History Headscratchers / TheGoodPlace

* 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 Elinors, 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?

* 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 Film/StandByMe taught me anything is they can be easily traversed. Just watch out for trolleys.

* 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.

** 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.

** 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.

* It's obvious that Doug's motivations are similar to Tahani's, albeit taken UpToEleven. 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.

[[folder: Erasing memories of deaths]]
* Why would Michael make the humans forget how they died? The point is to torture them. Wouldn't knowing they died in an embarrassing, stupid way be torture? And the answer can't be that Michael wanted to have a backup plan in case Eleanor confessed, because her actually improving and eventually confessing was the one thing he never expected to happen. That was always the biggest wrench in his plan, and he never would have done anything to prepare for that in the first attempt as he never considered that a possibility.

[[/folder]]

* Why would Michael want to make the humans forget how they died? The point is to torture them. Wouldn't knowing they died in an embarrassing, stupid way be torture? And the answer can't be that Michael wanted to have a backup plan in case Eleanor confessed, because her actually improving and eventually confessing was the one thing he never expected to happen. That was always the biggest wrench in his plan, and he never would have done anything to prepare for that in the first attempt as he never considered that a possibility.

* 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 would make more sense, as it's implied the Good Place didn't want new people coming in to add to the problem of 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.

** In ''Rhonda, Diana, Jake, and Trent'', Bad Janet insults a demon, and both the demon and Janet immediately laugh about. The demons get masochistic pleasure from Bad Janet.

** And as we seen more of TBP, 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.

*** 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.

* 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.

* 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 recommendation or obligation 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?

* 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. Based on a few comments the demons make, skin suits are rather uncomfortable to wear, at least at first. Todd the lava monster and Lance the slug are shown not wearing their suits, and they're treated incredibly casually, so there doesn't seem to be any recommendation or obligation that a demon can't be in their natural form. 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?