The Very Bad Ending To The Very Good, Good Place

On Eternity and the limits of any story not about God's love

The end of the Good Place was the saddest ending to a TV show I have ever experienced. But not for the reasons you might think.

You can stream The Good Place which wrapped in 2020 on Apple or Netflix, a witty, thoughtful, and heartfelt comedy about demons, angels, philosophy, and the afterlife. I thoroughly enjoyed this show, it had all the devastatingly funny smarts of 30 Rock with the warmth of The Office or Parks and Rec. The degree of difficulty of making jokes out of Kant is not to be underestimated. But even more, I found myself watching the show as a sort of a cultural commentary.

I do want to clarify, I am not critiquing the show itself. I loved the show, I thought the characters were brilliantly conceived—especially Sean, the head demon, who in the show tortured Shakespeare by reading him the script of the Entourage movie. I am simply using the Good Place as a mirror to hold up the pronounced poverty even of the best versions of the cultural stories we tell about life, death, and eternity.

But all praise aside, what does a post-truth or multi-truth (same thing, really) culture have so say about heaven and eternal life?

Turns out, not much. I don’t say this critically or dismissively. But the show ends as each of the four main characters reaches a state of contentment in their eternal state and essentially euthanize their soul in a way suggestive of Buddhism, emptying one’s self of desire to the point where there’s nothing else to live for. The conclusion had all the tear-filled warmth of the endings of the best stories, minus the “happily ever after.”

In the penultimate episode of the show, we arrive at an eternal cocktail party where the residents of the Good Place are slowly evaporating into mindless pleasure zombies. They have lived in such lavish luxury with no conflict, sickness, or pain that all of the meaning has been ever so slowly emptied out of existence. This malaise is embodied by the Neoplatonist Hypatia of Alexandria, who studied philosophy and astronomy in the 3rd-4th centuries—Chidi even drops an amazing “I love her in a Neo-Platonic” way that though, it kills, is not enough to break the hypnosis of this aimless ‘Good Place.” The show’s solution to this problem: there has to be an end. It’s death, the writers conclude, that gives life meaning. So, in the trajectory of the show, even eternal life has to have an end.

In the last episode we see each of the main characters pray the prayer of annihilation, welcoming their own personal relationship with Nirvana, where they have done all there is to do, eaten all that there is to eat, seen everywhere there is to see. They reach this “inner peace” that clues them into the call to walk across the threshold of existence to non-being. We are supposed to see the nobility and peace of their contentment but watching each character reach this climactic moment to end all moments, I found myself not deeply moved at their nobility of spirit or rejoicing with them as they reached contentment but indignant at the smallness of the story.

The Good Place has no room for eternity, no room for individualism (a profound irony in a Western story about heaven), and ultimately, no room for love. The show is content to let philosophy and ethics be a guide for mapping the good life rather than love. Philosophy has historically questioned what is a good life and preparation, as Cicero says, for “learning how to die.”

But love, love teaches us how to live. Love makes us fully our authentic selves. The Bible bears witness to not just an everlasting God, an eternal being who not only exists without beginning or end but whose disposition towards the world at large and individuals made in his image is unfailing love (Jer. 31v3). Jesus came to earth to remove the sickness of sin from our hearts which like a wasting disease slowly eroded our bodies and souls. His death on the cross and resurrection to his reign unending declare to one and all that though it seems that entropy and ending are the ways of the universe, there is a grace that is stronger than the grave.

The Good places essentially portrays the main characters consuming life. Over the eons of multidimensional time, or as the Good Place hilariously labels them, Jeremy Bearimy’s, the characters visit every magnificent city, every time period, eat at every great restaurant, and even play the perfect game of Madden (BORTTLLLES!). At the end, there is nothing left to do but to surrender one’s soul to the ether. Life has been consumed. But the Bible tells a different story, of a love that never fails, a love that can never be consumed (Romans 8). But even more, that this love is so magnificent that it will always evoke our desire, always divulge deeper depths, always make us more creative, more exploratory, more loving, more ourselves.

Ecclesiastes 3:11 declares that God has placed eternity in the human heart. The great philosopher Augustine (to my recollection completely ignored by The Good Place) says of our longings even in heaven that we “will be insatiably satisfied, without growing weary. We will always be hungering, and always being filled.” (Augustine).

And the biblical story not only invites us to wonder at the fact that our souls will live forever, sustained by the salvation and love of God, but that we will be embodied souls with new bodies that aren’t subject to the decay of sin and death. And we will live in a city where the love of God will be the distance between us where will cultivate, create and love without the frustrations of sinfulness, self-centeredness, and the limits of time.

The impulse to say that it’s arrogant that we should think that we as individuals should live forever may sound noble in its humility, but its the humility born of, to channel Lewis, thinking less of ourselves, rather than thinking of ourselves less. Greg Boyle, the Jesuit priest who works with at-risk and gang-affiliated young people in in Los Angeles reminds us, “Human beings are settlers, but not in the pioneer sense. It is our human occupational hazard to settle for little.” The Good Place is a settlement built upon a small story. But we were created for more.

This world with all of its pain, all of its suffering, all of its beauty aches for more. We long for justice, love, peace, community, to be fully known, and ultimately, we long for love. Perhaps we need an eternity that cannot exhaust our longings but an eternity that forever, in the paradoxical way that all the best things work, both fills our deepest longings and creates them. The love of God never fails, through life, death, and every Jeremy Bearimy, we shall never cease to hang on every word that comes from the mouth of God (Hans urs Von Balthasar).