Episode 52: Transcript

Episode: 52: Comedy, Death, and “The Good Place”

Transcription by Keffy

Charlie Jane: [00:00:00] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct, a podcast about the meaning of science fiction. I'm Charlie Jane Anders, a science fiction writer who thinks rather a lot about science. 

Annalee: [00:00:10] And I'm Annalee Newitz, a science journalist who writes science fiction. 

Charlie Jane: [00:00:14] Today we're going to talk about The Good Place, which was one of our favorite shows from the last few years. It's over now and we're so sad, but it's left us with so much to talk about. So are you ready to get into The Good Place? 

Annalee: [00:00:27] Yeah.

[00:00:27] Intro music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.

Charlie Jane: [00:00:55] So before we get started, just a word of warning. There are going to be massive, huge spoilers. 

Annalee: [00:01:00] Gigantic spoilers. 

Charlie Jane: [00:01:02] Just the spoilery-est spoilers ever. 

Annalee: [00:01:03] Yeah. You're going to be just the smell. You're going to smell spoiled meat like all over yourself after this episode. 

Charlie Jane: [00:01:09] Ew.

Annalee: [00:01:09] Charlie did not like that. 

Charlie Jane: [00:01:11] That doesn't even make any sense. There's going to be a giant thing on the back of your car. Let's just say that. Um, anyway, we're going to basically spoil all four seasons of The Good Place, including the ending. If you haven't watched all of The Good Place, stop listening right now and go watch all of The Good Place because it's an amazing show. And then come back and listen to this. But for the rest of you, let's talk about The Good Place. 

Annalee: [00:01:32] Yes. So why don't you start us off, Charlie Jane, by just telling us a little bit about what this incredibly weird show was actually about.

Charlie Jane: [00:01:40] It was kind of interestingly a workplace comedy in the same vein as other comedies from that creator, like you know, Brooklyn 99 and Parks and Rec and so on and so forth. 

Annalee: [00:01:50] Michael Shore.

Charlie Jane: [00:01:51] Michael Shore, yes. It was a workplace comedy set in the afterlife in which we follow a demon who is tasked with torturing a group of humans who thinks that they're in heaven but are actually in hell. And then eventually they find out they're actually in hell. It's not referred to as heaven and hell. It's the good place in the bad place. But the humans kind of become some of the workers in the workplace comedy in a way. And it's about their attempts to first to get out of the bad place and into the good place, but ultimately to reform the system that sent them to the bad place and the arc of the show is them grappling with those questions and like who deserves to be tortured for all eternity?

[00:02:30] What does it mean to be a good person and how do you become a good enough person to deserve to be happy for the rest of time rather than to be horribly tortured and lit on fire and have your private parts squished by rhinoceros feet or whatever. I don't know. 

Annalee: [00:02:48] That's actually, I think they actually bring that up in the show. 

Charlie Jane: [00:02:50] There's a lot of penis flattening in that show.

Annalee: [00:02:53] Jokes. Yeah, we don't actually see the penis flattening, but we hear about the different techniques. It's so interesting that you call it a workplace comedy cause as soon as you said that I was like, oh of course. And I actually was talking with some folks the other day about how one of the main ways that we imagine hell in a Western context, a sort of Judeo-Christian context is as a bureaucracy. 

Charlie Jane: [00:03:16] Right!

Annalee: [00:03:16] And that there's so many examples of that and that's really what it shares with things like Parks and Rec and Brooklyn 99 is it's this kind of, it's a bureaucracy that's ostensibly devoted to something nice like public safety or parks which are like a public good. And yet the bureaucracy itself is kind of hellish. It's tangled and byzantine. That's a really great way of thinking about it. So how is it that the bureaucracy works in The Good Place? There's a point system, right? 

Charlie Jane: [00:03:45] Right. There's a point system and the show very early on, doubles down on this idea that there is a way to quantify good and bad behavior and that we don't quantify it just based on your intentions or based on your state of mind or what knowledge you had of the outcome of your actions, but on the absolute impact of your actions. And we've actually got a clip of Michael, the demon who is pretending to be an angel, talking about that in I think the first episode of the show.

