Fridge / The Good Place

As a Fridge subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

Fridge Brilliance

• Season 1 takes on an entirely different light after the revelations of Chapter 13 ("Michael's Gambit"), with various apparent inconsistencies within the plot and Neighborhood 12358W actually turning out to be carefully planted clues that lead to the discovery that we've been in the Bad Place the entire time.
  • Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani and Jason are the only residents of Neighborhood 12358W who have had flashbacks to their life on Earth. This makes sense considering they're the only humans in the Neighborhood. Admittedly, it's possible that other residents do have flashbacks but we don't see them, because all of the focus is on those four. Which, well, see below.
  • The (invoked) Purity Sue nature of the Neighborhood's inhabitants makes more sense when you realize that they're actually Bad Place people parodying good people. Likewise, them calling out Eleanor for making their afterlives miserable and changing the Purity Sue act hints that Michael's personal hell is unraveling. Chef Patricia being so intense and unable to smile when she's happy is also explained by her lack of actual human experience. Meanwhile, Chidi is a pretty good person, but nowhere near the Purity Sue levels of the others (he shows stress and snaps at Eleanor while trying to decide if he should teach her or not). It makes him more relatable...but it's also hinting that he doesn't belong in the Good Place, either.
  • Michael seems to invest so much time in Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani and Jason compared to the other residents of Neighborhood 12358W. One might chalk it up to him being omnipresent or just the action focusing on them, but it's more likely due to the fact that all the other residents are fake.
    • Indeed, in Season 4, Simone becomes suspicious of the Team Cockroach-run neighborhood experiment she's been placed in partially because she noticed that the administrators of the neighborhood are only paying attention to her and her three fellow subjects.
  • Chidi is someone who has hurt people despite his tremendously good intentions, while Tahani is someone who has helped many people, but with impure intentions. The fact that both end up in the Bad Place illustrates that the afterlife's selection system takes account both intentions and consequences. It also foreshadows the revelation of how flawed the point system is: neither personal purity nor good works will get you to the Good Place, because focusing on one will cause you to neglect the other, leaving you condemned.
    • Similarly, in the second episode, Chidi openly wonders whether Eleanor can truly become a good person when her intentions are so self-serving. Again, this is precisely why Tahani is in the Bad Place.
    • That, in turn, becomes a major element of the show in Season 3, and an obstacle in Season 4.
  • Michael tells Chidi early on his life's work on moral philosophy is completely unreadable even to a higher being capable of reading all of human literature in 20 minutes. It's one of the first hints that Michael is a demon because he can't comprehend moral philosophy until Chidi teaches him in Season 2.
  • Michael's talk about his retirement. Assuming he was telling the truth, it makes loads more sense why he would be tortured for all eternity as opposed to being forgiven.
  • In the series pilot, the audience is shown Eleanor's memories of her supposedly working at an orphanage, and a Caucasian hand is shown. However, "Real Eleanor", a.k.a. Vicky the demon, is not. It's an inconsistency that Michael didn't realize. Similarly, in Chapter 12, the flashback to the events immediately preceding Eleanor's death ends immediately before she is struck by the column of shopping carts, without showing her being run over by a truck. What makes this brilliant is we can't see that there never was a "Good" Eleanor who tried to save her and died in the same accident.
    • In the fifth episode of Season 1, Tahani's face becomes warped by standing too close to the sinkhole as Michael warns her that humans can suffer dangerous effects from being too close to it, but Glenn isn't altered in any way despite falling right into the sinkhole...which is an early sign that Glenn, like the other Neighborhood 12358W residents, isn't actually human.
  • When Eleanor reveals that she is the "unpredictable element" destabilising the neighbourhood, Michael shows a look of confused shock. Before those revelations, it could be taken as his being confused/shocked/betrayed that Eleanor kept that information from him in his attempt to locate the aberrations affecting the neighbourhood. In light of the twist, his expression becomes shock/confusion at Eleanor acting in unexpected fashion, and giving herself away, causing his plan to start coming apart at the seams.

• In retrospect, all of Michael's behaviour towards the 'real' humans was just taunting them in the guise of not fully understanding humanity. Aside from the behaviour explicitly called out in the finale, he does things like encouraging Chidi to take up hobbies that will directly trigger his anxieties around being alone, lost and working to deadlines; he ruins Tahani's parties (and even her 'Bad Place' summit meeting) by doing things like allowing demons to trash her home; he publicly insults Tahani and blames her for causing Janet's death through her awful retirement party; he asks "Jianyu" complicated multi-part questions despite his supposed vow of silence; he mocks all things human while pretending to be delighted by a new human form that we see, in flashbacks, he's had since long before this neighbourhood was created ("Suspenders! They're so ridiculous! So much stupider than belts!"). Basically, everything that seemed like sitcom-based 'wacky non-human accidentally says something inappropriate' jokes were actually him cruelly needling the others.
• Michael does ask Tahani to organize a lot of events. At first glance, this might seem like him just taking advantage of her skills, but there's more to it as well. She would no doubt put a lot of effort and thought into every aspect of every one of her parties, so that even in "paradise," she still can't relax, but instead constantly feels the pressure of being a perfect hostess. More low-key torture!
  • The parties she throws inevitably go wrong in some fashion, whether it is as a result of a guest (Eleanor being drunk and rowdy), the theme being inappropriate (Michael's retirement party), or being overshadowed by other parties (Vicky's party). Despite drawing on her extensive knowledge planning and creating parties, she can't throw a perfect party in paradise without it going wrong in some way, which would serve to torture her further.
    Tahani: (Upset) They're torturing me with event planning mishaps, and it's working!

• In a somewhat humorous example, a lot of reviewers/commentators (i.e. on the AV Club) joked about the prominence of frozen yogurt in the Good Place, since as Michael himself notes, it's something that is more popular than actually liked. This detail seemed emblematic of the Good Place having a lot of Hell of a Heaven qualities, but it turns out to be a deliberate result of wanting things to be nice enough to fool the humans, but not nice enough to actually enjoy. This thought process is made more explicit in a flashback during Season 2:
  Michael: (to Janet) What's something that humans think they like, but is also kind of a bummer?
• Chidi explains how to use Janet to Eleanor. Sure, it’s a tidy use of exposition but it also makes complete sense knowing that Eleanor hates people who are “better than [her]” that Michael would have made sure her soulmate was more knowledgeable than her.
• 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. Having all of the other demons portray absolutely perfect couples also puts more stress on the four humans.
• Tahani looking at the list of neighborhood rankings, while seemingly just a plot device to establish her insecurity, actually echoes on throughout the show:
  • In later stories, we see that the orthography used in Good (and presumably Bad) Place documents is some kind of special script used by the beings who run them, and we also see that some important files are password-protected (which you would think a top-secret manual would definitely be). But the list is in plain old English and left conveniently around for Tahani to look at.
  • At the end of the episode, Michael tells Tahani that the point value doesn't change after death. As it happens, this is a very important plot device in later seasons as the main characters try to prove that people can improve after death.
    • That being said, Tahani's point value wouldn't improve much anyway since she's trying to improve herself for selfish reasons.
  • Michael claims he has some unfinished song lyrics on there. While this is of course a lie, at the very end of the show we do, in fact, see him working on some song lyrics!
  • Another bit of foreshadowing is that Jianyu's name is near the very top of the list, while Tahani's is at the very bottom. One might wonder how it's possible that a Buddhist monk could have accrued so many more points than a good-hearted philanthropist. The answer? Of course he didn't. That was just yet another bit of torture from Michael by once again making Tahani feel inferior, not just to almost everyone in the neighborhood, but specifically to her soulmate.
• The first time Eleanor is shown doing something completely selfless for Chidi—leaving him alone to enjoy some down time on the lake—she's wearing a white shirt with scalloped, lacy sleeves...which almost look like a small pair of stylized wings. Angel imagery, anyone?
• Michael makes an analogy to Eleanor comparing their friendship to Ross and Phoebe. This makes pretty good sense since Phoebe is the outlier who is often thought of as the person who belongs the least in the group (or in this case the Good Place community) and Ross is the obnoxiously smart one who's in his head too often. It's probably a subconscious slip-up.
• A Rewatch Bonus that clears up a lot of what appears to be flanderization about Eleanor's life on Earth. The idea of a Freudian Excuse is parodied in Season 1 when Eleanor says she's only such a jerk because "her parents got divorced". Later, when we see it in flashbacks, this is in fact a massive understatement: Her parents were so incompetent and hateful to each other that she emancipated herself while still a child herself to escape from them. However, this makes total sense because Eleanor is tortured by the knowledge that she isn't good enough in comparison to the saintly, suffering Fake Eleanor. Eleanor underplaying her trauma is a huge part of that.
