The Good Place: All Good Things Must Come to an End

I used to think I’d live forever. And the thought terrified me.

I used to think I’d live forever. And the thought terrified me.

(Contains huge, The Good Place spoilers. I’d recommend watching it first.)

As a child, I would lie in my high-bed thinking about Heaven. It goes on forever and picturing it was dizzying. It felt like looking off the edge of the world. You’d live there for a million years without the clock ticking once.

The comedy The Good Place faces a similar dilemma. When our characters finally reach The Good Place it’s a doped-up orgasmathon — everyone is so busy being blissful, they never talk or think. Taking it over, our beloved characters add a new feature, death.

This solves the problem. When people go to The Good Place (Heaven) they are able to do anything they’ve ever wanted. After a while, residents feel complete and grow dissatisfied with eternal satisfaction. At that point, they can walk through a simple archway by a forest brook and become one with the universe.

Narratively speaking this is neat, it tells us that death is a natural part of life, even the afterlife. This has been a big theme of the show. The scarcity of human experience provides meaning (much to the surprise of the demons). The finale is mature, profound and beautiful, with each of the characters we’ve grown to love making peace with themselves and saying goodbye.

And yes, it’s deep, but it’s wrong.

How could eternity get old? How could end up being stagnant or boring?

How could it be like being stuck in a room with a TV, a copy of the Godfather trilogy and a revolver? Some nice experiences and a way to end it all.

I understand the limits of TV shows. They can’t introduce too many new characters or changes. But in not doing so, The Good Place’s final argument is flawed.

Yes, eternity with no change would be boring, and euthanasia would be better than that. But that’s not the only option. In the show, the characters end up in charge of The Good Place. They could build on their successes and try to solve the next problem.

How do you create a Heaven worth living in forever?

In The Great Divorce, C. S. Lewis’ describes Heaven:

But very far away I could see what might be either a great bank of cloud or a range of mountains. Sometimes I could make out in it steep forests, farwithdrawing valleys, and even mountain cities perched on inaccessible summits. At other times it became indistinct. The height was so enormous that my waking sight could not have taken in such an object at all. Light brooded on the top of it: slanting down thence it made long shadows behind every tree on the plain. There was no change and no progression as the hours passed. The promise or the threat of sunrise rested immovably up there.

For him, Heaven is a place of eternal growth, there is always a higher peak to climb and new things to uncover. In fact, those who choose to stay in the foothills to welcome new entrants would delay this exploration. But this is no sacrifice, for Heaven is eternal.

The low expectations of The Good Place seem to rest on the finiteness of the universe. A limited number of friends. Some fixed number of angles for self-improvement. The idea that we are trying to complete our Earthly personalities.

And this is reasonable. It is hard to imagine that infinite growth is possible. It is obvious that we’ll always get bored. It seems immature to long totally reject death.

But the same is true for aeroplanes. For almost all of human history it has been obvious that humans cannot fly and immature for us to long to. But as I sit here, planes fly over my head. The dreamers were right and the “reasonable” folk were wrong.

Is heavier than air flight impossible or just very hard?

Is a satisfying eternity out of the question or just very difficult?

I don’t believe in a literal Heaven any more, but I still empathise with my child-self. An eternity without growth would be terrifying. The long rainy afternoon of the soul.

And I reckon Christians would agree. Heaven is only worth spending forever in because of the character of the management. Without God running the place, Heaven would literally be Hell.

The Good Place agrees; an eternity of mindless pleasure would be an afterlife not worth living.

Everyone agrees that ending death isn’t enough. To live forever, there need to be things to live for. This is the problem. So let’s not run away from it.

And this problem isn’t just a fantasy. Whether in 100 years or in a million, humans will one day live a lot longer than we currently do.

At that point, the issue won’t be death, it will be boredom.

As far as The Good Place is concerned, I think we can do better.