TGP Clip: [00:04:12] Michael: During your time on earth, every one of your actions had a positive or a negative value depending on how much good or bad that action put it into the universe. Every sandwich you ate, every time you bought a magazine, every single thing you did had an effect that rippled out over time and ultimately created some amount of good or bad.

Charlie Jane: [00:04:37] And the thing you'll notice in that clip is, like I said, Michael makes it very clear that it's not just the immediate impact of your actions, but the ultimate impact. So if you make a decision which has a ripple effect and ultimately causes something bad to happen on the other side of the world via sort of butterfly effect-type shenanigans, you are responsible for that. You're responsible for not just the immediate effect of your actions, but the ultimate impact of everything you choose to do.

Annalee: [00:05:03] And this is also how we know there's an immediate signal sent that this is not a standard kind of American Christian idea of heaven because there's a whole strand of Christianity that says that if you believe truly in Christ on your death bed, that you're fine, it's all cool. 

Charlie Jane: [00:05:20] Right.

Annalee: [00:05:20] And this show is saying no, it's actually about your actions throughout your whole life. And so you can't just be a jerk your whole life and then on your deathbed say like, “Oh man, I realized that was really bad,” and get blessed and go to heaven. So that's not gonna happen. 

Charlie Jane: [00:05:35] Yeah. I mean absolutely. In Christianity there was the whole faith versus works debate and part of that was this idea that is it about doing good on earth and is that how you get into heaven? Or is it about just believing in God? And there's a whole idea that—

Annalee: [00:05:49] Faith.

Charlie Jane: [00:05:49] Yeah, faith. And there's a whole idea that there's basically no way to be a good person or no way to really, we're all sinners, we're all bad, and that the only thing you can do is repent. And that the amount of your repentance and the amount of your accepting Jesus Christ as your savior is what determines your fate in the afterlife, not so much… And obviously, sincere repentance means that you'll try to do better. It’s not like you can just, I mean, unless we're talking about indulgences, which was a whole thing back in the day—

Annalee: [00:06:18] Yeah, that was a medieval kind of Catholic idea where you could just sort of buy your way into heaven. So it would be, it'd be perfect for the current presidential administration in the US.

Charlie Jane: [00:06:28] Pretty much. But barring that, generally it was like sincere repentance means that you're going to try to do better. You're not going to keep repeating those sins over and over again, or your repentance starts to seem less sincere. But at the same time, it's like, yeah, you're going to sin, you're going to be bad, you're going to do terrible things, and you're just going to, if you really feel bad about it and really want to be saved, then you will go to heaven.

[00:06:48] And The Good Place rejects that. And in fact, there's no God in The Good Place unless you count Maya Rudolph’s character who is sort of the closest thing to God that we ever meet. She's the judge who kind of settles after life issues, but she doesn't seem like she’s… She's definitely not omniscient and she doesn't seem like she's concerned with the sort of things that you would expect God to be concerned with. So yeah, it's about just quantifying the outcomes of your actions. Basically. 

Annalee: [00:07:13] It's like a quantified self after life version of coming up with how to measure goodness. It's like you can wear your goodness Fitbit and like if you do enough good steps—

Charlie Jane: [00:07:24] Oh my God.

Annalee: [00:07:24] —you’ll make it into the good place. But one of the many fantastic twists in this ever-weirder show was that the end of season one, right. We find out, they think they're in the good place, but they find out, nope—

Charlie Jane: [00:07:37] They're in the bad place.

Annalee: [00:07:38] They’re in the bad place. And it's interesting because throughout the show, at least in the first season, the way that Eleanor, kind of the main character or the point of view character, initially, is dealing with the fact that she thinks she's in a good place but she's been incorrectly assigned cause she knows she's been bad. She's trying to improve herself by learning ethics. 

Charlie Jane: [00:07:59] Right. 

Annalee: [00:08:00] And so this is an ongoing trope throughout the show where her best friend, sometimes lover, sometimes just life partner, Chidi who was an ethics professor on earth, is teaching ethics to Eleanor and then eventually starts teaching ethics to all of the people in there in their little workplace. So it's a work place comedy, but also a kind of a classroom comedy at that point. And they have this breakthrough where they realize that they can't ever possibly improve because of some of the limitations of the good place. Or really the bad place.

