The Hermit Philosopher: Reflections on The Good Place

Almost two years ago – January 30, 2020 to be precise – the 53rd and final episode of The Good Place aired on NBC. I have since watched all four seasons of this fantasy comedy on Netflix, and I just watched the final episode again. I don’t think I’ve ever been as enamored of a TV show.

For those who don’t know, the plot involves Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristin Bell), a woman welcomed after her death to the “Good Place,” a highly selective Heaven-like utopia designed and run by Michael (Ted Danson), a non-human afterlife "architect." To be chosen for the Good Place is supposedly a reward for a righteous life, but Eleanor and her three human companions are actually in an experimental “Bad Place.” They were chosen by Michael to torture each other emotionally and psychologically for eternity.

Eleanor thinks she’s in heaven, however, and she knows that she doesn’t deserve to be, so she tries to hide her morally imperfect past and become a better, more ethical person. She fails at this miserably, as do the other humans, but along the way they grow to understand what’s going on, and in the process they lay out a moral vision for us that’s quite sophisticated and deeply informed by principles of philosophy. It’s a vision that puts learning and trying to do good front and center, and it’s based in large part on T.M. Scanlon’s What We Owe to Each Other.

In the final episode, the four companions get to experience the real Good Place, and they find it boring. They decide that an endless afterlife, even an eternity of happiness, would lead to intellectual stagnation and loss of meaning. It’s too much of a good thing. As one of them says, it’s so perfect you become a “glassy-eyed mush person.”

They conclude that uncertainty is what makes life special, so Michael adds an exit door from Paradise to the unknown. If they leave through that door, they become like “a wave returning to the ocean,” as Chidi, one of the human characters explains:

Picture a wave. In the Ocean. You can see it, measure it, its height, the way the sunlight refracts when it passes through. And its there. And you can see it. You know what it is: it's a wave.
And then it crashes on the shore and it's gone. But the water is still there. The wave was just a different way for the water to be for a little while. You know, it's one conception of death for Buddhists: the wave returns to the ocean, where it came from and where it's supposed to be.

I love that metaphor. It’s a peaceful and comforting vision of the end of life. A gentle reminder that we’re all open parentheticals, waiting for the close parenthesis to come. At that point we will dissolve back into the fabric of the universe and will be at peace.

As usual, Shakespeare said it best: “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and we round our little life with a sleep.” ■