I finally managed to finish the Good Place, rewatching the entire series up to where I stopped in season 4. the first two seasons are great, but it goes downhill after that and the last couple episodes were actively annoying to the point where it knocks an entire point off the star rating for me. I love the cast, I love the premise, I love the production values and set design, I just wish they had stuck the landing.
What made the show so exciting was this sense that it had something to say, that it was exploring all these philosophical ideas and was eventually going to land somewhere cohesive and interesting. I'm not sure why I expected a TV show to do what no living philosopher has ever been able to do (answer their own questions satisfactorily), but I am not a philosophy guy, so what do I know?
The culmination of all this talk about ethics and meaning was, frankly, distressing to me. The most perfect afterlife they can think of is one where you get to do everything you've ever wanted and then kill yourself once you're bored. that for a human being, suicide is the answer to eternity. It would be one thing if the show had been largely focused on eastern philosophy for the duration and this was what it built to, but it was very much focused on western and judeo-christian concepts of sin and punishment/reward which it then kind of awkwardly sidles away from, or at the very least coyly refuses to elaborate on. What I'm trying to say is they built a playful and fun but woefully shallow concept of the soul and the afterlife and it was a shaky platform to launch into discussions of meaning and purpose from.
Ultimately, I think they looked at eternity and blinked and chickened out. One question they probably should have answered to provide some context and foundation for any thoughts about meaning they were trying to convey, was why any of it was happening. Why was there an afterlife at all? Who made all the janets? Why were the demons/angels/functionaries of the afterlife at all concerned about whether humans were good or bad? Why are demons suited to eternity but a human being isn't? Why not have human souls expand and grow in complexity much like Derek in this eternity? maybe they become afterlife functionaries too? the show was so desperate to avoid any hint of religion that they failed to define some important terms to put the events of the show in any sort of context, even though something like a higher power that IS concerned about all these things is frequently implied. But the show frustratingly never answers the question of what its all for. Obviously the writers of a TV show can't solve the meaning of life for us, but in the context of the show, it probably would have helped if the writers would have actually committed to the setting by eventually adding some crucial details. So in a sense, I understand the ending. If I were in an afterlife that poorly thought out, I can understand why people would want a way out.
Personally, I think it would have all worked better if they'd worked reincarnation into it somehow. The idea that you die and your soul just lingers for not real reason is not too appealing, instead of the tests in the middle place, why not have them reincarnate over and over with some vague sense of previous lives and lessons learned and frame it around that? Instead of an eternity of perfect ease, a long series of lives on earth, with all the ups and downs that come with that? Remembering everything only in between incarnations? I guess my point is, they had a lot of options, and they chose a shrug, and yet another meditation on mortality that boils down to "death is the only thing that gives life meaning."
Even that strikes me as posturing though. "death is the only thing that gives life meaning" is more something we say to ourselves to cope with knowledge of our own mortality. I don't see how mortality imparts meaning, although I do see how it imparts urgency to the proceedings. We are not living in forever so we'd best get to it. I think if we had the capacity to live to 400 years old in good health and vitality we wouldn't be thinking, "ah, if only I had died 300 years ago to give this all some meaning." Meaning comes from all kinds of things. It may be true that for creatures with our brains and our bodies as they are now that we would handle certain kinds of eternities poorly, but I'm not sure it stands to reason that any long-term extension of consciousness would lead to boredom and madness. I can imagine an enduring body and an infinite universe providing quite a bit of entertainment, frankly. Which brings up another question, why in all of eternity did they never leave earth? Again, the vision here is weirdly limited.
Beyond that, we should probably also be careful to distinguish between the natural ennui of age and the value-added ennui of stressful world we've created for each other. We're all very tired, I understand, but we've also created a very narrow and stressful range of options for living that are difficult to cope with (in the name of religion or economics or good old fashioned bigotry). We might think more kindly of eternity if we didn't exhaust each other so much as a matter of principle.
But I do go on. Suffice to say, while I thought the first two seasons were really good, ultimately the show kind of chickens out and goes up its own navel into nothing in the grand tradition of philosophy. Glad I watched it, but ultimately disappointing. Alas.
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