Charlie Jane: [00:08:33] They keep getting rebooted. What happens at the start of season two is that Michael takes them through 800 different versions of the fake good place in an attempt to find one that's stable and they eventually discover that basically they've just been rebooted 800 times and they have no memory of the hundreds of years that they've spent in the afterlife. Which, amazingly the 800 reboots take place over a single episode of television. It's like an incredible, like the second episode of season two. I rewatched it recently and they go through 800 versions of this fake afterlife. 

Annalee: [00:09:06] It's so incredible and we have a clip of Chidi talking about what it means that they've kind of gone through all these reboots. 

TGP Clip: [00:09:12] Eleanor: What do you think?

Chidi: I think this is pointless. We're trapped in a warped version of Nietzche’s eternal recurrence. 

Eleanor: Oh cool. More philosophy, that'll help us!

Chidi: Well, don’t you see the problem? We are experiencing karma, but we can't learn from our mistakes because our memories keep getting erased. It's an epistemological nightmare. Kant wrote, it is our duty to improve ourselves, so whatever Michael's reasons for doing this, he's giving us the best chance to improve ourselves. 

Charlie Jane: [00:09:39] The show kind of plants the seed early on that basically your duty is to improve yourself, which is what Chidi says. And that the problem with the afterlife is that you can't improve yourself. You're just frozen in a steady state of however good or bad you were on earth, that's however good you are or bad you are for eternity. And that that’s really what's terrible about the afterlife is that—

Annalee: [00:09:59] That’s what makes it hell, you’re reliving—

Charlie Jane: [00:10:00] Yeah, but even heaven is hell in a way because you can’t improve yourself in heaven either. 

Annalee: [00:10:05] Right. 

Charlie Jane: [00:10:05] And that's part of what they discover in the end about heaven is that it's equally problematic because of that inability to keep getting better. And you know, I mean it's a show that purports to be about ethics, but in a sense is really about relationships and about how people make each other better and how connections to other people and how basically these four humans plus, you know, Michael and Janet, are becoming better through knowing each other. And that that's really kind of the key in a way. Which you know, obviously is a sitcom-friendly premise because sitcoms are always about relationships. 

Annalee: [00:10:36] One of the things that struck me throughout the show is that part of the way the show imagines ethics is as therapy.

Charlie Jane: [00:10:44] Right.

Annalee: [00:10:44] And… because a lot of the, the things that the characters learn about themselves are the kinds of things that you would learn in therapy. And a lot of them have kind of the classic problems that send you into therapy, too, like parents who are neglectful or being kind of paralyzed about decision making like Chidi is. 

Charlie Jane: [00:11:02] Yeah. 

Annalee: [00:11:02] And the other thing that the show plays with a lot is the idea that we all can improve ourselves through education. And I think that, you know, both of those things, therapy and education kind of stand in for ethics on the show. And of course the education they're getting is literally in ethics. And one of the many—

Charlie Jane: [00:11:19]It’s a seminar.

Annalee: [00:11:19] It's a seminar. And one of the many things I love about this show is where a science fiction show might say, I'm going to teach you about astrophysics or like how you know, planets are formed or like what is a star made of. In this show, it's like, we’ll learn about the trolley problem. We'll learn about Nietzche. And it’s just… I’ve literally never watched a show that did that other than BBC shows about philosophy or whatever. Like if you listen to the Arts and Letters, BBC podcasts, like you'll also have the same experience. So.

Charlie Jane: [00:11:51] Yeah. And actually I recently went back and rewatched some of the second season and I feel like the major turning point in the show, the point where the show kind of really kind of takes a turn that defines the rest of its run is early in season two Michael decides that his only option at this point is to team up with the humans that he's been trying to torture and Eleanor is the one person who doesn't want to go along with this until finally she's like, okay, I will team up with you Michael, but only if you go to study ethics with the rest of us. And the idea that Michael, a demon, not only can be redeemed but can benefit from taking Chidi's ethics seminar ends up basically being the thing that saves everybody because Michael ultimately does become, spoiler alert, a good person. 