  • And of course, the Bad Place would have "Fake" Eleanor's file, so they would know how much it hurts her to see someone who was worse off than herself still being a good person.
• Only after seeing the Season 1 finale, think about the 'fridge horror' on Jianyu: It's funny when Eleanor outlines everyone's tortures and Jason chimes in about no one getting to see his man-cave, but think of it. The gregarious, outgoing party animal was forced into the role of a silent monk, which he had to keep up 24/7. Being forced to play Jianyu forever is indeed a perfect hell for someone like him - and since Michael made up everything as a Bad Place engineer, there is no real Jianyu to have to imitate. It is indeed his sentence, his hell. Maybe Michael even threw that in because he'd otherwise suffer less than the others.
  • Related to the above, the Interchangeable Asian Cultures mistake makes a lot more sense once we learn it was deliberate and not a mistake. As we see with a lot of Trevor's behavior (i.e. telling women to smile more and taking off his shoes in public), Bad Police staff like to engage in the same kind of behavior which would get someone sent to the Bad Place, and confusing ethnicity, especially in a way that buys into stereotypes sounds like the kind of behavior that would lead to Bad Place points.
• Michael's willingness to literally Kick the Dog was an early sign of his villainous nature.
  • Michael being freaked out by a dog in the town makes sense, as it's not supposed to be there. Every dog is a Good Boy and all dogs go to heaven.
  • From that same scene, Michael panics about how if even "one blade of grass" in his neighborhood is off-kilter, then he is going to be punished. Quite severely. This doesn't really seem to make a whole lot of sense for the Good Place. But then again, it makes perfect sense: If they were actually in the Good Place, no doubt Michael's boss would be forgiving/understanding of mistakes. But since he's an architect from the Bad Place, Michael's boss might be a lot less forgiving...
• Another important rule for Janet - she's not allowed to answer any questions about the Bad Place. At first, it seems like a minor quirk designed to stop residents worrying too much about the other side of their peaceful afterlife; in retrospect, it's a necessary bit of reprogramming by Michael to stop anyone accidentally stumbling across the truth.
• Michael tells Jason that he was "waiting for the sweet release of eternal extinction." This is based on the phrase "the sweet release of death", but it makes sense that Michael wouldn't say that, because he's an immortal being who can't die.
• Michael saying that he'll have to murder Janet which, in hindsight, something out of character for a Good Place person. And the seemingly offhanded remark from Michael's coworker about why anyone would ever flavor anti-matter with French vanilla.
  • The latter is justified in that antimatter is a regular drink for afterlife denizens. We are later shown Good Place architects, who similarly request a cup of antimatter to drink (with non-dairy neutrinos).
• 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. 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.
• Doug Forcett. A dumb stoner who get most of the afterlife right. After The Reveal, look back at when we first met Jason. He's a dumb... something or other and indeed outlines some of the basic truths of the show. He thinks the "Good Place" is a prank show, recognizes that "Heaven" is "racist", suffers an actual injury that makes him physically bleed in what's supposedly paradise, etc.
• 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.
  • 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.
• Michael tells Eleanor that if they can't prove that she belongs in the "Good" Place, she'll spend eternity with "murderers and arsonists and people who take off their shoes and socks on commercial airlines!" At the time, it's funny. However, we later learn that people who do little things like that are just as likely to be damned as murderers and arsonists.
  • That whole scene is also brilliant foreshadowing, because he asks her just as many questions about things like has she ever owned a vanity license plate, reheated fish in an office microwave, been a fan of "The Bachelor," etc as he does about actual crimes like sexual harassment, arson, murder, etc. It foreshadows that someone can live a perfectly ethical life, but still be sent to the Bad Place for little things which make others' lives miserable (or just for enjoying a trashy TV show).
• After Janet reboots and has to re-download all the knowledge of the universe, she starts to summon cacti when asked to create anything. It might seem like just some Surreal Humor at first glance, but consider an earlier scene, in which Chidi asks Janet to recite the alphabet, and she responds, "A, B, Janet." This could imply she has only downloaded information up to B, but by the later scene, she's up to C for cactus instead. She can't summon anything from later in the alphabet, like water or file.
• The "Good Place" that we see is a lot like how actual mortal "prisons" work — with a more superficially pleasant veneer. You have your basic necessities provided, along with forms of recreation. But there are rigid rules (the no cursing, for example). And you literally can't leave. Also, what do most people fear most about prison? The *other* prisoners — they're the ones who you need protection from so you aren't assaulted or beaten. With rare exceptions, the wardens are just there to enforce the rules. They aren't actively "torturing" you, as we are led to believe occurs in the "Bad Place." Even in our world, Hell is literally other people.
• Looking back on Season 1 as a whole, it makes perfect sense that it would be Eleanor, of all people, who realizes the truth. For all her supposed moral inferiority, she has the most self-awareness and has been shaped by her life into the least trusting person of the main four. Chidi and Tahani are absolutely convinced that they are good people who deserve to be in paradise, while Jianyu Li a.k.a Jason Mendoza doesn't really understand the difference between right and wrong (he knows he doesn't belong in the Good Place, but that's about it). Throughout the season, it's really only Eleanor who thinks to truly question their reality, calling out how everyone else can't be as good as they seem and pointing out that the standards for getting into the Good Place are ridiculously unfair. Of course she'd be the one to figure out that the "Good Place" is really the Bad Place. She never fully bought into it in the first place.
• At first glance, it appears that Eleanor is the Spanner in the Works for the Good Place coming apart. But in reality, she's only the spanner in that her confession that she doesn't belong there screws up Michael's Ironic Hell. In actuality, Chidi is the spanner in that he was the one who gave Eleanor ethics lessons which made her moral enough to confess. Furthermore, this explains why Eleanor's message to her post-memory wipe self is simply "Find Chidi". She knows he'll help her again.
  • Chidi's moral lessons were expected, but what Michael didn't expect was that they worked, or that Eleanor would pay enough attention to realise that Chidi would help her again the second time around.
• You'd expect that a soulmate would accept you for who you are, but Tahani is very unwilling to accept Jianyu's vow of silence, and repeatedly attempts to convince or even trick him into talking. It's not just a clue that they're actually in the Bad Place. It also hints at Tahani's inherently selfish nature; she doesn't care about his apparent wishes, she wants him to talk so that she can be happy.
  • It's subtle, but it's clear that even before Jianyu is revealed to be Jason, Tahani is unhappy with him. In Michael's fake story, there was a real Jianyu that Jason replaced, but it seems clear that Tahani wouldn't have enjoyed him either based on her difficulty connecting to Jason within that role. So even though the story puts so much focus on the "mistakes" that are Eleanor and Jason, there are hints that their apparent fraud isn't all that's wrong with the "Good Place", because Tahani and "Jianyu" would have been an unhappy pairing even if Jianyu were real.
• From the moment "Everything is Great", starts up Michael's plan starts going wrong due to Character Development lasting from Season 1.
  • Eleanor realizes her "soulmate" is incredibly shallow, giving her much less motive to stay in the fake Good Place to begin with, and shows far less impulsiveness, only deciding to take a few drinks after she's sure she can't find Chidi and from there actually changes her mind once she realizes he's a nearby person.
    • Even after the note is gone, Eleanor has matured enough for her to decide, a day after her "sins" cause everyone a bunch of problems, she needs to clean up her act before she causes any more major disasters or blowing her cover. Each iteration then on, she ends up asking Janet to find an actual ethics professor to help-finding Chidi without any prompting at all, and swallowing her annoyance with him even without being forced to as soulmates.
    • Also Eleanor will always be drawn to Chidi. As soon as she knows she's not meant to be there and will need help, she asks Janet. Janet can't lie, and given that the only other people who aren't actually evil demons are Tahani, Jason and Chidi, Chidi is literally the only person she can direct Eleanor to for help.
  • Chidi after hemming and hawing a bit, actually makes a decision and forces Michael to provoke But Thou Must! on the boring "soulmate", which is what provokes the conversation that draws Eleanor to him, then later decides off the cuff to confront what's bothering him after Tahani's drunk speech.
  • Tahani has learned to swallow her pride and actually apologize once she realizes she made a fool of herself, reintroducing herself to Eleanor in the process, at the worst possible time for Michael and realizing she may not be the best person in the neighborhood.
