My ending - not a prediction…
They keep trying to make the good place better, it doesn’t work.
They realize that the good place would be a journey, not a destination. They have learned, grown, made friends, etc. The best place would be repeating seasons one through four (in their terms) over and over again. Michael says that they finally got it. He pushes a button and then the series ends with the same way it started - Michael welcoming Eleanor to the good place.
Bollocks. People have been trying to have their Heaven-cake and eat their Heaven-cake too for a long time. People envision “themselves” in heaven and even the actual Bible describes it that way. It’s completely incoherent, and I don’t think they’re off-base for ribbing it.
But moreover, The Good Place isn’t a show about theology. It’s a show about (shrimp dispensers and Molotov cocktails and) terrestrial philosophy filtered through the metaphor of the afterlife. You can argue that “eternal happiness is boring” is a weak argument about the afterlife, but I think “having everything you want and nothing to strive for or learn is poisonous” is a little more toothsome.
First, of course it’s about theology. Atheists don’t think an afterlife exists at all, let alone a place where someone can be tortured for all eternity.
Second, you can get everything in this Good Place, including the opportunity to learn, and learning is striving. That argument is self-defeating. I’d argue instead that for most of the great minds on earth their work *is *their happiness. Given the chance to extend that work in all directions with other like minds would take precedence over stardust milkshakes. That’s an embarrassingly 21th century notion of pleasure. Moreover, the show needs to ask the people being tortured for eternity whether they’d like to try this Good Place as an alternative. I’m betting the voting would be about 100,000,000,000 to 0 even if they veg out from a surfeit of [del]eels[/del] pleasure.
Ironically, the last show just announced that the atheistic idea of death is the final reward. That utterly confounds the moral underpinning of the rest of the series. That can’t possibly be where they leave it. I’m hoping that the twists I mentioned will turn our expectations around yet again.
Can the ending satisfy everyone? Obviously not. No two philosophers ever agree on anything, and the meaning and purpose of life itself is the most argued and most contentious point of all. We’ll be right back here after the show slagging and/or praising what Michael Schur did. That’s the real-world future and always will be.
I think anyone expecting them to throw out all the solutions they’ve already come up with in the last episode are going to be disappointed.
Right. Questions about the afterlife or a point system to decide where you go in the afterlife is definitely dealing with issues of theology.
I would also half-jokingly say that terrestrial philosophy filtered by the afterlife (though the belief in its reality as opposed to using it as a metaphor) is what most of theology is.
I agree with both these points.
Certainly the ‘walk through a door and your consciousness ceases’ device is unlikely to be the show’s solution to all the problems brought up in the course of the show.
Once the show committed to the idea that human consciousness goes on forever—a wish-fulfillment classic for millennia, after all—it can’t just pull the rug out with a claim that ‘oblivion is really what everyone ultimately craves.’ That’s simply not true, and such a claim would leave a sour taste in the mouths of most viewers.
Whatever the solution is, it will involve consciousness going on forever. And I don’t think they’ll try to present the cheat of ‘your mind goes on forever, BUT it will be merged with all other minds.’ That’s a device used in a lot of fiction treating The Afterlife, but it’s a cliché–and unsatisfying, besides.
Is tonight’s finale really 90 minutes or is that some kind of recap + 20 minute episode?
It was 70 minutes with a 20 minute post show with the cast and Seth Meyers.
Without spoilering the show (which was just wonderful and extremely moving), the recap was one of the better examples of the after finale live show genre. It was kept short, and the actors clearly were very fond of each other.
Oops. That’s what Schur did say. Even for Michael Realman, who was designed to be eternal and had already lived an eternity without worrying about it. Heaven turned out to be a hospice. That’s interesting and unexpected, but I also doubt he meant it to be read that way.
Oh well. The ending was a series of satisfying farewells and tissue-moments. As finales go, this was among the best ever purely emotionally. I’m not complaining.
Take it sleazy, everyone.
I don’t think the show depicts death as the final reward. It instead says that without the prospect of death, humans struggle to find meaning in life. This is pretty explicitly stated in the previous episode.
BOOOOOOORRRRING ENDING!!!
Everything else was great, though. 
I was very confused by the very last scene, with the junk mail and the stranger. Was it supposed to mean more than it did?
Other than that, not a very surprising ending, but very satisfying, and lots of very funny moments.
Looks like it’s going to take Brent at least a few thousand more Bearimies to make it…
Early in the series Michael talked about wanting to feel human. “I wanted to get a rewards card, any rewards card.” “I wanted to talk briefly to someone and then say, ‘Take it sleazy’.” You can see a clip here.
One recap I read last night said the club mentioned in that piece of mail was someplace Eleanor hung out at.
When Eleanor walked through the arch, she became a thousand points of light. One of those points made sure Michael got a rewards card.
It’s also a reference to the episode Jeremy Bearimy, where Eleanor finds a wallet, and despite just finding out she’s going to the Bad Place no matter what, she still returns it.
For what it’s worth, I really disagree with this read. The idea wasn’t “oblivion is what everyone truly craves.” Our heroes didn’t crave oblivion, because they didn’t know that oblivion was behind the door. They didn’t know anything about what was behind the door. I’m not sure there’s a good way to distill the thesis statement of The Good Place into a few sentences - and anyway whatever it means to you is what it means, right? - but what I got from it was this:
To be human is to question. To ask “why?” And “how?” And “can it be better?” We obsess about unanswered questions, but to some degree we shouldn’t, because it’s the unanswered questions that make life interesting. If you ever had the answer to every question, you’d eventually have to invent new questions with unknown answers, just to keep going.And eventually, you’d have to seek the answers to THOSE questions, even if it you’re risking oblivion, because all that matters is the pursuit of knowledge.