[00:12:34] It's through those ethics lessons that he gets from Chidi and through kind of confronting the kind of demon that he's been for millions of years. Now that you're saying that about education, it really makes me feel like part of what's so nice about this show and part of what's so attractive about it is that it presents a fantasy in which education is still fully funded and we haven't had like Prop 13 and the horrible budget cuts and like everybody is an adjunct and like it's like what if higher education was still, you know, actually nice in a weird way.

Annalee: [00:13:02] And it actually could help you learn about yourself and the world. Well, I mean it's not fully funded though, right? It’s only in the afterlife that education actually functions the way we hope it would on earth. 

[00:13:16] You know, as you were talking about the turning point with Michael realizing that he needs to also go to ethics class is that for me, just me personally, I think one of the things I loved about this show was that it appealed to my sense of what goodness is because I associate a lot… I associate goodness with humbleness and I don't mean like a Christian humbleness. I mean, I was raised Jewish atheist, so I don't have any kind of crap implanted in my head from Christianity, really. But I think that the idea of someone who is in a position of power, being willing to say, actually I have something to learn from this lowly creature who not only is, I mean he's a demon and Chidi's just a guy. And so he's not only willing to learn from someone who's his subordinate in the sort of workplace of the afterlife, but also someone who's literally been created as a creature who is supposed to be more lowly. You know? 

[00:14:11] So it's kind of like a human learning from, a cat, and it’s… we do have a lot to learn from cats, by the way. 

Charlie Jane: [00:14:17] We do.

Annalee: [00:14:18] How to clean their litter box as often as they demand, things like that. But also, I think, I just love that idea of like the humbleness of it. And also, like you said, that there's this fantasy of improvement through education, which again, it appeals to me personally because I've been an educator. I spent a lot of time in universities and I guess it's a little bit of kind of a liberal fantasy in that way.

Charlie Jane: [00:14:40] Oh yeah. I mean it's literally a liberal arts education fantasy and now I'm remembering the part later in the show where Chidi’s is pretending to be a demon because they've snuck into the real good place and these other demons ask him how to torture someone. And he’s like give him books, man, force him to read books about ethics. That's the best torture. 

Annalee: [00:14:59] That’s so funny. 

Charlie Jane: [00:15:01] Another thing that's really interesting about The Good Place is that it's sort of got this underlying critique of you know, postmodern capitalism and post-colonialism because we eventually discover that nobody has gotten into the actual good place for 500 years. And that sort of roughly coincides with the start of colonialism and the dawn of kind of settler colonialism and the dawn of this kind of exploitation economy that we've built. 

Annalee: [00:15:22] It's the very earliest stirrings of what we now think of as modern capitalism.

Charlie Jane: [00:15:26] Right. And of course nobody ever raises the question of like, why aren't the people who've been colonized or who are, you know, forced to work in these factories or whatever. Why aren't they getting into the good place? But I guess because they're participating in the system, even unwillingly.

Annalee: [00:15:39] And there's a really great episode where we kind of find out about the system and we learned that no matter who you are, because of the way capitalism works, even if you're just a worker in a factory, the fact that you're doing that is perpetuating the system. And so even if you are someone who's been oppressed or you know, they don't kind of get into the nitty gritty of like, well what if you were just born a slave and worked as a slave your whole life? Like how can you possibly be propping up this corrupt system?

Charlie Jane: [00:16:06] Yeah.

Annalee: [00:16:06] But I think we're supposed to understand that no one is innocent in a system like this because the world has become so interconnected that it's impossible for you to never hurt someone else and never do something that that hurts someone else. And of course, all the examples they give are people in the modern era. So they're like, if you eat a candy bar, you're perpetuating factory farming and lowering wages for people in developing nations. And you're… the paper that has wrapped the chocolate—I'm just making this up. This is not an actual quote. But the paper that wrapped the chocolate will eventually go and pollute some place. And so, like I said, we don't get into the granular questions of like people who've been genocided or anything like that, but we're, from the perspective of like modern people in a developed nation. The idea is like, even if you're a super nice, good person, you're still oppressing people. 