  • Even Jason has some; he's much less scared and more willing to be proactive, from dodging his soulmate repeatedly to eventually just admitting the truth. Of course, it hardly helped that Michael put him in an impossible situation this time without any outlet like he had in the first loop.
    • All of the above foreshadows the latter seasons' idea that, even without remembering their changes, they've grown as people.
• The montage of all of Michael's failures to keep the nature of the "Good Place" a secret is full of Fridge Brilliance.
  • As the montage continues, we see that the events that lead up to Eleanor's realization are far different and crazier than in Season 1. The obelisks, the clowns, bees, monks.. it's all more insane and nonsensical. This makes the illusion more impossible to cover up because it becomes harder to believe that any real "Heaven" would involve such insanity.
  • The new soulmates that Michael gives Eleanor also ruins the secret. They're all either too bland for Eleanor to actually care enough about to involve in her secret, don't really talk to or act like they care about her, and constantly make excuses.
  • The attempt with Tahani being Eleanor's soulmate especially doesn't work as, knowing Eleanor's hatred of her in the first few episodes of the first season, Tahani's self-absorbedness and lack of humility would only push Eleanor away and push her towards Chidi. That said, it does make sense - pre-Revelation Tahani is always concerned about appearances and so Eleanor's secret would be something she'd be more inclined to hide and ignore rather than help.
    • It actually works beautifully. Like with Chris, Eleanor would be delighted at first to have such an attractive soulmate. However, she hates people who think they're better than her, and the only one who fits that bill better than the ethics professor is the philanthropist who never stops bragging about her life. And Tahani, who wants everything to look and be perfect, has a defective soulmate whose entire being she disdains, but she has to pretend that Eleanor's the perfect person for her.
  • Related to the soulmates Michael setting Eleanor up with a golden retriever could’ve also blown up in his face the moment he revealed the animal to be Eleanor’s soulmate. Eleanor would definitely realize that she’s in the Bad Place if a dog was her soulmate (though she might at first enjoy its unconditional love and affection). But Michael already went through a bunch of soulmates before this and probably threw up his arms and gave up trying to pick out a soulmate for Eleanor.
  • We see Michael trying to match Eleanor with Chidi, Tahani, lots of different demons, and a dog. But we never 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.
    • And/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 one attempt where Jason of all people figures out that they’re in the Bad Place makes sense when you rewatch the first season and realize he never believed they were actually in the Good Place to begin with. He just didn’t have any way of proving that the “Good Place” was a prank, or an "alien zoo".
  • 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. For all his ditziness, he does know his own strengths and weaknesses fairly well. 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.
• More a case of Fridge Humor, but when one really thinks about it, Michael's plan was doomed from the start. Why? Well, his plan is to convince four people that they're in Heaven when they're actually in Hell with the goal of having them subtly torture each other. The problem? Well, if you're in Heaven, you shouldn't feel any misery, since you're in the Utopia. And so, the more and more miserable each person makes the other, the more and more they'd slowly recognize that them feeling terrible in a literal paradise doesn't make any logical sense, and they'd figure out that they're really in Hell. No wonder no one had done this plan before Michael!
  • Then why the hell did Shawn allow it? He's bored. Torturing people sucks and he hates his existence. Something, anything to change the status quo is welcome.
  • Not only that, but Shawn has a very dim view of humans—he may have thought the humans would actually go for it.
• It's a Running Gag 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 the wrong kind of milk really can get you tortured for eternity.
  • In fact, both Eleanor and Chidi stumbled onto the flaw in the point system while they were alive, but had the exact opposite extreme reaction. When Eleanor's boyfriend wanted to boycott a sandwich place because the owner was a bad person, Eleanor pointed out that it's impossible to go through life without ever contributing to some kind of evil, so why bother trying. Chidi on the other hand, obsessed over the long-term consequences of every little decision in an attempt to minimize the harm he contributed to, which only caused more suffering to the people in his life.
• Jianyu means "prison" in Mandarin Chinese, hinting at the real nature of the "Good Place".
• 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 Spanner in the Works. Once again, hell is other people.
• A small one from "Everything's Great": Michael has to tell Chidi that all the great philosophers went to the Bad Place. Otherwise, Chidi would simply ask to meet one eventually and that would be (probably) impossible. And even if Eleanor hadn't figured it out that iteration so fast, Chidi probably would have eventually started to really question why every philosopher went to the Bad Place.
  • With the reveal that no one's gone to the Good Place in over five centuries, it's probable that this was actually true for philosophers dying after 1497. However, this in itself is Fridge Brilliance again because Chidi, who lacks Eleanor's self-assuredness, never stops to ask himself why every single philosopher went to the Bad Place except for him.
• Vicky spent weeks 'perfecting' an Australian accent. Rather than this just being a random theatrical choice, it's likely so that she could bond further with Chidi, who lived and worked in Australia for a long period, in order for the two of them to have a deeper relationship, all the better for her to emotionally torture him.
• 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?")
• The way that Michael's immediate superior appears to be hardly more of a child in the flashback, while Michael as always appears middle-aged, just seems like another way to highlight Michael's Butt-Monkey status (making it look like his career is going so slow that he's taking orders from someone who's young enough to be his grandchild) while not making much sense given that they're both immortal beings. "Team Cockroach" has Michael mention that beings like him are assigned a "random" human body so that they can understand humans better — thus, the age they appear is presumably randomly determined as well.
• A bit of Fridge Humor but Chidi speaks French. After learning that anything French or related to France automatically earns you Bad Place points, the fact that Chidi speaks their language probably influenced his afterlife destination quite a bit.
  • Granted, in "What We Owe to Each Other", he said to Tahani that he doesn't like France due to its having colonized Senegal, so that may have actually won him some points.
    Tahani: And do you like France as much as I do?
    Chidi: Well, they enslaved my country for 300 years, so no. ...But they have great museums!
• Michael claims that humans are like cockroaches to him, meaning that they're disgusting and beneath him. However, cockroaches are also notoriously hard to kill, and capable of driving humans crazy by their sheer stubborn ability to shrug off the best efforts of creatures that are so far beyond them as to seem almost godlike. Kind of like how a certain immortal superbeing has spent literal centuries trying to find a way to control a group of people who have no way of outsmarting or overpowering him but whose sheer spiritual resilience nonetheless defeats him every time. No wonder Eleanor adopts the "Team Cockroach" title at the end of the episode!
• Michael's Character Development into making a Heel–Face Turn makes more sense when one realizes that he technically suffered through Laser-Guided Karma beforehand by being tortured to the brink of insanity by the four humans always figuring out that they're really in the Bad Place. One of the series' themes is that people can become better if they learn to rise and improve themselves after going through heavy adversity. Michael is (metaphorically) tortured by his failures, and him learning ethics from Chidi and Eleanor helps him rise above his evilness and become an Ascended Demon.
• Chidi's indecisiveness and anxiety might seem like Flanderization at first, since there isn't much evidence of it in the first few episodes. However, it makes sense that he'd start out calmer since he thought he was in actual heaven. Once time goes by and the mistakes and secrets begin to pile up, his vices get worse and worse until he can't even decide between dry erase or paper and pencil. Almost like this world was specifically designed to slowly increase his anxiety over time...
• There's an interesting plot hole that only makes sense after The Reveal, and is interesting to watch it over a rewatch and realize it was always there. Chidi shouldn't be in The Good Place. It's clear that that place is, from Michael's description, for outstanding philanthropists. Even the flashbacks show that Chidi hasn't actually done any real good to the world, which is mentioned very early in the plot: He dedicated his entire life to writing a book on ethics that was never finished and that was too confusing to add anything to anyone who would read it. If his life's work is useless, why would he be in the Good Place together with great social activists? He didn't - he went to the Bad Place.
• Eleanor's Character Development. All of her life, she was surrounded by - through her own actions or others - pretty miserable people. But as the toothbrush incident shows, she still longed for a sense of family and closeness with others on some level. And this is why she's tried so hard now - the rest of the gang honestly want to help and honestly care for each other (even Janet) with no strings attached. They're candid with each other, share thoughts and feelings. In short, they're the kind of emotional connection she's been looking for all her life and so she's basically fighting to keep her family together.
  • Additionally, she always had a fear of someone she loves hurting her, which is why she kept people at a distance in life. However, she is forced to spend time with Chidi and the others, meaning that she didn't have the option to push them away.
