Nightmare Fuel / The Good Place

Chidi has just killed his friend.

As a Nightmare Fuel page, all spoilers are unmarked. Proceed with caution.

General

• The whole concept of the afterlife the show presents. Your entire life, from birth to death, is monitored by bizarre and unknowable entities who assign point values to every single decision you make. If you fail to reach a high enough standard, you get left to suffer horrific physical or psychological torture forever. And that's before we find out that, not only is the system fundamentally flawed, making it so achieving a high enough point total been impossible for over five hundred years, but even the souls that do make it into the Good Place end up literally losing their minds from boredom, as they all eventually run out of things to keep them entertained. Every human who has ever lived has had a miserable afterlife experience, yet everyone involved, from the accountants to the heads of the Good and Bad Places to Gen herself, either doesn't notice, care, or have a solution to the problem. It takes incredible effort and massive amounts of luck to get them to change such an obviously and horrifically flawed system. Just imagine if the heroes had failed, and the system was left to go on as it had been...
• The conventional tortures of The Bad Place are implied to be horrific. None of the humans in the first season ask about any friends or relatives, or are shown to be worried about the implications here.

Season 1

• The moment in "Michael's Gambit" when the camera focuses on Michael after Eleanor figures out they are in the Bad Place, and Michael lets out a legitimately chilling evil laugh is fairly scary for a bright and happy sitcom. The reveal that everyone's in the Bad Place also puts the entire first season in a darker light, particularly interactions with other residents and "Real" Eleanor, who are all demons working to torture the humans.

Season 2

• In "Everything Is Great!", Eleanor manages to very quickly work out that not only are they in the Bad Place, but also that they've already figured it out before and had their memory wiped. It wouldn't take very long to wonder how many times you've been mind wiped, and if there's anything you can do to stop it happening again. And then they get wiped again, ruining the work she did in the first and second iterations.
• That is topped by the next episode "Dance Dance Resolution" which reveals that Michael has been sending the gang through hundreds of redos because Eleanor keeps figuring it out every. Single. Time. (Except once when Jason does). It's no wonder Michael finally decides to offer a truce to the gang to make this work rather than do it again. In Season 3, it's revealed these attempts took 300 years of non-linear time.
  • It approaches Black Comedy but also very disturbing that every time Michael reboots the scenario, he has to kill Janet. Think about it, hundreds of times of her having to be killed over and over again and it's horrible every time, with her begging him not to do it.
    • Lampshaded when Janet's tearful begging starts to bother even Michael, who asks her to please chill out, we've been through this literally hundreds of times! Janet immediately snaps back into her default cheerful tone and states that her pleas are a fail-safe to prevent resetting, so, sorry, Michael will have to continue to deal with it.
• In "The Trolley Problem", Michael puts Chidi and Eleanor in a simulation of the titular ethics problem (given the choice, would you let a speeding trolley run over 5 workers or one?) Poor Chidi can't make the decision in time, and winds up covered in the 5 workers' blood. And then again, with his friend Henry's.
• In a flashback, we find out why Michael had to steal a Good Place Janet. He asks a Bad Place Janet to act good and the attempt causes her face to literally melt and then her entire head basically implodes into her standing body.
• Jason is canonically the victim of statutory rape.

