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Arist posted:If the idea is that most people who do manage earn enough points eventually ruin it for themselves, I could see that, maybe. But, again, that suggests that Mindy is still the only person to ever even get close to ultimately ending up there, which seems... off. Yeah exactly. If someone as lovely as Mindy could earn enough points in a single action that SHOULD get her in there if not for a technicality of timing, there's no way LITERALLY NO ONE ELSE has ever managed to get in there.
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# ? Feb 18, 2025 13:06 |
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I do wonder if the good place is as debauched as the bad place. Once people get into the good place, the accountants stop tallying points, so living there is basically consequence free. Eternal life with everything you could want and no consequences? Yeah, that's going to end well...
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The_Doctor posted:I do wonder if the good place is as debauched as the bad place. Once people get into the good place, the accountants stop tallying points, so living there is basically consequence free. Eternal life with everything you could want and no consequences? Yeah, that's going to end well... Yeah this is an obvious angle the show is going to bring up. We've seen folks get better in the Bad Place so why can't Good Place earners end up turning into horrible people?
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Mokinokaro posted:Yeah this is an obvious angle the show is going to bring up. We've seen folks get better in the Bad Place so why can't Good Place earners end up turning into horrible people? "Janet! I've been curious, what does human flesh taste like?" EDIT: I just had a mental picture of a flipped version of the scene in the first episode where Janet plays a clip from the Bad Place, but instead it's from the Good Place and it just looks like the Event Horizon log. The_Doctor fucked around with this message at 23:18 on Oct 12, 2018 |
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When Chidi is trying to teach Michael doesn’t he say something like “if you live forever then ethics doesn’t matter and actions have no consequence” And Michael only starts to learn after he fears for his death ? Yeah, if the good place doesn’t have a system to keep people there and exile if you go bad, people would probably lose their humanity over time.
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The_Doctor posted:I do wonder if the good place is as debauched as the bad place. Once people get into the good place, the accountants stop tallying points, so living there is basically consequence free. Eternal life with everything you could want and no consequences? Yeah, that's going to end well... The twist will be all the demons torturing humans are actually people from the good place who got bored.
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CAPTAIN CAPSLOCK posted:The twist will be all the demons torturing humans are actually people from the good place who got bored. That actually would be pretty great except demons don't seem to know enough about the system to have much of an idea how it works. I mean we have no idea if Michael's "good place" was anywhere close to the real thing.
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Harrow posted:The only way I could see a twist like that working is if it's because the Good Place recognizes that the rules are massively stacked against humans and that they need to intervene or nobody will get in. Like it turns out what Michael and Janet are doing is what the Good Place folks have been doing all along, because if they didn't, almost nobody would actually make it into the Good Place at all. there are accepted teachings in all of the world's major religions that are similar to this ![]()
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The real Bad Place was the Good Place all along In the Bad Place, sure you've got the old penis flattener, but in the Good Place, you've got the unlimited creativity of humans to torture each other It's probably filled with passive aggressive bullshit precision fucked around with this message at 00:14 on Oct 13, 2018 |
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So maybe the demons working the Bad Place are actually just humans who got into their own versions of the Good Place? ![]()
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Problem with that theory: the entire reason Michael came up with The Good Place neighborhood experiment was because humans would not willingly torture each other. I'm not sure I think that would be true in reality, but from what Michael said it's true in the show's fiction.
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If there's going to be a dark twist with the actual Good Place, my idea is that it's actually cessation of existence, run on a cult-like philosophy that life is bad. So all of the Good Place employees are just in charge of cheerfully (and forcefully) directing humans into a machine that erases souls. That'd make for a pretty good "out of the frying pan, into the fire" moment.
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Mokinokaro posted:Yeah this is an obvious angle the show is going to bring up. We've seen folks get better in the Bad Place so why can't Good Place earners end up turning into horrible people? What's horrible about indulging yourself when you've entered a post consequence state?
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If we broadly define bad things as things that hurt other people, and you’re in a place where people can’t really be hurt or deprived or made to do anything they don’t want to do, can you actually do bad?
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Maxwell Lord posted:If we broadly define bad things as things that hurt other people, and you’re in a place where people can’t really be hurt or deprived or made to do anything they don’t want to do, can you actually do bad? What if everyone in The Good Place was just immensely bored with continued existence?
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What if the Good Place is just really nice?
Piell fucked around with this message at 02:44 on Oct 13, 2018 |
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Piell posted:What if the Good Place is just really nice? Then there's probably no point in showing it, and probably no way to show much of it without it being a letdown anyway. I think this is a big part of why it seems like fiction often features detailed descriptions of Hell while leaving Heaven rather vague or mysterious. Edit: watch the gang wind up in the Good Place by act two next week just to make this post look dumb.