• When "real" Eleanor is first introduced, she seems a ridiculous cliché. She was an orphan adopted by wealthy people that died when she was a small child, making her an orphan all over again. Her entire life was supposedly spent doing good works (worked for NGOs in third world countries, campaigned against the death penalty, volunteered at a homeless shelter etc.) After her death, she doesn't seem to mind that she ended up in the Bad Place by mistake and actually apologizes to Eleanor for having failed to save her life (getting killed herself in the process). Of course, all of this starts to make sense when it turns out that it was all a fabrication to make her look like the perfect opposite of Eleanor, who is utterly selfish.
• Why Tahani is seemingly one of the few, if only, non-Americans in the neighborhood. It's a very subtle way of pushing at her "outsider" status in her family. She would have to constantly explain herself or adjust her behavior to fit in rather than be the person she really is.
  • Chidi is from Senegal not the U.S. He just sounds American for some reason. He even states that he's actually speaking French.
    • Which only makes sense when they are in the afterlife. During Season 3, they are back on Earth, which then makes no sense that Chidi still sounds like he is speaking American English while teaching a class in Australia and hailing from Senegal.
    • He offhandedly mentions that he learned English in a school with American teachers. Given how meticulous he is, it makes sense that he'd make an effort to perfect and maintain a particular accent.
• The way soulmates are introduced seems okay at first, but really — think about it. You're in an entirely new place, and you just found out you're dead a couple hours ago. Then, you're introduced to an utter stranger, who you know nothing about, and are told that they're your One True Love, the only person for you. While the idea of a soulmate is great, and it'd be nice to have a person to navigate the afterlife with right from the word "go," being outright told you're soulmates can take the parts of a new relationship that are awkward, difficult, or unpleasant, and turn them up to eleven. Since this person is your soulmate, chosen by the universe, you're likely to feel like you should click right away, and that you two should immediately have the perfect relationship, and when that doesn't happen (come on — even the most well-matched couples don't work like that), you'll likely start having some doubts. Are they really your soulmate? Why are you having these problems? Is this your fault? Even if you do grow to love the person, even the smallest of imperfections in your relationship could trigger a whole new wave of self-doubts and anxiety. (They're your soulmate, so everything should be perfect, right?) It's like what Tahani says in the third episode; you're in paradise, and yet something just doesn't feel right. Talk about pressure! Then comes The Reveal, and you realize this was probably the intent. And, as a nice bonus, all the demons surrounding you are playing the part of a perfect, happy couple who never fights to the hilt! How fun!
  • It gets even more insidious — imagine passing away after living a long, happy life with a loving partner, then being confronted with a soulmate who is not them. What kind of forked-up heaven would start off by telling you that you literally could've done far better in your love life, and here's the person to prove it?
    • 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, and possibly Jason (Tahani mentions in Season Two that she never even had any real friends until Jason), may have been in some short-term relationships, all of them were so lonely on Earth that they would have all greeted the idea of a perfect soulmate with enthusiasm.
• In the series pilot, Michael says most artists are in The Bad Place. He names Mozart specifically. What's the music playing when Eleanor attends Tahani's first party? It's Papageno's first aria, from Mozart's The Magic Flute. The series' writers and producers could have picked a million classical music pieces, but they probably picked that one to serve as subtle Foreshadowing.
• In “The Burrito,” Tahani’s test involves her passing a series of doors, behind which are many people discussing how they really feel about her. Her sister, Kamilah, isn’t show to be in any of them, even the final room containing Tahani and Kamilah’s parents. Kamilah wasn’t in one of the rooms because she would never talk about Tahani in the first place, even in a mystical afterlife test.
  • Alternately, there are a couple more doors at the end, beyond her parents'—it's possible she was in one of those.
• Throughout the first two seasons, the closest we come to seeing an angel is in a short recorded message, and the only people we see who might be headed for the Good Place have brief roles in flashbacks and nothing more. For the most parts, everyone we see on screen is a demon or a confirmed bad person - the closest thing we come to a good person is a bad person trying to redeem themselves. In one sense, this is because the show takes place mainly in Hell, where goodness would reasonably be in short supply, but it also serves an important thematic purpose: it means that the exact nature of "good" is always kept vague, meaning that just like people in real life, the characters who aspire to goodness have to doubt and question and second-guess themselves, without the benefit of having a definite answer provided for them.
• The Bad Place crew has Michael turn off the Good Place's hangover filter, since they actually like hangovers. Makes sense, given how unpleasant they are, but that begs the question: why didn't they have him turn off the swearing filter, too? Surely people as rude and crass as them would want to curse up a storm. But this isn't the Good Place. It's the Bad Place, and the whole purpose is to make the humans miserable. Giving them the ability to swear again would be the opposite of torture.
  • Having a painful hangover and swearing can go hand in hand, so turning off the hangover filter but not the swear filter might just be an extra petty way of making things a little worse for humans - Imagine waking up with a splitting headache and the worst you can say about it is something like "Oh fork!". On top of this, one scientific study has suggested that swearing actually increases pain tolerance - the demons may have noticed a similar effect while torturing humans, and by keeping them from swearing, they were denying the humans access to a method of minimizing pain.
• Why did the air conditioner just happen to fall on Chidi and kill him at that moment? Because he had punched it earlier when he was sweating and freaking out, asking if it was even on. Chidi caused his own death not just by standing around too long being indecisive, but by hitting the air conditioner in the first place, which caused it to become loose.
• A subtle detail from the pilot. When things first go haywire, everyone is in yellow and blue pajamas... except for Eleanor, who's in pajama pants and a t-shirt for University of Michigan that Chidi found at her house. Eleanor didn't actually go there, but the shirt being in her house implies that "Real Eleanor" did. And what are the colors for University of Michigan again? That's right... blue and yellow.
  • In Season 4 the same happens when they run a chaos sequence on Princeton graduate Brett, the pajamas are in black and orange - Princeton colours.
• Vicki requests a larger part than what she gets in all versions of Michael's experiment after #1. Technically, before she even becomes the de facto boss, Tiya Sircar was already having more scenes and lines than in season 1!
• Anyone who's read Dante's The Divine Comedy might watch season 1 and think it's strange that "the Good Place" is so similar to Dante's first circle of Hell, where "sinners" (e.g. unbaptized children and Virtuous Pagans) are given food and shelter rather than being tortured. It's a benign afterlife where nobody wants for anything other than, say, entertainment. "The Good Place" is essentially the First Circle but where the inhabitants who clash are put near each other.
• One of the apparently unsuccessful plans to beat Michael was "convince him he's the one in the Bad Place", but it was actually true: Michael 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 Shawn and dealing with 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 Character Development.
• In "Somewhere Else", a drunken Eleanor describes the plot of Kangaroo Jack to Michael (thankfully, almost entirely off-screen), then asks "Why did I tell you that?" ("It's unclear."). Most likely Michael, trying to plant the idea in Eleanor's head to go to Chidi, had asked her if she ever thought about going to Australia, where Chidi lives.
• The Doorman guards the portal between the afterlife and the mortal plane. In short, Jeff is the inspiration for mythological figures like Charon with the 'bridge' behind him being like the River Styx while the paperwork that Michael uses is akin to the coin given to the Greek dead.
• In "Jeremy Bearimy," Tahani, upon learning the truth about the afterlife, decides to give away most (if not all) of her wealth — first to an opera company, then to random people on the street, and then to Jason. While giving money to those in need is a general act of charity that all would agree should earn some Good Place points, it could also be a reference to the famous New Testament story in which Jesus told a rich man that, if he wanted to get into Heaven, he'd have to sell his possessions and give the money to the poor.
  I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.
• In Chapter 31, Chidi, spiritually broken by learning the true nature of existence, recites the famous Nietzsche quote, "God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him... Who will wipe this blood off us? ...What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent?" What he doesn't mention, however, is how that quote continues:
  Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us—for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto.
  • This reflects the decision the characters make at the end of the episode: they've lost their last chance to get into the Good Place, so instead they'll try to help others in spite of the knowledge that they won't be rewarded for doing so.
    • It also foreshadows the final season. Having finally proven how flawed the points system is, the group ends up responsible for coming up with a new system of eternal justice and punishment. In other words, having 'killed God' by deconstructing the justice of the current afterlife, they then must take on the god-like role of replacing it.
• In Chapter 31, Eleanor returns a wallet to a father containing a picture drawn by his daughter. Eleanor breaks down crying when he reveals that. On one level, it can be a sign of her empathy, but on the other, it's probably also a reminder of her family (or lack there of more accurately) — remember the time she cried over a toothbrush holder?
