You probably shouldn't read this if you haven't watched the show. Trust me bro, you gotta experience the show. Nothing I can say can possibly do justice to the greatness of this show. I just finished binge watching the show. I was gonna watch a few episodes a day but it was too damn good. I had to watch like a season a day. This show is too good to be allowed! It should not exist. We don't deserve a show this damn good. I got high right before watching the finale. I am shooketh. I have so many questions about the universe of the show and about the real universe. I have so many questions about the meaning of life and morality and how to make peace with death. First what the fork is Janet? She's like this cosmic AI robot for the afterlife, but she says she isn't a bot and isn't a person. Every afterlife neighbourhood has one. There are good place Janets and bad place Janets and neutral Janets and a disco Janet for some reason. and our Janet is a good place Janet that was stolen for the fake good place Inside the bad place. And she lives in an endless void and she can just conjure whatever you want and is all-knowing. She is a servant you can just summon for anything. And every time you reboot her, she becomes more humanlike. And at one point, every Janet in existence banded together to play keep away with a world-ending device to stall God from ending the world. not literally God but the closest thing to God in the show. The divine judge is a homebody who watches a lot of TV and has a button she can just press to end the world and I fear she will press it by accident. I want the damnn button destroyed. Fork, I'm high. In the show, we see characters struggle with ethical qualms about whether to live by virtue ethics, consequentialism, or deontology where there are absolute rules. The point system used to judge people seems to combine these systems. Points are based in part on the consequences of one's actions but motivation also matters. Good deeds don't count, at least not as much, if you're only trying to score points. At one point the characters are told they have no chance of going to Heaven now that they know about the system because their motivation will be to get points. But then, after some existential crisis, they decide to be good anyway for its own sake. This means they ultimately have the right motivation, they aren't trying to get points because they think they have no chance of going to Heaven. it's kind of a paradox but the show never really articulates this. There's also a bit of a plot hole. There's a dude who got high one day and figured out the afterlife system and now is trying to live by the point system as much as humanly possible. But the show never brings up that he shouldn't be getting points because his motivation is to get points. Those last few episodes. They could have just ended with the heroes going to Heaven but they did not. Turns out people are unhappy in Heaven because life only has meaning if it is finite. So a door is created (how? I dunno. And not even Janet knows what happens when you go through it) for people to go through and cease to exist if they choose to. And I find the idea sad. Once you go through it, you can't turn back. The idea of choosing to cease existing is just so final, I can't see how one could make it. Yet I used to understand. I used to be so severely suicidal that wanting to die was the default for me, I struggled to understand why everyone wasn't suicidal by default. Yet now? I can barely deal with the knowledge I will die one day and in all likelihood cease to exist. I probably won't get time to do everything I want. Of course in the show's idea of Heaven, you do have as much time as you want to do everything you want before ceasing to exist but even still, ceasing to exist is so final. I guess the most anyone can do in this life is make sure our lives meant something. Once I saw the penultimate episode, it became obvious what the finale would be. A bunch of time skips happen and, one by one, the main characters choose to leave Heaven. They reach nirvana, a feeling of completion, and want to move on. One of them doesn't go through the door though, she becomes one of the architects of the afterlife tests. I kind of wanted all of them to do that. I'm not sure I like the finale. I wanted the four to stay together for all eternity running the afterlife. They say at one point they don't know for sure the afterlife system will stay in place, the devil could stage a coup. I kinda wanted Elanor to stay in charge of Heaven and make sure everything kept running smoothly. Micheal, the demon who turned good, gets his happy ending by becoming human, content in not knowing his future. Elanor finally walks through the door, after discussion about the idea that death is just a wave going back to the ocean and taking a different form, and........I'm unclear on what happens to her when she goes through the door. She seems to become a sort of spark that goes inside a human on earth and inspires him to do a good deed by bringing mail to Micheal who is now a human and Micheal gets his dream of getting a rewards card. So is Eleanor now like a fairy that helps people? a conscience? is she now inside everything? one with the universe? I don't quite understand the ending and am not sure if I'm supposed to.
Some more follow up thoughts on the series. The big famous twist that comes at the end of season one is that they thought they were in Heaven but were actually in Hell all season. A special Hell designed for the four of them to torture each other. Which ultimately backfires cause they all save each other and the rest of humanity. But the twist that these four were in Hell was interesting cause it caused us to ponder why these people are in Hell. Later in the series comes an even bigger twist that I think partially ruins that twist: nobody goes to Heaven. Nobody in over 500 years has gotten into Heaven. That really changed how I saw the show cause it was no longer a question of why is Chidi or Tahani in Hell: everybody goes to Hell. There is nothings special about these four. So I have mixed feelings about the show going that direction but ultimately I am happy with it going that direction cause it gave the heroes a mission, it became no longer about the four "bad" people trying to find their way to Heaven, but these five reformed people and Janet trying to find a way to get everyone a chance to go to Heaven. and in the end, after a LOT of twists and turns, they succeed.