The Good Place - A Fan Theorizes

I don't watch much television.  Baseball games.  The occasional Brit stuff with my better half.  So much of what flickers across the small screen these days is just predictable, repetitive stuff.  So when something unconventional comes along it catches my attention.  And when it continues to go in unexpected directions I actually make some effort to watch it.

The Good Place is one of the few examples in recent years.  It airs on network (!) TV.  NBC to be specific.  And the plot in very brief summary is this:

Four imperfect but non-evil humans wake up in The Afterlife.  Micheal ( played by Ted Danson ) is a sort of angel in charge of their corner of heaven.  But of course, it is really hell, something they only slowly figure out.  The show is actually about.....philosophy, perhaps the first show to centerpiece the thoughts of Kant, Hume and Sarte since Monty Python's Flying Circus.  It sounds dry but it is engaging and funny on a deeper plane than most generic entertainment.

Danson is great, he has a lifetime of comedic timing to work with and so far as I can tell is doing this minor gig just because he enjoys it.  The protagonist is Kristin Bell, and she does a fine job, but there are several secondary characters who steal every scene they are in.  "Janet" played by a newcomer D'arcy Caden, and "Shawn", the demonic antagonist.  He's played by Marc Evan Jackson whose role is written to work when overacted.  He "chews the scenery" with gusto.

I very rarely delve into pop culture but as The Good Place starts its final season I do want to go on record with a Fan's Guess as to how the series will end.  No doubt there are other collections of predictions out there but I have not looked them up.  Just my thoughts on the fly.

I think the entire contrivance of The Good Place, with its many twists and turns is actually to save the eternal soul of.......Micheal, the supposed demon played by Ted Danson.  The recurring theme of the show is that humans, when given the opportunity, can become better.  And so it is with Michael who starts out covertly tormenting the main cast members but eventually becomes their ally and even offers to sacrifice himself to save them.

Under this theory all the other characters are actually angels.  Whether they know it or not.

All that's left then is to figure out who is God.  I doubt it is the four "human" characters.  The entire show is written with the premise that they are, in two distinct couples, "soul mates".   It could of course be Janet, the engaging, witty Artificial Intelligence that also becomes ever more human.

But I think the final plot twist will link all the way back to the opening minutes of the show.  Michael, speaking to a newly arrived Eleanor, points to a goofy 1970's vintage photo and says it was a remarkable human named Doug Forcett.  He had taken a batch of hallucinogenic mushrooms and figured out the exact mechanisms by which the After Life worked.  We meet an adult version of him in a Season Three episode and he is painfully trying to do every possible thing to increase his After Life point total.  When he accidentally steps on a snail he decides that he has to walk barefoot 50 miles to donate money to the Canadian Mollusk Fund.

Other possibilities are of course in play, but with my fan theory, here's the face you want to see when you walk towards some distant glowing light in the Hereafter...