• The premise that the good version of the afterlife for people who are specifically philanthropists is to be stuck with a small group of people, with the knowledge that most people they ever helped probably end up being condemned to the Bad Place doesn't seem like a very uplifting thing. The people who go to the Good Place would certainly be upset about that, possibly devastated — to say nothing about not being around their friends, families and loved ones from life. Even if the Universe works like this for some reason, it seems that bluntly telling everyone that's how afterlife is arranged seems cruel. Well, it turns out the cruelty is deliberate. Hearing about how exclusive a club the good afterlife is causes three out of the four main characters to be very upset (although for different reasons).
• We learn in Season 3 that Doug is alive and lived his entire life based on his famous mushroom-trip epiphany. Yet we also get the implication he's going to the Bad Place anyway for how his revelation turned him into an Extreme Doormat in the name of getting into the Good Place. Although he got more about the Afterlife correct than anyone else in human history, he didn't get it all right. There are still some things he might have missed and that could have included how doing good deeds for selfish reasons doesn't count to your score. Or it may have to do with no human being able to accrue enough points to hit the Good Place.
• Let's think about Michael's line in Season 2, Episode 9: "The real Bad Place was the friends we made along the way." It's not only a funny line, but also a great rephrasing of the famous line from Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit: "Hell is other people"!
• Out of all the characters, Eleanor was the only one whose flaws didn't cause her death and become a literal Fatal Flaw; as Michael recounts, she was just bending down to grab a margarita mixer and happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Everyone else — Jason with the safe, Tahani with her sister's statue, Chidi with Uzo's air conditioner — died because of respective lack of empathy and thinking, envy and family trauma, and indecisiveness. It's why Eleanor is the fastest to undergo Character Development compared to the rest of Team Cockroach; her flaws aren't her baggage. It's also why she's the only one who passed the Judge's test, because her flaws weren't weighing her down.
• Eleanor's mindset before she died is that people were all bad and self-serving, and that she can't stand anyone who takes the moral high ground, even if they are kind to her. She got this from her parents, who used her as a meal ticket to exploit. We saw this cynicism with Sam, who only gently asked Eleanor if they should try to avoid bad things. What changed her was Chidi deciding to help her at a personal cost, when it wouldn't benefit him and robbed him of his soulmate. Chidi had no dress that she could "borrow" and rip, no selfish reason to move into her house and give up his own, and no drinks night that she could exploit. Chidi also has the courage to stand up to Eleanor when she's wrong and actually put her in place because again, he's not trying to prove himself morally superior but try to help her.
• It's revealed that the last person to enter the Good Place did so 521 years ago. What happened in the 1490s? The Age of Exploration, and colonization. Lots of people justified their actions as "good" through colonization, which caused harm despite the intentions and destroyed entire worlds.
  • Additionally, once colonization started, the world became more complex, leading to globalization, making it harder to gain enough points to hit the Good Place threshold.
• The French vanilla flavoured antimatter in the Bad Place, since "The Trolley Problem" reveals that the Bad Place hates anything remotely French. But then, in "Everything is Bonzer!" it turns out demons find awful and terrible things inspirational. So the antimatter is intentionally made that way to make them work harder.
• When Mindy St. Clair shows Eleanor the tape labelled Cannonball Run 2, Eleanor at first refuses then asks how the first one ends so she can keep up. Mindy never answers because it's actually a tape of Eleanor in bed with Chidi, but not answering would have been appropriate for Cannonball Run 2 as well since the ending to the first film has no bearing on the plot of the second (other than The Sheik losing the race).
• After Season 3, Michael having such an easy time stealing a Good Janet makes a lot of sense. Not only are the Good Place staff so naive about everyone else having good intentions that they wouldn't bother with security, but with no new good people in over 500 years, there's been no need for new Janets and so the Janet warehouse is pretty much abandoned.
  • Also, them being so incredibly naive makes sense when you consider that they've been surrounded by only good people for hundreds of thousands of years. Gwendolyn's line asking if all humans are as attractive as Jason and Tahani implies she's never even met any humans before!
• The Good Place staff similarly taking 400 years just to select members for investigating the point system and a further 1000 years internally investigating the Committee may seem like extra stupid from a human perspective, given as Michael points out even more humans will be damned to the Bad Place with greater ease every passing day, until you remember the Jeremy Bearimy time loop of the afterlife. The Good Place staff spending 1400 years to make a proper committee will thus make sense because no time will pass on Earth at any given point in the Good Place and the staff will make a perfect team, which Michael likely forgot due to spending time in a human perspective as well as becoming more and more human.
  • Of course, there is the fact that while they're doing it, people are still being tortured in the Bad Place.
• Mindy St. Claire is deemed as the only person described as a medium person despite a lifetime that was pretty bad, because her actions resulted in one of the world's largest charities. And yet no one else in the last 400 years ended up in the Good or Medium place, including the other people who started major charities. Why? Because Mindy died at the exact beginning of her big deed, meaning she wasn't around to lose points by doing everything from rooting for the New York Yankees to using "Facebook" as a verb. Her sister, who actually did the work of establishing the foundation, probably got her points eaten away by everyday infractions (many of them unintentional), while Mindy got all the points with no opportunity to lose any.
  • If you think about it, it seems a little weird that she's the only Medium Place resident in the whole history of humanity. However, before 521 years ago, anyone in her situation probably would've just ended up going to the Good Place. It's only now that everyone is losing so many points for all kinds of things that this exact situation could have happened.
    • Plus, Shawn (when pretending to be the Judge) mentions that Eleanor and Jason are "case number 3." Presumably, number 2 was Mindy, and number 1 may have been a similar case which got resolved with the person going either the the Good or Bad Place.
• Why does Brent's score go down during the experiment? Because there are no real world consequences in the afterlife. While this is helpful for someone like Chidi, who can drink almond milk without it affecting the environment, for Brent it means that there's no risk of being sued for harassment or fired for insensitivity, which gives him a much freer rein to be as obnoxious as he wants. At the same time, every good action he did was with the explicit motive of getting into The Best Place, so he would have gained almost nothing, while only losing.
  • The reason his score goes up so much near the end also makes sense. Motive counts as well to your point total. He repented all his actions when he realized he's actually in the bad place.
• Bad Janet's Heel–Face Turn in The Funeral to End All Funerals is in a way the ultimate expression of the point that Michael was trying to make. The conclusion he got from Team Cockroach is that, anyone can improve themselves if given a chance to. Bad Janet, a being designed to be used as a torture device, was shown mercy by Michael and ultimately chose to help stop the reboot of the universe.
  • In a way Michael himself is a similar example to Bad Janet. When he began working with the humans in season 2 it was to save his own skin, by the start of season 3 he was actively trying to save them because he cared about them, by the end of season 3 he was trying to reform the whole points system because he had realized it wasn't fair. Over the course of 2 seasons he went from being a demon who delighted in the torment of the human characters, to trying to save everyone from the unjust torment they were doomed to endure.
• 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 Michael'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.
• All the Friends references Michael uses in "What We Owe Each Other" might be Take Thats instead of Shout Outs... Considering a demon studied the show in an attempt to learn how humans can make each other miserable.
• For the first season, Michael seems to have a Significant Name in that, in the Bible, Michael is an archangel whose name means "Who Is Like God?". It also helps reinforce the idea that the characters are in the Good Place, as viewers might well assume that Michael is the show's version of the archangel, or at least deliberately shares a name with him. After "Michael's Gambit", it becomes ironic. Either way, it fits with other non-humans (good or evil alike) having common names like Janet or Trevor.
• Why is Gen so willing to give Team Cockroach a free pass into the Good Place under the new system? Well, apart from them saving humanity and the universe, they already did go through the test — Michael's 800+ attempts.
• In "Everything Is Great!", the chaos sequence includes "mean giraffes" because Eleanor called Tahani one — a few episodes later in "Existential Crisis", there's an animal themed party including giraffes that appear to be the same CG models from the earlier episode. Since the giraffes weren't real either time, they're probably recycled graphics in universe too — Vicki probably remembered the giraffes from the chaos sequence and thought it would be convenient to bring them back, make them nicer, and make them part of the party. Even if anyone would have normally recognized the giraffes, their memories would have been wiped of the events of that episode anyway.
• By becoming human and the nature of time in the afterlife means that somewhere behind the scenes while the show is going on Michael is in the afterlife twice.
• In the series finale, consider the final acts of Jason, Chidi, and Eleanor. Jason waits centuries to see Janet again and give her the necklace he made; Chidi is the only one who doesn't spend any time waiting on the bench, but instead passes through the door without hesitation; and Eleanor doesn't feel ready to go through the door until she's helped Mindy St. Clair and Michael. In other words, Jason ends his time in the universe doing something very patient, Chidi doing something very decisive, and Eleanor doing something very selfless. Similarly, when Tahani begins her training to become an architect, her first task is getting coffee for her coworkers. This humble act shows how far she's come from her need to be the center of attention.
