Review: It’s a wonderful afterlife in The Good Place’s bittersweet finale
Eleanor (Kristen Bell) takes charge of a new experiment. [credit: NBC/Universal ]
We have bid a tearful farewell to The Good Place, NBC's hilariously inventive, yet thoughtful, take on the afterlife. The show delivered rich characters and plenty of laughs, but it also challenged us to ponder deeper questions of what it really means to be a good person. Consistently intelligent and insightful, particularly about human foibles, each season held enough surprising turns and unexpected twists to keep a typical sitcom running for twice as many seasons. But The Good Place was never a typical sitcom. I'm pleased to report that in the series finale, the writers didn't blink while grappling with (among other things) the troubling implications of an infinite afterlife for finite humans.
(Spoilers for first three and a half seasons below. Major spoilers from the last half of S4 are below the second gallery. We'll give you a heads up when we get there.)
In the pilot episode, Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell) woke up in a generically pleasant waiting room and discovered she was dead and in "the Good Place." Neighborhood architect Michael (Ted Danson) explained the afterlife point system and introduced her to Janet (D'Arcy Carden), an AI guide who serves as the Good Place's main source of information and can pretty much give residents anything they desire (however ludicrous). Eleanor also met her "soulmate": a moral philosophy professor named Chidi (William Jackson Harper). Once they were alone, Eleanor confessed to Chidi that she'd been admitted to paradise by mistake and asked him to help her become a better person-no small feat, since by her own admission, Eleanor was a "trash bag" of a human being back on Earth.
Read 17 remaining paragraphs | Comments