<em>The Good Place</em> Felt Bad in the End

This article includes spoilers through all four seasons of The Good Place.

I did not expect, watching a candy-colored fantasy sitcom’s final episode, to think of one of the saddest songs I’ve ever heard. Yet when The Good Place’s Chidi (played by William Jackson Harper) explained to his soul mate, Eleanor (Kristen Bell), that he wanted to leave heaven and be annihilated, my mind went to strange places. Chidi was sharing a memory of his mother wiping lipstick off of Eleanor’s cheek; it was, for him, the moment in paradise when he felt full and final contentment settling in, when it became clear there was nothing more to seek. These lyrics by the great David Berman came into my head: “The end of all wanting is all I’ve been wanting / and that’s just the way that I feel.”

Berman, of the rock bands Silver Jews and Purple Mountains, sang that line on an album he released a month before he killed himself at age 52 last summer. The song is plainly suicidal; The Good Place is plainly not, right? In 2017, the show began with its four main characters already dead, navigating a zany afterlife filled with frozen yogurt and lava monsters. Over four seasons, they discovered a glitch in the cosmos that had been sending all humans to hell for the past 500 years. By the finale, the heroes had reopened the gates to heaven, where they were able to sip on stardust and hang with loved ones for as long as they liked. A happier ending could not have been imagined.

Except for all the disintegrations. The