Season 3

• In "Everything Is Bonzer!", Jason's flashback when he was trapped in the safe. You know he'll be fine, but the raw terror and panic in his voice is horrifying. Especially when you keep in mind that in the original timeline, he did die.
• In "The Brainy Bunch", The Judge sends Trevor flying off into void due to him interrupting her and also tricking The Doorman. His fate utterly terrifies Michael and Janet. Trevor may have been a jerk, but that punishment is just horrific. Note: we will never see Trevor again.
• In "The Snowplow" and "Jeremy Bearimy", the humans of Team Cockroach accidentally see the portal into the celestial space and become aware of the system about how entry into the Good Place and Bad Place is determined, thereby tainting their future scores and damning them to an eternity of torture despite all the work that went into redeeming them.
• "The Worst Possible Use of Free Will" has several flashbacks of Eleanor's time in the fake Good Place, including Michael being completely cruel to her and Chidi in attempt 119, the one when they were deeply in love. He mocked Eleanor and Chidi for thinking that their love was stronger than he was, pointing out that he manipulated everything that made them fall in love in the first place, and thus is still the one in power. This sends present-day Eleanor into a navel-gazing session where she wonders if she truly has free will, and if she does, how much of it was spent letting others decide things for her? It's so bad that Michael in the present day has to pour iced tea on top of her head to reel her in.
• "Don't Let the Good Life Pass You By":
  • In a way, Doug Forcett's life can count as a deconstruction of the Heaven Seeker. This poor man randomly figured out the truth of how the afterlife works and became so terrified of doing anything that could ruin his chances of getting into the Good Place, turning into a complete and total Extreme Doormat who pushes himself to uncomfortable and painful extremes of "goodness" to earn the points necessary to get himself a spot there. And even that still isn't good enough!
    • As we'll learn, this is what the point system actually demands! Remember, he was right, and still damned.
  • The bar fight between the demons and the Soul Squad reminds the humans that they are out of their league. Eleanor screams when Chris manages to pull Chidi over the bar counter and starts dragging him to the portal; all Eleanor can do is hang on to Chidi, at the risk of being pulled back into the Bad Place. Tahani manages to save them, but Shawn grabs the two and starts pulling them.
• "Janet(s)"
  • Janet's void is in danger of crumbling apart thanks to Eleanor having an existential crisis, which gives Janet Volcanic Veins and has Eleanor rapidly shifting between different forms as the world falls apart around her. Michael is seconds away from marbleizing Janet before it's under control.
  • Also, the group discovers an absolutely horrifying fact: no one has made it into the Good Place in 521 years. Really consider that for a moment. Everyone who's died since the year 1497 has gone to Hell. Literally everyone. Feel your spine shivering yet? And what makes it even worse is that the accountants consider it a perfect system and see nothing wrong with it, refusing to believe it's being sabotaged or that it's at all flawed. The following episode reveals the system is just that broken, and nobody cares. Everyone is doomed to the Bad Place due to the world having become so interconnected that it is impossible to engage in society without causing harm to someone else or benefiting a bad person.
    • Think about everyone who ever died since 1497. Every child, every baby, who ever died in any way, since 1497, is being tortured, most of them without the intellectual maturity to even comprehend what is happening to them, for all eternity. Fred Rogers is in hell. Abraham Lincoln is in hell. Steve Irwin is in hell. Every victim of every unjust murder, every terrorist attack, every genocide, every freak accident and every natural disaster since 1497 is in hell as are any and all perpetrators. To borrow a turn of phrase from Carl Sagan, who is also in hell- every saint and sinner since 1497 is being eaten by four-headed flying bears for all of eternity.
  • Neutral Janet, a purely-functional Janet dressed in beige who never emotes and speaks in the tersest, most matter-of-fact way possible. Sure, it's also funny, but the blankness makes her feel more like a mannequin than a supernatural AI, and it's pretty unsettling.
• "Chidi Sees the Time Knife": Shawn plans to use a "Michael-suit" to torture the humans for eternity should the new experiment fail; leaving them confused and despairing throughout their eternal torment as their dear friend who risked everything for them seemingly betrays them.

Season 4

• "Tinker, Tailor, Demon, Spy":
  • Michael reveals his true form is a gigantic Cthulhu-esque squid monster that's on fire, is covered in teeth, smells terrible, and constantly oozes juice. It's apparently such a horrifying sight that he refuses to reveal it even though it would confirm his identity. Michael believes that, if the humans were to see him like that, they would forever view him as a repulsive monster and would be too disgusted to remain friends with him. To repeat: This form is so horrifying that Michael rather blow himself up into a pile of goo for months than have his friends see him as what he truly is.
  • The "horse" that Chidi draws that comes to life is all kinds of horrifying. From its dislocated eyes to its shambling body to the frog-like tongue it uses to eat the butterfly. No surprise everyone was running for the hills when it came into existence.
• "Employee of the Bearimy"
  • Remember Shawn's plan to torture the four humans by having Vicky wear a Michael suit? At Demon Con, he reveals that he wants to expand this form of torture to everyone. People who go to the Bad Place would be tortured by demons disguised as their spouses, their friends, family... Imagine being tricked into believing that someone you love deeply is hurting you and you don't know why. For eternity.
• "The Funeral to End All Funerals":
  • Gen gives her ruling: the points system is flawed. The Soul Squad wins. Yay! Except... her idea of "fixing" this problem is to wipe Earth from existence and start over. Every person on Earth, good and bad — gone forever, with absolutely no evidence that they ever existed. All this because millions of humans were unjustly tortured, and upon realizing it, the not-so-loving God has decided it's easier to start from scratch and hope it turns out better this time than it is to actually fix it. It's essentially Noah's flood, except even worse, since God at least spared two of each animal, plus Noah and his family. Gen intends to spare absolutely nobody.
    • And by nobody we mean nobody. Even people who have already died and made it to the afterlife will be erased if Gen has her way. Imagine being one of the lucky few who made it to the Good Place. You were a good person all your life, and are being rewarded in death with eternal happiness, only to have it suddenly taken away from you, without you even knowing why. Although the realization of what the Good Place s actually like as listed below means they'd have likely seen it as welcome.
  • Gen's utter Lack of Empathy is especially chilling. She treats erasing Earth with all the same gravity one would normally treat wiping your computer's hard drive to get rid of a virus, even doing a little song and dance number. Humans Are Insects, indeed...
• "Patty" reveals the actual Good Place is just as screwed up as the rest of the afterlife, as it turns out having your every desire met for all eternity eventually becomes its own kind of hell, making your existence meaningless and with no hope that anything will ever change until eventually even the greatest minds to ever live are reduced to "happiness zombies" who can barely hold a coherent thought.
• By the time of the Grand Finale, Derek has been rebooted millions of times, and his form has transcended into a creepy big floating head made of space with bright white eyes, with uncanny abilities including a vision of the inevitable heat death of the universe.

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