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21 Muns posted:If there's going to be a dark twist with the actual Good Place, my idea is that it's actually cessation of existence, run on a cult-like philosophy that life is bad. So all of the Good Place employees are just in charge of cheerfully (and forcefully) directing humans into a machine that erases souls. That'd make for a pretty good "out of the frying pan, into the fire" moment. then the good place wouldn't be a cessation of soul. it would be a cattle pen where you stand in line to get into a machine that erases you the cessation of self is an afterlife idea in multiple of the world's great religions. in these traditions it is not a "dark" idea, but rather the idea that the dead person has successfully become one with goodness, or with the true nature of the universe. your ![]() ![]() Lutha Mahtin fucked around with this message at 03:49 on Oct 13, 2018 |
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NecroMonster posted:I've said it before. The "good place people" set up the rules this way so no one would ever go to the good place and they would never have to do any work of any kind. The place isn't empty because the rules are dumb, the rules are dumb to keep the place empty. If the whole lies work if there is a bit of truth to them thing is right, then I think the first episode where the only people who get into the good place are the ones who give both of their kidneys to a person they just met on the bus, that would keep the good place pretty empty to begin with.
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Toast Museum posted:Then there's probably no point in showing it, and probably no way to show much of it without it being a letdown anyway. I think this is a big part of why it seems like fiction often features detailed descriptions of Hell while leaving Heaven rather vague or mysterious. see also: Dante's Inferno is kind of a big deal and nobody has ever willingly read Dante's Paradiso
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The season premiere had them say that there are 30 billion souls in The Bad Place, and it seems like it would have been trivial for the writers to research that there have been roughly 100 billion anatomically modern humans ever, so I'm going to take this as an implicit confirmation that 63-70 billion people (accounting for those still living) have made it to The Good Place, and that the overly harsh requirements were a lie. Or maybe they were true and the other 70 billion or so people... are I dunno, just floating around the universe as ghosts?
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The one thing we know for sure is that none of the four humans qualify to make it into the good place. Chidi was definitely a good person, Tahani and Jason were flawed but they certainly weren't bad people, even Eleanor doesn't deserve to be tortured for eternity. Either there is a twist to the story, or the requirements are actually really high if you want to get into the good place.
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The requirements might just be high to prevent the dilemma of 'what incentive is there for Good People to not stop being good?'. Ergo, they only pick people so good that they wouldn't even seriously consider letting themselves be bad.
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We know there definitely is a good place and that it's staffed, because Michael stole Janet from a Janet warehouse, inferring the existence of others.
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Now I kind of want to see "God" or whatever board of directors passes for "God" that sets the point totals for various acts and oversees the Good and Bad Places.
BigBallChunkyTime fucked around with this message at 13:07 on Oct 13, 2018 |
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I don't think Chidi was a good person necessarily. He semi-willingly ruined everything for everyone around him. He never did anything really horrible that we know about but he also never did anything good. He cared more about rules and theories than helping actual people. He was a Pharisee.
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Maxwell Lord posted:If we broadly define bad things as things that hurt other people, and you’re in a place where people can’t really be hurt or deprived or made to do anything they don’t want to do, can you actually do bad? I imagine it's like griefing in an MMO; just because you can't lose anything of substance doesn't mean you're not annoying someone and ruining whatever they were doing at the time.
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Oasx posted:Either there is a twist to the story, or the requirements are actually really high if you want to get into the good place. I think the requirements are just really, really high. Ultimately I think this show, like all of Mike Schur’s shows, is really optimistic about human nature. I don’t think a dark twist would really work here. My guess is that it’s just super hard to get in and maybe even the Good Place architects/staff/etc agree with Michael’s belief that the system is deeply flawed and unfair to humans, but it isn’t up to them.
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OctaviusBeaver posted:I don't think Chidi was a good person necessarily. He semi-willingly ruined everything for everyone around him. He never did anything really horrible that we know about but he also never did anything good. He cared more about rules and theories than helping actual people. He was a Pharisee. Chidi was so indecisive because he did want to be a good and ethical person, but as we know the road to hell is paved with good intentions... Just a little more literally in his case. That said, I don't think Chidi was a bad guy, but he definitely wasn't good either.
