TV

‘The Good Place’ Season 3 Finale Has Fans In Tears

by Amanda Yeo  27 January 2019
The Good Place

Want more Junkee in your life? Sign up to our newsletter, and follow us on Instagram and Facebook so you always know where to find us.

The season three finale of The Good Place dropped on Netflix earlier this week and, in what is now The Good Place tradition, the show has upended its status quo once more. However, not content to leave it there, this season also served its game-changing developments with a heaping side of tears.

If you’ve had even a passing acquaintance with the internet over the past three years, you know about The Good Place. The morally philosophical comedy has built a reputation for throwing twist after turn at its audience, warping its storyline to look like the name “Jeremy Bearimy” in cursive English.

Fans are thus accustomed to having the rug pulled out from under them, and were bracing for the season three finale to end the world as they know it once more – and it did. But what they weren’t prepared for was the emotions.

In the episodes leading up the the finale, after Michael (Ted Danson) realises that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, Judge Gen (Maya Rudolph) allows him to run another experiment to see if humans can become better people, this time unencumbered by the messy moral entanglements present on Earth.

Assisted by former lab rats Eleanor (Kristen Bell), Chidi (William Jackson Harper), Tahani (Jameela Jamil) and Jason (Manny Jacinto), Michael is to monitor four new subjects – chosen by the Bad Place’s Shawn (Marc Evan Jackson) – in a new neighbourhood built in the Medium Place. The tables have turned, the experimentees are now the experimenters, and we’re all set for a new normal.

But, of course, things aren’t as simple as that.

If you haven’t seen the season three finale yet, turn back now if you want to avoid spoilers. If you have seen it, you’ll know that Shawn doesn’t just send some random candidates for the experiment. Instead, because the Bad Place’s whole thing is to make everything as awful as possible, he sends people with personal links to Team Cockroach, attempting to sabotage the experiment.

If the experiment fails, Michael gets “retired”, the humans get tortured for eternity, and Janet (D’Arcy Carden) gets turned into a marble. Also, humanity is determined to be irredeemable and worthy of eternal damnation. The stakes are pretty high.

So when the group find out the next arrival is Chidi’s former girlfriend Simone (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), they have Michael erase her memories of having met them prior. Chidi also volunteers to have his memories of Simone erased so he doesn’t inadvertently reveal their shared past and blow the experiment.

Unfortunately, erasing Chidi’s memories of Simone means erasing a good chunk of his memories, period. It’s impossible to make Chidi forget Simone without also making him forget Eleanor – and the fact that the two are in love.

It’s the Trolley Problem, only on one track there’s Chidi and Eleanor’s love, and on the other there’s all of humanity. And for the couple, there is only one ethical solution.

It’s devastating watching the couple say goodbye to each other, but the hits keep coming when a heartbroken Eleanor demands Janet tell her the meaning “to everything”, searching for something to justify the pain. Janet consoles her with a beautiful speech, and The Good Place‘s writers rub cut onions in the audience’s eyes.

The premiere date for season four of The Good Place hasn’t yet been announced, so we don’t know exactly how long we’re going to have to live with this agony.