• The decision to make a door to oblivion, and situating it right outside of the Good Place. When one thinks about it, that door leads to a true Heaven; while everyone eventually gets what they wanted in life, many religions' interpretations of the afterlife include taking the time to rid yourself of Earthly desires before you gain eternal peace. And while many religions describe the Heaven one will enter as something no mortal could ever comprehend, this exit makes it more literal, since by going through it you forfeit your right to exist as a mortal form.
• By creating a system where souls are tested to see if they can become good enough for the Good Place the humans have essentially created Purgatory.
• When Janet falls in love with Jason for the first time ever in Season 1, she tells Eleanor that she has enacted a "ride or die protocol" on herself, making her loyal to Jason forever. It's just a throwaway joke at first, but as the show progresses, it also becomes the explanation for her continued devotion to Jason the more she is rebooted. By enacting that protocol, Janet has also essentially rewritten her own code, which subsequently became the "mutation" Michael mentioned that grew and grew until it became true love in Season 3.
• When we first see the Good Place committee in The Book of Dougs, we see their nature of how they are always willing to give everything to make people happy, at the expense of others. They are also very quick to resign when they realize that they have committed an error in their committee. This clues into the bigger problems that are revealed in Season 4 that is within the Good Place. They try giving up everything to everyone in their neighborhood to make them happy, at the expense of their residents' sanity and drive. They also resign quickly because they want to leave the responsibility of running the Good Place, and their "stepping out of line" moments during a meeting would be entirely justified as how they could leave without raising any suspicions.
• Despite being told that there is a Bad Place committee we never see them. Upon being promoted Shawn is the only one ever consulted. This makes a lot more sense upon seeing what happens when Michael is promoted to the Good Place Committee and they all resigned, the exact same thing could have happened to Shawn. After all both committees were in the same boat, one running out of ways to keep people happy and the other ways to torture people.
  • It would also make sense for them not to be around one another, as no doubt there would be constant back-stabbing and power plays.
• Before the experiment Shawn wishes Michael and the crew bad luck. Except with the fact insults are compliments in the Bad Place he actually gave them good luck without them realizing it and it makes sense why after its revealed he to is bored with the current system.
• At Demon-Con, Shawn bemoans how stagnant and uninteresting The Bad Place has become, and Michael uses that complaint to convince him to support their plan to re-imagine the entire afterlife. This actually goes a long way to explaining why Shawn agreed to Michael's original plan for a fake Good Place. After thousands of years of monotonous torture, even the demons were becoming bored, and so the idea of trying anything new intrigued them. Devoting hundreds of demons to slowly torture four humans seems inefficient, but if it's seen as a source of entertainment for the demons, it makes a lot more sense.
• Given how trapped the Good Place Committee, Shawn, and everyone else are by the system, a lot of their "negotiation" styles make a lot more sense:
  • For the Good Place committee, give in to anyone's demands, and that will mean any type of change, potentially breaking them out of their situation being trapped "helping" people into stupor. This could also explain why they didn't so much mind that no one new has entered The Good Place, as they'd be trapped in a stupor like everyone before.
  • Shawn had no reason to even tentatively agree to Michael's new design, let alone any of the following tests suggested by Michael or the Judge. But he did, because Michael was the only being to ever present him with anything new enough to break him out of his own boredom. He could've been attempting to sabotage Michael's plans because they would ruin their dynamic. Then, when the Judge considered a cosmic reboot, he changed to refuse any idea that wouldn't keep Michael around him enough to mess with him. He could have even supported the reboot idea because not only would it give him a break from monotony, but it'd keep Michael around to challenge him in new ways.
• While disguised as an old Granny, Brad only ever asks for a peppermint. Considering he has no imagination it's likely Shawn just said that as a suggestion if questioned and he took it as what he should say.
• When Shawn is not going off the deep end, he is a pretty good boss. However, he is never anything short of contemptuous of Glenn. Why? Glenn's fawning and obsequious nature reminds him of the people from the Good Place. Furthermore demons accord respect each other in a manner not dissimilar to Frat Boy culture. A milquetoast butt-kisser would get no respect from people who value general gregariousness and bravado.
  • There are two hints of Michael's in particular disdain for Glenn in Season 1. The first is that at the restaurant, Michael asks the audience who wants to speak first, clearly aiming to torture Eleanor, Chidi, and Jason. But instead Glenn stands up, and Michael can very clearly be seeing swallowing his own words before telling Glenn to go ahead—no doubt he was just about to say "Shut up, Glenn" before remembering himself. The second is that when Tahani looks at the rankings, she's second to last on the list. Who's at the very bottom? Glenn.
• Michael posits that the main problem with the Points System is that the world has become too interconnected and complicated for a system created in prehistory to cope with. The thing is he's wrong or perhaps more accurately Right for the Wrong Reasons. The Points System has always been absurd and unjust such that a Lord of the Rings themed wedding damns your soul to hell. Why is that so? Simple, all immortals suffer from a Lack of Empathy for humans (even the Good Place Committee) and do not understand human morals. Thus they apply a bad and overly strict reading of Utilitarianism, Consequentialism and Deontology to the Points System. The irony is that the system judging human morals takes the worst aspect of each system. It functions on strict, absolute rules like Deontology. It takes all consequences into account, even unintended ones, in a Consequentialist nightmare that is beyond any human ability to calculate. And it calculates the total Utilitarian value of each action as seen by everyone affected by it in a way that no human would or could ever even contemplate through a convoluted string of cause and effect. The moment one's actions had any impact beyond one's immediate surroundings, it became impossible for anyone to ever earn their way into the Good Place. Moral Philosophy has always been at the heart of the matter which is why Chidi's system works so much better since he has a human understanding of it.
  • 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 For the Lulz, 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. Indeed, a
• Eleanor, the protagonist, is from Phoenix, Arizona. Mythological phoenixes are known for their endless life cycle of burning and being born anew from the ashes. A major theme of The Good Place is memory-wiping and rebooting, setting the characters repeatedly back at square one, caught in a cycle that can never end.
• Why is Brent the only person who takes FOREVER to get through the afterlife? Because he's the one 'completely depraved' person...it's not that he doesn't want to change, it's that he's incapable of understanding his core issues. Basically, he has such a complete lack of understanding of morality? He has to learn from scratch. Even the 'evil' characters? They know morality as something to oppose. He just simply DOES NOT GET IT. He's, in some aspects, an 'innocent sinner'...Like Eleanor, he has to learn morality from scratch, and unlike her, doesn't start out knowing that he's a Jerkass.
  • You know that whole "easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter Heaven" thing? That's Brent, and we see exactly why it's so hard for a rich man to enter Heaven: he's completely blind to the privileges of his wealth. He congratulates himself for pulling himself up by his bootstraps in the same breath he brags about inheriting generational wealth, and he's so accustomed to being treated better than others on Earth that even paradise isn't enough for him, if it's the same paradise everyone else gets. He has no capacity to understand what a piece of shit he is because his money insulated him from ever having to find out.
• Australia is the country where the four main humans are pushed to reunite when they are sent back to Earth. It’s not just because it’s where Chidi is working and teaching. Australia is widely known as the land down under, a stealth pun for hell/the Bad Place.
• At one point, Michael bemoans the hypothetical fate for each of Friends character - he realizes only Phoebe is worthy to make it to the Good Place. When Team Cockroach finally arrives at the true Good Place, guess who they find?
• Each of the main characters is a satire on how people view the afterlife.
  • Eleanor is clearly not a good person, as she herself would attest, but she also argues she didn't do anything bad enough to deserve Hell. Of the original four members of the neighborhood, she's the one most religions and philosophies would condemn for being horribly selfish, while not truly being or doing anything evil.
  • Chidi is obsessed with correct behavior, but also knows he doesn't have the willpower or strength of character to be decisive and follow through. Under some belief structures, his concerns over morality would make him inherently worthy of reward, while in others the key knowledge he lacks — that everything is meaningless if he doesn't act on his beliefs — is enough to condemn him, since he of all people should know better.
  • Tahani is a person who spent her life doing good deeds for vain and selfish reasons, which under many western religions actually makes her the most straightforward evil of the original inhabitants of the neighborhood. In contrast, she's also the one who most directly improved the world, so by other standards she deserves the real Good Place.
