible combination because they'd never out each other and could just hide in their house and not actually torture each other (EDM aside; Eleanor could just ask Janet for sound-proofing for Jason's Bud-Hole).

** The characters who do (and don't) figure out that they're in the Bad Place make perfect sense. Eleanor, for all her flaws, is very self-aware (in the very first episode she admits to being a trashbag from Arizona), and so she's the most willing to question why she supposedly belongs in the Good Place. The character with the next amount of self-awareness is Jason, who also figures out that they're in the Bad Place at least twice. Chidi never realizes how much his indecisiveness hurts himself and others, so he never figures out that he's in the Bad Place during the first go-around (the second time, when Eleanor was helping to run it, they almost had to spoon-feed it to him, and he'd also matured a fair amount, plus he'd been hanging out with Simone). However, he at least does realize that he has flaws, even if he blames it on drinking the wrong kind of milk. Tahani has the least amount of self-awareness of all of them, so she never figured out that she was in the Bad Place--indeed, she never even understood why she ought to be there until Michael spelled it out in Season Two.

* It's a RunningGag that every time Chidi finds out he's in the Bad Place, he figures that he ended up there because he drank almond milk. It's funny because it demonstrates Chidi's lack of self-awareness, in that he would overlook a lifetime of hurting everyone in his life with his indecisiveness and blame his eternal damnation on something as minor as his choice of milk. And it's brilliant because without realizing it, Chidi instinctively figured out the flaw in the point system, as it turns out the unintended consequences of something as minor as drinking milk really ''can'' get you tortured for eternity.

* The other residents. Michael has unintentionally made them suffer through their own Bad Place by forcing them to act like good people. No wonder they eventually mutiny. It may even mean that, ironies of ironies, the Bad Placers are their own SpannerInTheWorks.

* The way Jason is tortured(he's given the ultimate man cave but can't share it with anyone) is subtly reminiscent of the joke of the priest who skips Sunday service to play golf and plays the best game of his life. (St Peter asks God why he doesn't do anything to stop him and God replies "Who's he going to tell?")

* Even after the new judging system is implemented and the Bad Place demons don't get to directly torture humans anymore, they'll still have a lot of suffering to enjoy--that of genuinely bad people who are trying to get into the Good Place but are either improving very slowly or not at all. The last time we see Brent, he's on attempt #15,724, trying to understand why it's bad to tell a woman to smile.

** In addition, ridiculous things like having a Lord of the Rings themed wedding or being born in France can take away points. While it might make sense from the point of view of a supernatural being who does things ForTheLulz, it's also immensely cruel to every Tolkien fan, French person, etc. A supernatural being with no empathy for humans would never consider how unfair it is that just by ''being born and growing up in a particular country'' or having a themed wedding, you can doom yourself to eternal punishment. Especially since these things have no particular moral value--it's not as if a human can automatically know that these things lose points, in the same way most humans understand murder, theft, etc to be bad.

* One of the apparently unsuccessful plans to beat Micheal was "convince him he's the one in the Bad Place", but it was actually true: [[SmugSnake Micheal began the series confident that his new methods would revolutionize torture and lead to the humans keeping each other miserable]], only to lose control of the experiment when they kept coming together, all while piling on the lies to [[BadBoss Shawn]] and dealing with [[TheStarscream Vicky]] in the process, leading to him stewing in frustration and anxiety. And much like the humans, the stress and misery of the experiment ends up triggering his own CharacterDevelopment.

* It's honestly not so surprising the answer was already there from the beginning. The whole show goes on to show how people can change and season 1 shows just how effective Micheal's neighborhood was at torturing souls. Of course the answer to how to fix the afterlife system is to just continue doing what they started.

* The fact that both people from the Good and Bad Places seem to have no sense of mortal time is total FridgeBrilliance. The demons put up with roughly 300 years' worth of Michael's attempts to change the neighborhood before they went on strike, while the Good Place Committee believes that doing something in 400 years is urgent. The Good Place Committee and Accounting aren't worried by the fact that no one's gone upstairs in 521 years. Given that Michael and Gen are the age of the universe, and that even junior demons have been torturing people for a thousand years, it's a lot more understandable how a few centuries isn't such a big deal to beings like them. And that's not even counting the TimeyWimeyBall that's Jearimy Bearimy!

* Here's a big one. Remember how many genocides there were during the 20th century? Remember all the Nazi concentration camps in particular? So you could spend a few years in the camps, die there...and then immediately go to the Bad Place. And spend the next ''several decades'' (or possibly even longer, depending on how exactly Jearimy Bearimy works down there) in the Bad Place. Being tortured for "crimes" you didn't even know were bad because the points system is so forked up. '''Yeesh.'''

*** Notably, though, the only four characters that get focus are ones who wouldn't think of this, because none of them ever ''had'' a soulmate on Earth! While Chidi and Eleanor may have been in some short-term relationships (and possibly Jason and Tahani as well, though there's no real indication either way), all of them were so lonely on Earth that they would have all greeted the idea of a perfect soulmate with enthusiasm.

** In addition, ridiculous things like having a Lord of the Rings themed wedding or being born in France can take away points. While it might make sense from the point of view of a supernatural being who does things ForTheLulz, it's also immensely cruel to every Tolkien fan, French person, etc. A supernatural being with no empathy for humans would never consider how unfair it is that just by ''being born and growing up in a particular country'' or having a themed wedding, you can doom yourself to eternal punishment.

** Michael may not be aware of what happens if a Janet is rebooted, because it is extremely rare for a Janet to be rebooted in the first place. As Janet says, Janet is only supposed to be rebooted if she malfunctions and starts threatening the residents. In the bad place, that's not an issue that causes a Bad Janet to need rebooting, and most architects would ordinarily never need to reboot Janet.