The Good Place: Season Finale Features an Early Contender for Best TV Twist of the Year
(Episode 1.13)
NBCUniversal
There are twists, and then there are the jaw-dropping reveals that practically force you to pause the DVR so you can digest it before moving forward. This was one of the latter.
NBC’s high-concept comedy The Good Place has been a strange fit on network television all season, telling the story of four souls trying to find their way around their little corner of heaven, but that’s never been more evident than in Thursday night’s season finale. It’s now clear this show doesn’t belong on network TV. Heck, it doesn’t belong on cable, streaming or anywhere else. It shouldn’t even exist at all, because the world doesn’t deserve a sitcom this weirdly ambitious.
The series wrapped up its 13-episode season with “Michael’s Gambit,” which dropped the bombshell that the entire series has been set in The Bad Place all along. Turns out there’s a reason Eleanor (Kristen Bell), Chidi (William Jackson Harper), Tahani (Jameela Jamil) and Jason (Manny Jacinto) have driven each other crazy ever since they woke up in “utopia”—they were hand-picked to get on each other’s nerves. The entire season has been one big experiment staged by Michael (Ted Danson), who actually works for “The Bad Place,” to create a new type of hell where the tenants don’t actually realize they’re being tortured. It was a legitimate surprise and game-changing reveal, fundamentally changing the series at its core. That’s a rare move for a sitcom, especially one on NBC in primetime. It will also undoubtedly inspire more than a few immediate re-watches to go back and look for clues we might have missed.
The twist puts all the subplots from the previous 12 episodes into an eye-opening new perspective, from the mismatched soul mates to the insecurities that almost always seemed to be agitated. Turns out that wasn’t just sitcom-y silliness, but a coldly calculated plan to cause maximum emotional damage. Who knew a show called The Good Place could go so dark? In the season finale, we get to see the back story of how Michael’s gambit came together, as the aspiring afterlife architect pitches his outside-the-box plan to the Hell brass. Everything about this world is fake. Literally everything. The four main characters were the only “real” people in the entire neighborhood, with the rest of the cast populated with actors from the underworld.