This was originally written on 1/16/2021.
It took me a very long time to get around to it, but I finally finished this show. I loved it when it first came out, I followed the second and third seasons as soon as they were available to me, and then, after being on Netflix for over a year (I think) I finished the fourth and final season a few days ago. I loved it, it was phenomenal. I cried at the end and felt profoundly sad for several days. I still do, for that matter. And then I talked about the show with my analyst. So I’d like to write a bit about the show, what I liked so much, and what my analyst and I said.
A Brief Synopsis
There are going to be spoilers for the whole thing, so if that’s something that matters to you, stop reading here. If you already know about what happens then skip this part if you want. If you have no idea what the show’s deal is and/or you don’t care about spoilers, then read on, and I would recommend this show.
Eleanor, Chidi, Jason, and Tahani have all died and gone to (what looks like) the Good Place. They slowly learn that this is not, in fact, the Good Place, but the Bad Place reimagined by one of the demons Michael who is experimenting with a new way to torture people. After the group has figured it out he resets their memory to try again. Each of the 802 times that they’re reset they still manage to find each other, decide to improve themselves to remain in (what they think is) the Good Place, figure out the scheme, and band together to try and stop Michael from tormenting them.
Michael eventually begins to sympathize with the group. He decides to help them get into the Good Place because they’ve shown that with time and dedication they can improve themselves morally, which, for him, is enough evidence that all four belong somewhere else. Over whatever season we’re in now the group comes to learn that actually, nobody has ever gotten into the Good Place. Life on Earth has proven so utterly morally complicated and confusing that it’s impossible to get a good enough “score” to qualify for eternal utopia.
The next and final leg of the show is the group proving that even people who were terrible on Earth can improve, demonstrating this proof to the “judge” (who makes the call on what the rules of the Good and Bad places are), and inventing a new system. They succeed, hurray, and are all admitted to the Good Place. What they learn when they get there is that, as it turns out, being allowed unlimited and unceasing pleasure for all of eternity ends up being terrible and boring. They decide to implement a new mechanism into the Good Place where one can walk through a door and end everything, permanently, returning to whatever (it doesn’t get specified by the show), at a time of their own choosing. Spend as much or as little time as you want in the Good Place, and when you’re ready, you can be finished.
That was a crash course. I hope it was good enough if you aren’t familiar with the show.
What I Liked
There are a number of things that really drew me in to this show — especially the final season — some related to psychoanalysis, many not necessarily related. Let’s talk about them.
Life on Earth
This point that living a completely upstanding moral life is extremely difficult, if not impossible, is spot on. (Quick note: I’d like to say that I’m not advocating any of the moral positions that I’ll be writing here. I don’t know that much about philosophy, and even less about moral philosophy. These are illustrative examples, not strict philosophical arguments.) Is it morally wrong to kill animals? Maybe, but what if you’re going to starve unless you eat something and animals are the only thing you have access to? What if you appropriately kill the animal first, doing so as painlessly as possible? What if you use every single piece of the animal so that none of it goes to waste? What if meat is an essential part of your diet due to the large amount of protein it contains? What about the fact that at this point most people think of meat as being completely normal? Do the answers to these questions change if you’re living in this culture instead of that one? Do they change over time? If you make a misstep here, according to the logic of the show you’re probably on the road to the Bad Place, and given all the questions above, how could you not make a misstep? This kind of moral questioning is present for a lot of the time that we spent on Earth, and it might even never be absent. (For example, I’m typing this on a computer made by people in another country that are probably making very little money in exchange, and with parts obtained in a probably unsavory way. Yet I need a computer to really function in my various roles.) It’s an excellent point the show makes. The question at the heart of “The Good Place” and the quest to fix its status is, I think, “what is it to be moral?”, something that the show never explicitly asks or answers.
People Can Improve
I don’t have a whole lot to say about this because it’s right there in the title. Michael even directly says it at one point, “No one is beyond rehabilitation.” I agree with this, but I’d add the caveat that no one is beyond rehabilitation or at least the opportunity to try. Michael’s advantage is having all of eternity to give people the tools and the chance, an amount of time we don’t get on Earth. Which brings me to the next thing…
The Final Door
This is possibly my favorite part of the show. That said, I was surprised to find when I looked at fan messaging boards and the like that a lot of people really didn’t like it; they thought it was too depressing, they wanted something more uplifting, or something along those lines. But I couldn’t disagree more. What makes a project worth engaging in? I would argue that it’s the possibility of finishing it one day, or maybe the possibility of it never being finished, which is itself an endpoint, if a paradoxical one. What makes it worthwhile to find a partner to love? I would argue it’s the idea that it could end. If finding love was a quest to find someone who would absolutely love you no matter what, never finding any fault whatsoever, no matter how small, and never bringing up any argument at all even if it’s insignificant, then I think love would be boring. It wouldn’t be love, it would be something else. And the fact that “The Good Place” sees this as a necessary, rather than contingent, part of life is astounding to me. Of course what makes life worthwhile is the fact that it comes to a close. Imagine reading a book that literally never ended. You get to the final page only to find that there is another one. I’ve never read a book quite like that but I’ve certainly read books which felt like that, and they weren’t worth my time. The fact that life, and the afterlife as well, has a final page is why we bother reading it in the first place. It makes the book beautiful.
