Just Gone: Death, Faith & The End Of The Good Place

WARNING: giant spoilers for the last three episodes of The Good Place. Do not read this unless you're up to date or don't care about spoilers. Also, trigger warning for mentions of suicide, faith and my conception of death cos if this show can attempt to "design a better system of morality for the entire universe", I might as well figure out where I stand.

When I was in my final year of university, I dreamt I died in a car crash. I didn't know how to drive and yet, there I was, careening down a hill at full speed. I knew this was it, I was going to die. Even though I was dreaming, a kind of clarity washed over me. "Oh, I'm going to die." In the split second before I crashed, I knew that there was nothing next. When I died, I would be gone, just gone. The thought shocked me awake and has haunted me ever since.

I wouldn't call myself a religious person, even if I'm open to the idea that there is something else out there. But I've always treated religion more as a nice story than as a way of living. The Catholic all boys school where I attended high school set us the task of reading Yann Martel's Life of Pi (2002) as our year 12 English text. I imagine it was to demonstrate that science was just as much a story as religion but faith offers the "better story". In the final section of the book, Pi offers two versions of his story, one with animals and one without and asks the two investigators "which is the better story?" They both say "the story with the animals is the better story." "And so it goes with God," replies Pi (p.317). When faced with cold hard science or an allegorical tale of anthropormorphised tigers named Richard Parker, we'll pick the allegory any time.

However, my take away was that religion is just a nice story to get us through the cold realities we live with. Life doesn't make sense, so we find a way to make sense of it. The stories of the Bible and other holy texts are just that: stories. Through this lens, I did shockingly well in religious studies, even winning an award. Ironically, I didn't do quite as well in Literature because while I could understand why the stories worked and the themes underpinning them, I was less good at explaining how.

I think fear of death motivates many, if not all, religions. We don't want there to be nothing, to be just gone. On the same day as The Good Place finale, new show Evil aired its season finale, and death was very much connected to religious belief. "I don't know how we die and our lives just disappear with us," priest in training David states. "It makes no sense to me. I don't know why people aren't unnerved by it." This is what draws him to the Catholic faith. When I mentioned to my uni friends about the dream and my realisation, one guy simply said, "that's too depressing." And it is! It's unnerving and upsetting to think that all we are will vanish at the moment of our death. That all we have done, the connections we've made all cease to be. Yes, they live on in our legacies with others, but for us, we're gone, it's just gone.

Solipsism suggests that the whole world only exists in our head, that you're all just figures of my imagination. When I mentioned this to my partner, Adam, he said that's very selfish. He's right, of course, but for each person, the world is subjective and singular. So when we're gone, the world ends even as it keeps turning.

Maybe the horror of death is it reminds us that we're biological beings. In C.S. Lewis' The Pilgrim's Regress (1977, p. 77), John sees this reality, "through the face, he saw the skull and through that the brain and the passages of the nose, and the larynx, and the saliva moving in the glands and the blood in the veins". Lewis describes this as "John sees all humanity as bundles of complexes", we're all blood and bone and tissue. This revelation horrifies John. And it upsets us too. Death reminds us that we're trapped in our bodies and they're failing us. So we imagine a soul, something that can outlive us when the body dies. But I don't know if I believe that. What if we are just neurons, so when we go, there's nothing?

I've been thinking about death a lot this week because The Good Place ended. For a show set in the afterlife, it was never really about in faith and death. It was more interested by the hope that change was possible, that with enough time, we can become better people. Around the third season, it becomes about the Kafka-esque structures that make up the afterlife. But once that was all settled, the show slowed down and finally acknowledged what it means to die. Just in case, you missed it up to the top, MAJOR SPOILERS FROM HERE.

After finally making it to the Good Place, the gang find a realm zombified by boredom and complete satisfaction. After you've done everything you could ever want to do, what's left? So, they come up with a solution. You live as long as you want, but when you're done, when you feel complete, you can go through a good. The final door. And then, you're gone, what that means ambiguous. Finally, in its last ever episode The Good Place could finally discuss what it means to die.

What makes the show's treatment of the afterlife and death so unusual and thought-provoking is it's decision to view the Good Place as just another stopover before the eventual end. Many series' feature death, but the afterlife is treated as a storytelling device to give the characters a happy ending. Those left behind grieve and eventually move on. The question of where did they go is never even asked. But The Good Place positioned itself as finally being able to talk about it openly. The loss is allowed to linger; the realisation that the characters we love are going is allowed to sink in.

This makes great storytelling sense with some of the best ever final episodes positioning us with the characters, figuring out a way to say goodbye to your friends. The Mary Tyler Moore Show memorably ended with the regulars all getting fired from their TV show and forced to leave behind the family they had made. All TV show's in their own way are a metaphor for death. As Dan Howell once said, "the last episode of a TV show is like all your closest friends have just died." All we have left are memories; our time with them is finite, complete. But that loss still stings.