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Lutha Mahtin posted:there are accepted teachings in all of the world's major religions that are similar to this Well, right, and I think that's sort of why it'd be an odd fit for this show. Like it's all very Touched by an Angel, y'know? But I do think if any show could do a story like that without it being the kind of cloying "angels watching over us" plot we've seen before on other shows, it's The Good Place. Though, one other thought about the "Simone is a Good Place agent" theory. I hope she isn't--I like the idea that she's just a really cool human--but if she is, I like what that says about what the Good Place (the place) is. Simone isn't cloyingly nice and boring and sweet all day long. She's sort of... aggressively well-adjusted. She's funny and smart and though she's very kind, she's kind in a no-nonsense, "the truth hurts" kind of way. She's self-assured and confident, and she's accepting of other people's foibles even as she helps them avoid hurting themselves by going too far down those paths. If she's an indication of what the Good Place is like, then it's not the boringly "everything is fuzzy and warm and don't think too hard" nice place that Michael's facsimile Good Place was. It'd be something a lot more interesting and a lot more human. Another possibility is that the Good Place is boring and full of the sort of empty niceness that it looks like it might be, and Simone (again, if she's a supernatural being in the first place) is a rogue Good Place agent the same way Michael is a rogue Bad Place agent, who recognizes that the whole system is flawed and nobody is truly happy. That could be an interesting plot, too. But again: I'd prefer it if Simone was just a regular human who happens to be a very good and cool regular human. Harrow fucked around with this message at 15:00 on Oct 13, 2018 |
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NecroMonster posted:I've said it before. The "good place people" set up the rules this way so no one would ever go to the good place and they would never have to do any work of any kind. The place isn't empty because the rules are dumb, the rules are dumb to keep the place empty. I'm not sure this is right because we know the Good Place fought to get Mindy St. Claire and only begrudgingly accepted the Medium Place deal. Thematically, I think it's better if everyone in the afterlife has good intentions but never stopped to question the system. They just assume that because it has always been there, it must be working, ignoring that 99% of humanity is suffering for all eternity because they didn't fluke into a Good Point boon like Mindy or grow up in an environment where good behavior was encouraged.
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Maybe Simone's terrible accent is actually a clue that she's a good person agent pretending to be an Australian woman.
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I saw an interview with Schur in which he mentioned doing more research into psychology this year instead of just ethics and he specifically cited the Milgram experiment that shows people are way too trusting of people in charge. People who "have lab coats and clip boards." So I definitely think Simone is not everything she seems.
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She's probably still just a regular scientist, but we don't know a lot about her own ethics. It's possible that down the road, she might want to do some experiment a la Milgram that isn't ethical, and it gives the group reason for pause.
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thanks alot assbag posted:She's probably still just a regular scientist, but we don't know a lot about her own ethics. It's possible that down the road, she might want to do some experiment a la Milgram that isn't ethical, and it gives the group reason for pause. Especially if she gets her hands on fully operational Janet capabilities. ![]()
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Actually thinking about it I'd like to watch a spinoff that's just Janet walking the earth and telling everyone what they need to know.
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I see from context that $18,000 is actually a lot of money.
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Harrow posted:Well, right, and I think that's sort of why it'd be an odd fit for this show. Like it's all very Touched by an Angel, y'know? But I do think if any show could do a story like that without it being the kind of cloying "angels watching over us" plot we've seen before on other shows, it's The Good Place. See, I don't think the "Simone is a Good Place Agent" theory works. The judge checked in on the 4 humans, and immediately recognized everyone who wasn't a human. If Simone was a good place agent, the Judge should be able to see that immediately and she would have been grabbed by the doorman as well. I think she's just a decent human being.
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Koalas Massacre posted:Chidi was so indecisive because he did want to be a good and ethical person, but as we know the road to hell is paved with good intentions... Just a little more literally in his case. I dunno. I feel like he has a clear mental illness that goes beyond merely choosing to be indecisive. We see a lot of examples of how much pain it brings him throughout his life and he's still unable to alter his behavior. Can we really attach a moral value to that? Perhaps it could be said that him not seeking therapy for it was immoral, but I don't know that that deserves eternal damnation.
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# ? Feb 18, 2025 13:06 |
There Bias Two posted:I dunno. I feel like he has a clear mental illness that goes beyond merely choosing to be indecisive. We see a lot of examples of how much pain it brings him throughout his life and he's still unable to alter his behavior. Can we really attach a moral value to that? Perhaps it could be said that him not seeking therapy for it was immoral, but I don't know that that deserves eternal damnation. Yeah I relate to Chidi alot but that's because I have an anxiety disorder so making decisions suuucks because I'm always examining the smallest choices from 73936 different angles. Therapy has helped a lot though! Ironically I used to have a big problem with impulsivity 🤷🏾♀️
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