Chidi
Something I left out of my synopsis was the arc of the Chidi character, which I’d like to turn to now.
His whole deal on Earth was a paralysis that he experienced from the sorts of questions that I posed above. “Should I wear these shoes? Or is that immoral? Should I wear shoes at all?” etc. It left him to neglect his friends, his family, his love interests, and so on, because he was too absorbed in these questions that he had no time to spare for those people. So he goes to hell. Over the course of his hundreds of afterlives, though, he finally, mercifully, learns that there is no answer, or at least not an absolute answer, to every single question, moral or otherwise. He asks one of the characters to keep a note for him to give back when he gets his memory restored (his is reset one more time than everyone else) which we eventually are shown to say “There is no ‘answer.’ But Eleanor is the answer.” And what’s so fascinating about this, for me, is that in giving up the idea of capital T “The” answer, Chidi can start providing answers. Eleanor asks him when his memory is restored, “Hey so what’s our deal now, are we still a thing?” to which Chidi responds, “Oh, yeah, I love you. Do you love me?” No reservation, no hesitation, he has an answer for Eleanor. His lack of certainty provides a sense of certainty in the paradoxical way that things like this happen.
And so we come to what I told my analyst.
“The Good Place” and My Analysis
I told him more or less everything I wrote in the summary above, and more or less everything I wrote in the Chidi section above. He asked a few questions, but our point of departure was the Chidi section, and not in the way I anticipated.
The preamble I provided before talking about Chidi was to say, “The other thing that really struck me about the show was the character Chidi. I don’t think his name matters but there you go.” After I finished speaking my analyst asked me “What do you hear in the signifier ‘Chidi?” I responded that I heard “cheat” in there. (If you say Chidi the way it’s pronounced on the show, it would be something like “Chee-dee.”. It’s not much of a leap, or it wasn’t for me, to get to “cheat” from there.) “What do you make of that?”
Well, what I immediately provided was my propensity to cheat in school, especially when it came to subjects I wasn’t very good at. Do you remember those big TI-83 (or whatever number) graphing calculators? If you do, you might also remember that the newer ones have the capacity to basically write notes in them, which I would do before a math exam so that I didn’t have to remember everything. It’s just one example of how I would cheat, but it’s the one I provided.
“Why did you cheat on these things?”
To impress my parents with good grades and preserve the image of myself as someone who was “smart” or whatever. He replied that not only was I cheating on the test, but I was cheating for that image as well. I didn’t do well on math tests. I wrote down the information so that I could get the grade and demonstrate it. No need to be good at math — I could just cheat and no one would be the wiser!
I recalled to him a scene that I’ve written about here before. In the fifth grade, I think, I bombed an anatomy test and got an F. Rather than showing my parents I preserved the image of someone who is “smart” and who “gets good grades” by hiding the failure. Of course, they found out. Then they studied with me, convinced the teacher to let me give it another shot, and I passed. Woohoo, I got an A on a fifth grade anatomy test.
The analyst said some other things back, and then I recalled yet another scene which I also wrote about in the same post mentioned above. When I was starting to do the weekly NLS seminars for Lacan’s seminar X, I would try and grasp everything in the text (a ridiculous task) and make sure that I could pose an excellent question or comment to everyone. Something that would make them say “Wow, Jared really gets this! He’s brilliant!” I earnestly tried to do this — not only did I formulate the questions and comments, but I actually spoke them. And of course no one was astonished by my brilliance.
“So you’re cheating the Other.”
Yes, of course! I was trying to demonstrate to the Other (here placed in the audience at the NLS seminars) “Look, I already get this. I’m not lacking anything!” I was cheating my way to being an analyst just like I cheated my way to being someone who gets good grades. Instead of letting the text speak to me and allowing myself to be confused or ask actual questions of the text I was asserting that I didn’t have any, just like I wouldn’t allow myself to be confused by math and would instead write what I needed to know in my calculator.
I don’t think I do this quite so much now as I did much earlier in my analysis, or at least I hope I don’t, but it’s still a theme that absolutely haunts countless of my sessions. Now I’m giving myself some space to be confused. Someone told me recently, talking about reading Lacan, to “let the text just wash over you rather than trying to get it all at once.” I’ve been trying in earnest to let that happen. In fact I remember at an NLS meeting a few weeks ago I raised my hand and said, “I read this paragraph, had no idea what I’d just read, and then wrote in the margin, ‘Fucking what?’ Can I read it and try to talk it over a little?” I got a little laugh which was nice, but more importantly I asked a real question. I put my own lack out there, rather than disguising it under an asinine comment, and in return I got some really nice discussion.
“I’m glad you told me Chidi’s name, even though it didn’t matter.”
He said that with a laugh and obvious sarcasm. My unconscious had “cheated” a little too, sneaking in something that, without his pointing it out, would’ve stayed out of my awareness. I told him, “My unconscious is telling me, ‘Stop cheating!’”
We ended there.