Short review: The Good Place, Season 4, Episode 12

A feel good episode with a "but". The "but" being the big reveal that Heaven is actually Hell when it's stretched out to eternity. Because that's not a deep observation, is it? Anyone who has reflected on what an infinity of living on a cloud playing a harp would be like, or even doing it for a week, has quickly concluded it would be pretty terrible. Booooring. And the same for doing anything else.

I see why the writers wanted to dispense with the question "Why not just infinitely reboot them when life got monotonous?" But Chiti's admonition that they couldn't do that because Michael used that approach to torture them and they couldn't co-opt Hell's techniques in Heaven rings false to me. Michael didn't reboot the Fab Four AS torture, he did it to allow him to experiment with different KINDS of torture. His experiment was failing and so he simply was resetting and trying again. In the Good Place the resetting would be a way of refreshing oneself, going back to a clean slate and then having more awesome heavenly experiences. It allows the participants to climb the highest peak and then climb another. Works for me.

What else struck me? I immediately wondered as the original Good Place team ran off after handing the task over to Michael - where exactly are they running TO? The Bad Place? 

My other thought was "My my, there look to be well under a hundred people at the "here's our plan for the Good Place" party. Just a few dozen winners out of billions? That's functionally zero. Clearly if that's the case a whole LOT of people missed a lot of fun by spending their time on Earth being good just to get into the GP. Life could accurately be described as "A 99.99999999% chance of torture in Hell for eternity".

Given those odds, I'd counsel going for the gusto.