Party while the world burns: Season 3 of The Good Place
wrongquestions posted: It's Easy to Be a Saint in Paradise: Thoughts on The Good Place's Third Season (via
thisweekmeta)
I enjoyed this critique of The Good Place, but would go further and argue that the problems with the story and worldbuilding in Season 3 are bringing out the worst in its premise of eternal bliss and damnation, and is in danger of destroying everything that was good or meaningful about the show.
Abigail Nussbaum said in the original post:
It makes sense for Michael, while he still believes that the point system is being tampered with by the bad place, to argue that it needs to be reviewed and reformed. But after he realizes that it's not the point system, but the world that is broken, it's rather unclear what his proposed remedy is. Like so many others, I don't know what the correct response is to the realization that capitalism forces us to participate in the exploitation and immiseration of others. But I'm pretty sure that changing the definition of "good" so that it excludes these unintended but still very real negative consequences is not it. Yes, Michael's approach has a solid justification in that all humans who ever lived are being subjected to eternal torture, but surely the solution to that is to stop torturing, full stop, instead of trying to redefine the types of people who "deserve" to be tortured? At the very least, we've reached a point where the show's worldbuiding, with its focus on the afterlife, ceases to be useful as any sort of philosophical or ethical thought experiment.
The Season 3 revelations, in other words, indict the very belief in an afterlife that sorts people into eternal torture or eternal bliss columns based on individual morality. The only question is whether this indictment is intentional on the writers' part or not, and the answer to that will determine the direction of Season 4 and the show's position in the ongoing conversation about ethics and systematic injustice that it has become a part of.
See, in the show's cosmology as it stands, Michael's solution makes perfect sense. If life on Earth is nothing but a proving ground to determine whether you are fit for eternal torture or eternal bliss, what does it matter what state Earth is in--especially once it turns out to be meaningless even as a proving ground for souls? The true essences of people, their actual eternal souls, can be saved regardless.
Also, if the only test of this torture/bliss divide is individual morality, what does it matter if this requisite morality for eternal bliss can exist only in a vacuum free of pesky worldly concerns like exploitative capitalism and environmental destruction? Again, circle back to point one: the physical world is transient and unimportant. Its brokenness has made it less, not more, important to save because it's now too broken to be a meaningful test. In a cosmology where only the soul and eternal life are of any importance, life and Earth no longer figures in that equation once it can't be a "real" test of a soul's morality and its place in the eternal afterlife.
This is why the developments of Season 3 have brought the show rapidly into "who the hell cares?" territory, unless you do subscribe to the belief that personal enlightenment and/or going to heaven are the ultimate goals of life. To the extent people do subscribe to these beliefs, Season 3 brings out the worst in these belief systems by proposing a version of striving for enlightenment/bliss that does absolutely nothing to improve the real world. The subjects of the repeat experiments at the end of Season 3 are already dead, and according to the current cosmology cannot go back to carry their lessons forward on Earth. The only thing that they can do is avoid eternal torture and seek eternal bliss for their individual selves.
Worse, the new developments read as an active advocacy to stop trying to improve the world or care about fellow mortal beings. If it doesn't matter how much good you try to do and you go to hell anyway, what's the point? If your only hope of avoiding torture for all eternity is to die and prove your individual goodness in a completely different afterworld than Earth, why even try to do any good on Earth?
These revelations are in turn rapidly destroying the characters that we have come to love. Eleanor, who came so far from her trauma-driven selfishness, now seems to be fine with abandoning the world as a lost cause. Chidi, who dedicated his entire life to a study of how humans should live, now comes across as a personification of the arid meaninglessness of that discipline. Michael, as discussed, is actually consistent with his characterization as a being of the afterlife, but his breakthroughs and growths have become even more unmoored from real life than before when life on Earth at least had meaning as a testing ground for souls.
As the original post and commenters have pointed out, The Good Place has reached a point where the cracks in the foundation of its cosmology have reached a breaking point and the only viable way forward is to subvert the cosmology itself. Otherwise it will go down as the show that raised interesting questions about ethics, religion, and real-world injustice only to give the most despiriting, escapist, and destructive answer imaginable. It will become the show that advocates that we leave this world to burn and go away to party forever in heaven. It will have substituted a good death for a good life as the ultimate value, and that is not a good place it to end up.
Dreamwidth entry URL: https://lj-writes.dreamwidth.org/2019/02/21/the-good-place-s3.html