If I have one issue with the writing on ‘The Good Place’, it’s that they haven’t exactly figured out how time works. Or at the very least, they have put no heed into the concept of the passage of time. Does time cease when you die, and you spend eternity in a perfected facsimile of life as you knew it to be (The Good Place) or tortured by the worst your society had to offer for eternity (The Bad Place)? Would The Bad Place for a Roman be a never-ending coliseum? Would a 16th century Englishman be forced to perform in The Comedy of Errors for all eternity.
The reason I ask this is because in the first part of this season, we saw a graph of how much time each iteration of the Bad Place lasted, and it looked like the average length of each iteration of The Bad Place was 3-4 months. That’s 200+ years of torture – not that they remember any of it. That said, and thinking (writing) about it, it makes sense that the artificial world would be constructed around a reality they were familiar with. Maybe I’m putting too much thought into this, but I’m really genuinely curious about the organizational and generational structure of The Good Place.
Speaking on the subject of time, one of the many things that I like about the Good Place is that they don’t mention something and then tease it for too long. Is there a Medium Place? Boom, we’re seeing the Medium Place. When they started talking about the Bad Place? Boom, members of the Bad Place show up, in all their Adam Scott awesome-terribleness. The furious pace of the show is great. The writers take care of 800+ reboots in like 25 minutes, where a lesser show would use the season.
Maybe time doesn’t matter in the long game. Maybe ‘The Good Place’ is an allegory for ‘The Wizard Of Oz’
FAN THEORY
I mean, you can easily map the characters to the ‘Wizard of Oz.’ Chidi is clearly the cowardly lion, Eleanor is Dorothy, Jason’s the scarecrow (he certainly needs a brain), and Tahani’d be the Tin man (all her good deeds having lacked heart, after all.) In past episodes this season, the clues are all there in plain sight even including a hot-air balloon. So the logical conclusion then is that the people who run the afterlife will be exposed as incompetent parlor tricksters who are less powerful than they seem, and they will be overthrown. Eleanor, Chidi, Jason and Tahani’s journey through Oz will help them realize their character flaws, ultimately leading them to the true Good Place. The season two finale airs on NBC at 9 p.m. ET on Thursday, Feb. 1. Have a take on what happens next? Comment away.
-Dagobot
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