Charlie Jane: [00:17:01] Yeah, totally. 

Annalee: [00:17:02] You're still… your Apple phone is still causing horrible things to happen in China or whatever. 

Charlie Jane: [00:17:09] Yeah. And it's interesting because the show spends a lot of time in its latter couple of seasons dealing with the question of how to fix the afterlife and how to come up with a better system for dealing with people after they're dead. But at no point does anybody say, how are we going to fix this system on earth? Nobody's like, well the real problem is capitalism and post-colonialism. So the solution to fixing the afterlife is actually to start a revolution on earth. That's never even discussed as an option. Even though the idea of completely revamping how souls are dealt with after death is like a major concern. It's, you know, the underlying cause is untreatable, basically, according to this show.

Annalee: [00:17:45] Yeah, I think that's right. And I mean this kind of to me gets back to the therapy theme because one of the things about sort of modern day therapy is it's not, it's, it's not about changing the system. It's about kind of becoming comfortable or becoming able to cope with a system that's inherently unfair. A lot of therapy is aimed at like, yep, there's things you can't change and so you'll never be able to overthrow the president or all of white settler colonialism. Just learn to take a warm bath when you feel upset or whatever to quote a therapist of mine. 

[00:18:20] It's interesting because it seems like in a way it's not really about ethics if it's not about solving these problems, right?

Charlie Jane: [00:18:28] Right. I mean it's not about fixing… Like I said, it's not about fixing the underlying cause and really, I mean, because of the perhaps limitations of the sitcom genre, it is really about relationships and about like being nicer to the people in your life. And you know, I still don't think that Chidi’s indecision is an ethical issue per se. It's a mental health issue. I think that you're right that it's about therapy and that therapy is ultimately about the self and about the self in relation to others but also the self as kind of an entity unto… in isolation.

Annalee: [00:18:59] Yeah, separate from these social issues. However, what I think the show does do is say, all right, we can try again in the afterlife. We can try to build an afterlife that rehabilitates people who were part of the problem on earth and rehabilitates people who were victimized on earth and then give them a better world. A good place that’s actually really good. And at the very, very end of the last season, we kind of get a glimpse of what that looks like. And it’s sort of sketched in, that's a lot of sort of like staring at the sunset and getting to win at your favorite video game or whatever. Or just getting to just spend all of eternity getting better at the video game. 

[00:19:44] So like a lot of pop culture, this show has it both ways. On one hand the show says all of these social problems that are turning us into bad people can't be solved. On the other hand, after you die, maybe they can be solved because we can become architects. Like one of the characters actually becomes an architect of good places and bad places, I guess.

Charlie Jane: [00:19:59] Yeah, Tahani becomes an architect. And you know, in the end the ultimate kind of resolution is that there's no way for any kind of eternal bliss or eternal torture to be sustainable. And that really, you just have to eventually accept oblivion. And we've got beautiful tear-jerking clip of Chidi talking about like what that might look like.

TGP Clip: [00:20:20] Chidi: Picture a wave in the ocean. Yeah, you can see it, measure it, it’s height, the way the sunlight refracts when it passes through and it's there and you can see it, you know what it is, it's a wave and then he crashes in the shore and it's gone. But the water is still there. The wave was just a in different ways for the water to be for a little while. That’s one conception of death for a Buddhist. The wave returns to the ocean where it came from.

Annalee: [00:21:16] I was crying so much. 

Charlie Jane: [00:21:18] Oh my God, I cried my face off.

Annalee: [00:21:18] That whole final episode was just like, I mean, actually to be fair, I cried during a lot of episodes in this show, but that was a very, it really was a very touching, beautiful ending. It was a heart wrenching evocation of heaven and self-acceptance. And of course it's not heaven, it's the good place. It’s important to actually make that distinction because the show is very clear that this is not Christian or any kind of… If anything, it's kind of Buddhist, I think, ultimately, but we don't get reincarnation or anything like that. So it's really just, it's sort of like Unitarianism with the file numbers of filed… with the serial numbers filed off. 