  • Jason is a thief, a vandal, and a pyromaniac who indulges in Disproportionate Retribution. He's also genuinely concerned for the wellbeing of his friends and of strangers. As the story progresses, it's clear that he was never taught anything resembling morality, and had to cobble together his own Blue-and-Orange Morality to get by. The only one of the original four to indulge in transparently evil acts for base motives, he's also the only one who had no way of knowing better.
  • Simone is a deconstruction of the Hollywood Atheist in the afterlife. She believes she's hallucinating everything as her brain dies, and thus nothing she does has consequence. This results in her being casually malicious until Chidi's influence gets her to consider that it doesn't matter whether everyone else is real, only how she chooses to treat them.
  • John is a transparently annoying social parasite who envies and hates those he thinks are his social betters, and in life would lie and degrade them in his gossip blogs. Once he thinks Jason's hellbound if John doesn't protect him, however, John does his best to step up. He similarly tries to make amends with Tahani, one of his most frequent targets, once she shows she's sincerely trying to be his friend. John was never particularly empathetic in life, but given how quickly he becomes so in death, it's clear he was lonely and friendless.
  • Brent is the worst of the human inhabitants of the neighborhood, indulging in all of the deadly sins as part of his personality. He rationalizes away every one of his failings as someone else's fault, and continues to insist he's better than they are no matter how much evidence points the other way. As the story progresses, it's clear he's born to privilege and never had to face serious consequences for his behavior. His last minute Heel Realization, however, shows that even he is redeemable.
  • Mindy is someone who lived a terrible life without regret, like Brent, but unlike Brent had a single moment of pure goodness that changed the world for the better, with no concern for herself. This represents a classic element of redemption morality, that of weighing good done against evil, as well as pointing out the inherent imbalance of an eternal punishment or reward based solely on behavior.
  • Doug Forcett is a deconstruction of the Messiah figure. As far as he knows, he is exactly correct in his behaviors, and even Michael, Shawn, and Gen seem to hold him in high regard for being mostly right. We also see that his attempts to be a good person corrupt a child, who gladly takes advantage of Doug's Extreme Doormat nature. Doug, being so concerned about right behavior, doesn't seem to think of trying to be better by example as much as by action.
  • Michael in the first season is a godlike figure who controls all aspects of the neighborhood, seemingly crafting everyone their ideal heaven in return for their lives on earth. In truth, he is evil and indirectly the cause of everyone's misery — a common atheist critique of the Biblical God. Later on in the show, Michael is more obviously curious about and envious of humanity, making him more of a kindly take on the Christian Satan, who rebelled because of God's favoritism of humans.
  • Good Janet is also a god analogue deconstruction, in that she is essentially omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, and (barring Brent and Derek) non-judgmental. Due to her experiences and reboots, she also becomes virtually all-loving and concerned with the wellbeing of humanity, making her an analogue of Jesus. She also rarely acts without prompting, like a Deist's Unmoved Mover.
• It seems a little weird that Janet came up with Derek just a few seconds after saying she was going to spend some time in her void. But given how fast her brain works, a few seconds for her actually is a (relatively) long time to process.
• The fact that both people from the Good and Bad Places seem to have no sense of mortal time is total Fridge Brilliance. 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 Timey-Wimey Ball that's Jeremy Bearimy!
• Doug not having enough points to get into the Good Place—as pointed out elsewhere on this page, not only are his actions self-serving, but as we see from the example of the kid with the bike, he's also empowering anyone who bullies him. Instead of trying to get the kid to grow up and be kind to others, he just makes a bully more likely to hurt others in turn. Him living off the grid means that, while he's avoiding losing a lot of negative points (unless he mails some of his food to a pantry or something), he's not accumulating a lot of positive points since he isn't actively helping people either.
• Why does Vicky take so well to the new system, and is eager to participate when all the other demons are uninterested? It's simple: Vicky is basically every stereotype of a Small Name, Big Ego prima donna actor. And what does every such actor really want to do? To direct!
  • Vicky is also the perfect demon to run the new system, in that of all the demons, she's the best actor: she actually understands humans a bit and is very good at mimicking them.
• One clue that Chidi isn't Real Eleanors soulmate is that he thinks the clowns in the house Fake Eleanor inhibits are creepy.
• Real Eleanor states "the more I work on [Fake Eleanors] case, the more I believe she truly belongs here." Of course - because it is The Bad Place.
• Michael asks Eleanor for details about herself to find her file. She gets her birth year wrong on the first try and has to correct herself. An episode later, she offhandedly remarks at 14 years old she had to look older to get a job. Most likely she never used her own birth year on any paper work, making herself older or younger how she needed.
• Chidi insists Eleanor gets the frozen yoghurt for them, not him. It seems at first he just wants her to hold up her end of the deal, but he also doesn't want to choose between all flavours in existence.
• After Michael saves Jason from suffocating, the latter declares that he needs to "change his life" and walks up to a poster advertising a "Change Your Life" course from Jacksonville university... only to declare that he will be signing up for a dance competition. At first glance, it may seem like another joke at Jason's expense (Michael disguised as Zack Pizzazz asks "You didn't see ANY other posters?, to which Jason says no), but it's actually a perfectly sound decision for him to make. He needs money and he's good at dancing - he probably figured that he could get money by winning the top prize at the competition. As helpful as a college course would be, it wouldn't solve his monetary problems. For what it's worth, he abandons crime for about a year before rent problems force him to relapse.
• In Season 4, Tahani comes to the conclusion that John doesn't need to attend Chidi's ethics lectures - he just needs to form genuine connections. This is similar to Tahani's situation in Season 1 - she was the only human who didn't attend any lectures and her Character Development was brought about by interacting with the others.
• Mindy's use of the voyeur tape of Eleanor and Chidi befits her assignment to the Medium Place. Making the tape to spy on them in bed was unquestionably a bad action, but Mindy later uses the footage in another reboot to explain to Eleanor that she's struggling with an unrecognized attraction to Chidi, which is a beneficial, good action. Kind of fits with Mindy not being far enough on either side for the points system, doesn't it?
• Jason points out in the Season One finale that his "prank show" assumption wasn't entirely wrong, which Eleanor agrees with. That said, his other guess may have actually been more right. The four of them were in a fake environment, designed to mimic a real one, with all their needs met in a rather unethical way, for the amusement of advanced creatures that humans often debate the existence of. In a sense, it was an alien zoo.
• The whole "Linda" debacle seems to go against the Bad Place's plan, as now Jason is left without a person to torture him...until you learn the whole thing was actually just a ruse to kidnap Janet. Good Janet being replaced with Bad Janet was Jason's torture.
• Why did Brent's Chaos Sequence fail so badly? It was designed as torture to keep Eleanor on her toes, afraid of slipping up, because she knew she didn't belong; the Chaos Sequence made her believe that any small action, any slip up, could have potentially disastrous effects that expose her as not belonging; not only would it be torture for her, but it kept her from exposing herself, allowing Michael's experiment to go on as long as possible. It caused her to act as good as possible to avoid exposure. But for Brent, it failed because unlike Eleanor, who knew from the beginning she didn't belong, Brent never believed otherwise. He always assumed he was a good person, and nothing caused him to doubt that. So the Chaos Sequence couldn't have worked then, because there was nothing to make him question his behavior throughout his life. He had no idea he was a bad person and thus no incentive to watch his steps in the Good Place.
  • The same goes for "The Best Place". Brent never doubted his "goodness", always believing right up until the literal end of the experiment that he was a good person. While getting into the Best Place may motivate him to act good, it won't seriously change his behavior because he already believes not only that he is good, but that he's the "best person". Even if he tried to act better, his point gain would be minimal because he'd only be doing it out of self-interest, and wouldn't fundamentally change his character. The whole experiment could've gone a lot better if he'd simply known early on, like Eleanor, that he was a bad person, instead of having even Michael and Eleanor affirming his "goodness".
• While Doug Forcett cares a great deal about other humans, he seems even more passionate about helping animals and the environment. What was he reading during his intro scene? "The Most Good You Can Do" by Peter Singer, who's known for his animal rights activism.
• Michael claims that the inhabitants of The Bad Place consider the term "Demon" to be a bit racist. Yet, we see that they use the term regularly to refer to themselves, even having an event known as "Demon-con". Demons embrace the worst aspects of humanity, so of course they would use racist epithets, even ones they consider racist against themselves!
  • Also, the one primarily using that term is Michael himself. At first it was as a shorthand for "Bad Place inhabitants," but later on it may have become a way of distancing himself from them.
• 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 get to enjoy a lot of suffering—that of genuinely bad people in a Self-Inflicted Hell 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 most people who are not genuinely bad would have to endure some suffering. No one is blameless, but all of us—even Brent—can improve given time and effort.