In The Good Place finale, each character slowly realises they've lived all they need to and go off to the door. For someone who's struggled with suicidal thoughts, and who only recently decided I don't want to die, this could feel triggering. But suicide has never been a moment of peace, it's a way out when it feels like you have no other option left. This is never true, but it doesn't feel like that. And maybe sometimes, it's a desperate plea for help that doesn't come. It's this devastating and nuanced situation that makes the disgusting bullshit of 13 Reasons Why so irresponsible, especially in the suicide scene. As someone who was depressed while watching, my predominant thought was "oh, that looks so easy".

But the 'death' in The Good Place isn't like that. It's an ending, an answer to the question that is life. It's not suicide, it's transcendence, a fading into the Universe. When we die, Chidi suggests, we go back to where we came from:

"Picture a wave in the ocean: you can see it, measure it, its height, the way that sunlight refracts when it passes through. 
It's there. You can see it. You know what it is - it's a wave.  
And then it crashes on the shore, and it's gone. But the water is still there.
The wave was just a different way for the water to be, for a little while.
That's one concept of death for a Buddhist. The wave returns to to the ocean. Where it came from. And where it's supposed to be." 

It was this scene that has made me cry, realising that one day Adam will be gone, and my family, and my friends, and me. Because if we fade into the Universe, we still have the moment the fade out is done, when we are simply gone. And that's hard to accept. Perhaps only The Leftovers, whose entire premise was about how we cope with overwhelming grief and unanswerable mysteries (and topped my TV list two years running), and Donna's fate in Doctor Who (my gold standard sobbing ball on the floor moment) have the same sense of finality and heartbreaking greatness.

Maybe The Good Place's theory makes that a little easier. We get to have our life, then try over and over again until we become the best version of ourselves, get our reward and then, when we feel ready, we go. That's a full life (and afterwards) and it's peaceful. But my problem with the philosophy put forward is that it makes out Earth lives relatively meaningless. That's kinda my problem with heaven in general too. Why suffee when you could just go up there and find a better life? Because this world feels like it's in chaos, the idea of a next one is comforting. One where all our loved ones forgive us and make amends, where our impact on the planet doesn't matter. But it does and I worry the argument The Good Place puts forward has no practical application (one of my only key flaws with the finale, the other is down below under *). Then I remember the door. An ending, of a TV show or a life, helps us to find meaning.

Maybe we are just gone, or maybe we come back, or maybe we just become part of the Universe that birthed us. But maybe it doesn't matter. What really matters is what we believe and what we do with that. Maybe we just need to try to make the world better with what limited time we have.

So, what do I believe, in the end? I told a counsellor once that I didn't know what my faith was. She said, "That's something you'll struggle with your whole life. It's okay not to know." To just let the mystery be. But i believe that there's something out there, a presence guiding us towards hope and light, which the film Latter Days illustrates beautifully. However, underneath it all, I believe we just go in a way that feels like sleeping. You know when you can't get to sleep no matter how hard you try until suddenly you stop fighting and the next thing you know it's morning? You have no idea the moment you fell asleep, but you know it happened.

I imagine death feels the same way. You're alive and then you go, slipping away, like a wave crashing back into the ocean. And that's okay. Because we live on in the people who love us who live on in the people who love them. Even if we are truly gone, that there is nothing left, at least we can know that we loved and were loved ourselves.

As for beloved TV shows, an ending is wrenching but it also allows us to say goodbye. At best, there is no more story left to tell. They have come at a time when we need them and we take them with us forever, finding new shows that speak to us. But that's not easy. I wasn't even hugely emotionally invested in The Good Place and I sobbed my way through it and wrote a long-ass blog post about it. Not even a tiny bit ready for BoJack Horseman. But that's why we love them, despite the heartache.

Maybe if I'd known all that my dream wouldn't have haunted me quite so much.

*The other flaw in The Good Place finale is the treatment of Janet. Arguably the show's breakout character, D'Arcy Carden has imbued the AI's life with warmth and hilarity. Shaped by her connections to those around her, Janet became a symbol of all the The Good Place attempted to do thematically, which is what makes her lack of goodbye so notable.

While all the other main characters get a grand sendoff, Janet is left alone, able to feel human connection but without the people that helped her find it. This loneliness is not really explored, but perhaps the scene where she tells Jason that she lives in all moments at the same time (has Mike Schur been watching the Watchmen?) is supposed to mitigate that pain slightly. But it's hard not to feel that in some way, she's left abandoned and alone, like Fry's dog or the little monster Simon in World Of Tomorrow. To become human is to open ourselves up to loss. Bit of a bummer that.

For further reading, I highly reccomend this piece by Emily VanDerWerff and her colleagues over at Vox.