Thoughts on The Good Place

The Last Judgment (Michelangelo, 1536–1541)

I recently read a couple decent but contrasting reviews of The Good Place, one on Slate ("The Good Place Went Out on Its Own Terms") and the other on The Mockingbird ("The Despairing Place"). The conclusions were predictable (predictability is going to be a running theme here). Secular, humanist Slate loved it, religious, humanist Mockingbird disliked it. It was interesting that both loved the show over all, and that both loved the penultimate episode.

Anyway, considering these reviews caused me to start typing a Facebook post, and when that post reached 6 paragraphs I realized this was a good writing exercise, and that it should be a blog entry.  (one problem with my blog has been that I keep relegating it to 'finished' pieces or topics that I have little emotional investment in. I need to start taking some bigger swings on this thing).

Back on topic... I know opinions like this are why many people find me insufferable but really, from the beginning there was no other way for The Good Place to end. Either the theologians or the philosophers were bound to be disappointed in the ending. A sitcom with this premise cannot have a satisfying ending, because it is asking questions that we, as a species, have never found satisfying answers for.  That's why I never really watched it, though it seemed tailor made for me.

Now, that doesn't mean I agree with the author of "The Despairing Place". The tone of a theological review of a show about philosophy on a theological website could be predicted as easily as the possible finales for The Good Place.

Which, again, is the point.  Neither philosophy nor theology have given us flawless answers to why we are here, where it all comes from, or what comes next, or even if there is a next. No, atheists haven't answered those either, they just gave up asking the questions, the quitters. 😉 The article is correct, despite the flights of special effects whimsy the show was never able to transcend the limits of our imaginations.  Heaven & Hell simply looked, and acted, like fun house mirror images of material reality. Understandable, as it's all we have as a conceptual framework.

But these places are meaningless unless they transcend material existence.  I'm not certain it is truly possible for us to imagine beyond reality. Heck, we have a hard time imagining 'places' within reality that are not 3 dimensional. Was The Good Place functionally different from cinematic depictions of cyberspace, such as The Matrix or Ready Player One? We've been trying to imagine these different places in reality a long time, try reading Abbot's Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884) sometime and then consider if the tale, in your mind's eye, really is 2 dimensional. Heck, not even The Simpson's 3-D Halloween episode could really extend our abilities to perceive meaningfully beyond our material framework. Or Homer's material framework, anyway.

And we don't do much better on the questions themselves, ignoring the conceptual framework. No matter how often we try, our answers always come back to oblivion or some sort of god. Even when we try to imagine 'scientific' answers it invariably leads to the same places. I put quotes around 'scientific' because science itself doesn't have anything to do with the big questions asked by philosophy or theology, it's just our best intellectual tool for understanding material existence itself, and therefore is pretty worthless when we try to leave reality behind. But regardless, boiling away the decorations on the many different answers we've tried to come up with for these big questions it is always there is nothing, or there is 'god'. And we end up right back where we started asking the questions.

It was brave of a sitcom to try to answers these questions, I suppose. And like all good art, the show taught us plenty about humans, our ethics, our strengths, and our weaknesses.  Even the handful of episodes I watched over the years showed it was funny and clever with a great cast. Great art, in my view, always says something truthful about humanity. The Good Place did that, even if it never answered the bigger questions that premise promised answers to.

Now, time to sleep, wondering how embaressed I'll be by this blog post in the morning... 😀

All views in this blog are my own and represent the views of no other person, organization, or institution.