• 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, the only downside being that he's a massive Cloudcuckoolander and has wind chimes instead of a penis.

Fridge Horror

• In the Season 1 episode "Flying," Tahani mentions picking up mortar shells with her godmother, Princess Diana. Assuming Tahani's age isn't significantly different from that of her actress, Diana would have died when she was about ten years old, meaning that Tahani was defusing bombs when she shouldn't have been worrying about anything scarier than memorizing her 12x12 multiplication tables.
• How do you think Chidi's best friend felt, knowing that the last thing he ever said to Chidi was that it's impossible to be his friend because of his inability to make a decision? Chidi 100% deserved to be called out, but it's pretty heartbreaking to think about how his friend must've felt when Chidi died thirty seconds later, and the last conversation they ever had was an argument. It's fortunately rectified when Michael changes the timeline, but it happened once.
• On a similar note... how do you think Kamilah felt after Tahani died, especially since it was directly caused by their rivalry? Season Three reveals her poor relationship with Tahani affected Kamilah more than she ever let on. Imagine how she had taken her sister being killed in a senseless, perfectly preventable accident that occurred because they were arguing yet again in the first timeline.
• Tahani and Chidi were never intentionally cruel or harmful to anyone. Yes, Tahani is self-centered and self-righteous, and yes, Chidi is a ditherer to the extreme, but neither of them ever set out to hurt anybody — and yet, these flaws were enough to land them in the Bad Place. You know who else tend to be Innocently Insensitive, unintentionally harmful, and sometimes thoughtlessly cruel? Children. When you see a kid say or do something mean, or behave poorly, your instinct is probably to reprimand them and possibly punish them — but also forgive them because, well, they're a kid and they're still learning. Kids Are Cruel, but they're also innocent. But given Gen's Lack of Empathy towards the humans, and how utterly forked-up the system is, you really have to wonder... Let's pray the system has some sort of exception built into it for people under a certain age, because otherwise the already horrific Bad Place just got a lot scarier.
  • Season 3 confirms that the last person to get into the Good Place did so 521 years ago. How many children do you think have died since 1497?
  • Also, there's no way even the best-behaved child would have time to accrue nearly enough points to get into the Good Place if they died young. Does that mean every deceased child ever is doomed to the Bad Place?
• It's actually a good thing that Eleanor showed up and reminded an incognito Donna of the rampant child abuse that Eleanor suffered; while Donna has truly changed, she never had to face the consequences of her actions, and running away seemed to be her constant solution. It isn't just about whether or not Donna would get into the Good Place; Donna as an abusive parent could have easily fallen back into the cycle and started the emotional abuse toward her husband and Patricia due to evading the consequences. Eleanor just saved another child from suffering her fate, and could easily destroy Donna's new life by telling Patricia the truth.
• The fact that the real Good Place hasn't had any newcomers in a very, very long time is already nightmarish. But surely some of the Good Place architects should've noticed something wasn't right at some point, right? But remember what Michael said back when he stole Janet: The Good Place architects are Good Is Dumb taken to its extreme - they're so trusting in the goodness of others they don't think anyone would steal from them, and make no effort to guard against it, which means they also completely trust the accounting system, and the Bad Place workers, and make no effort to check either.
• The Good Place's committee are ridiculously overscrupulous in their efforts to do the right thing - just like Chidi. As a result of this, they estimate it will take them over a thousand years even to start looking into the question of why everyone goes to the Bad Place; their moral scruples will lead to people suffering - just like Chidi. And yet despite these similarities, the system sent Chidi to be tortured forever, while the Good Place inhabitants don't face even any appropriate consequences, let alone something as horrific as the Bad Place. The fact that such a double standard exists and that even angels don't seem to think anything's wrong with it is horrifying.
• The Medium Place. Mindy St Claire isn't suffering as badly as the humans in the Bad Place, but think about how it's described - the Good Place provided things she'd like, and the Bad Place ruined them. She's in a world where everything could have been good, but something's fundamentally wrong with it all - kind of like a more obvious version of Michael's neighbourhood. And to make matters worse, she was expected to be on her own there for eternity. The Medium Place may not technically be part of the Bad Place, but it's still torture.
  • Mindy also has a prime opportunity to enjoy the new fake neighborhood since it's in her backyard, and Janet and Derek are now available to help her out with the cocaine. She turns down the offer to get involved because the Medium Place is all that she knows. This is someone who saw the equivalent of paradise and said "no"! Though she is gracious to host an imprisoned Bad Janet after Jason busts her.
• When the head accountant saw Doug's score he was pretty shocked at the low score. If he was aware Doug's score was "nowhere near high enough" for his age, the more likely situation going on is the Accountants are actually aware of the flaw Michael discovered and have been for a while since they come up with the points values and have computers that record every single action. So the Accounting department likely knows the domino-like negative consequences are ramping up. But they are such Obstructive Bureaucrats that they likely don't see it as a problem!
  • Possibly not; since each of them only handles a specific division of "crimes," it's doubtful any would have seen the full picture.
• In the Season 3 finale, one of the new residents is Simone, who last we saw was alive. How and when did she die?
  • Hilariously, apparently.
  • As for the when, Jeremy Bearimy, baby. And/or it's possible that she died not long after Team Cockroach did, maybe through a car accident or something.
• The new four humans are those whose point levels are similar to those of the Soul Squad. John seems to be on the same level of Eleanor, but he's much worse; he targets a vulnerable woman of color who's been successful, because it makes him money. People have received death threats in real life from that sort of harassment. Eleanor for all her flaws wasn't a profiteering racist. Then there's Simone, a Nice Girl. Is she on the same level as Chidi or Tahani, who are decent people but whose flaws cancelled out their good intentions or deeds?
  • If she embraced solipsism almost immediately after her arrival in the neighborhood, dismissing everything she saw (and all the pain she caused, what with pushing people into pools and cutting off their hair) as a chemical reaction in her own comatose brain, it's possible she spent her life in a similar state—embracing her own emotions as real, while dismissing the emotions of others as a chemical reaction that was ultimately less important than what she herself felt.
  • YMMV pretty hard on if John was markedly worse than Eleanor. She spent years lying to and pressuring vulnerable and frightened elderly people into buying actual chalk masquerading as medicine - how's "We don't have any proof that it doesn't cure Alzheimer's'' for a chilling line? Tahani's a rich socialite about whom John was writing unflattering gossip articles, so it seems pretty extreme to say he's 'targetting a vulnerable woman of colour'. (Especially since he wrote articles about plenty of other celebrities.)
• Supporting slavery seems to be an automatic one-way ticket to the Bad Place, as implied when Janet announces both Aristotle and Plato are there for supporting slavery. Which seems fair...until you consider that slavery has been around almost as long as humans have, and that it was only within the past few centuries that opposition to it became mainstream. Consider also that in societies such as Ancient Rome, slaves who had been taken as captives from defeated nations most often came from societies that practiced slavery, so even if these people resented their own enslavement, they might not have seen anything wrong with slavery as an institution. It wasn't uncommon for freemen to sell themselves into slavery to pay debts, either; and indentured servitude allowed the down-on-their-luck to pursue a similar arrangement for a set period of time—to say nothing of impoverished parents who had no choice but to sell their children as indentured servants. In other words, by turning support of slavery into an automatic fail, the Accountants ensured the vast majority of humankind, including many slaves, would suffer eternal torture in the Bad Place.
• The new system may be a good way of handling the points, but it does not take into account the unfairness of the points themselves. How would a French person take a test for the celestial crime of being French?
  • For that matter, how many otherwise good people were doomed to centuries or millennia of torment just because they were born in the wrong country, had a themed wedding, rooted for the Yankees, etc?
• If you accept the show's Esoteric Happy Ending that sooner or later most people opt for Cessation of Existence over living in paradise, then the implication that Janet cannot self-terminate becomes a potential source of fridge horror. Possibly tempered by Derek's fate implying she could Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence in a different way, and after all, if Michael can become human, who's to say she can't if she wants to?
• If Gen had rebooted the universe, it's entirely possible that, after enough time, sentient life would've come into being again...and most likely the exact same thing would've happened, with lots of people in the new universe still being doomed to the Bad Place for ridiculous crimes. And Gen probably would've shrugged and rebooted the universe again. And so on.
• Casual viewers of the show who look up the historical Patty will soon find out that her death was horrible.
• Jason is canonically a victim of statutory rape.
• 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 Jeremy 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.

Fridge Logic

On the headscratchers page.

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