[00:22:02] Ultimately what the show argues is that you have to have death in order to have goodness. 

Charlie Jane: [00:22:07] Right.

Annalee: [00:22:08] And I think that's so interesting because we're living in a time right now where people are obsessed with the idea of life extension, people who aren't dealing with the realm of ethics, but like technology and medicine are thinking about how can we extend human life to a thousand years or however long we can possibly live, upload our brains and all that kind of stuff.

[00:22:29] And this show is saying, sure, great if you can live for a jillion years, but you have to have death and if you don't have death, none of that living will mean anything, so there has to be a final exit and that's what these characters ultimately choose. They choose to become one with the wave or whatever. It’s so sad.

Charlie Jane: [00:22:49] Aww. We’re going to take a little break and when we come back we're going to just talk about what's so darn funny about the afterlife.

[00:22:57] Segment change music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.

Charlie Jane: [00:22:57] Science fiction and fantasy frequently deal with the afterlife. And what kind of tropes do we usually see in stories about the afterlife?

Annalee: [00:23:16] Oh my God, there's so many. 

Charlie Jane: [00:23:19] So many.

Annalee: [00:23:19] Yeah, so there's stuff like people not quite being able to get into the afterlife and kind of sticking around. So Heaven Can Wait is one that—

Charlie Jane: [00:23:29] I love that movie.

Annalee: [00:23:29] I saw when I was a kid and I remember thinking it was really groovy, but that's a sort of a Christian version where—

Charlie Jane: [00:23:37] Right.

Annalee: [00:23:37] He's in heaven but there's been a mistake made.

Charlie Jane: [00:23:40] He's a football player.

Annalee: [00:23:41] He's a football player or whatever and he's sort of taken to heaven before he dies and then his body is cremated and like the angels are like, “Oh my God, you weren't supposed to be dead. We'll stick you back on earth in somebody else's body.” And so it's a comedy, he sort of… hi-jinks ensue as he tries to kind of pick up his old life and the body of this other guy.

[00:24:01] And then there's things like the Phillip Jose Farmers series To Your Scattered Body Go. 

Charlie Jane: [00:24:06] Yeah. 

Annalee: [00:24:07] Which actually reminds me a lot of The Good Place. It's a series of several books where people who've died reawaken on, I guess, another planet and they don't know why. And they can get food from these weird alien technology devices. And they immediately set to work kind of trying to rebuild their civilizations. But people from all different times are mixed together. So Mark Twain is a major character—

Charlie Jane: [00:24:36] Right.

Annalee: [00:24:36] And you know, there's ancient Egyptian pharaohs who are characters, so—

Charlie Jane: [00:24:41] And Richard Francis Burton and yeah.

Annalee: [00:24:42] There's a bunch of annoying white guys, basically. I mean it's of its time. And one of the things that I remember even when I was a kid reading the books, whenever a woman goes to one of the alien machines to get food, she sort of sticks in this device. And like when the men do it, like food comes out when the women do it, food and makeup come out. And I was like, and it’s like, oh! Lipstick! And it's like, why? I love the idea that Phillip Jose Farmers' idea was like, all women from all throughout history, all need makeup. 

Charlie Jane: [00:25:13] And Mark Twain doesn't want to try on lipstick, I mean, you know.

Annalee: [00:25:16] Yeah! It's the afterlife. Like wouldn't Mark Twain be like, I've always wanted to wear petticoats. You know…

Charlie Jane: [00:25:21] Seriously.

Annalee: [00:25:21] I don't know why that was my Mark Twain accent. That’s sort of a weird British accent.

Charlie Jane: [00:25:24] I’ll take it.

Annalee: [00:25:27] But anyways, so there's stuff like that and ultimately To Your Scattered Bodies Go reminds me of The Good Place cause it kind of turns out that this is a giant alien experiment to kind of continue to see how humans will act. The aliens that we never really understand are kind of putting us through some kind of new trial of being human. 

[00:25:45] There's stuff where scientists discover that the afterlife is real. Like in the movie The Discovery or like Flatliners.

Charlie Jane: [00:25:52] Oh, Flatliners. 

Annalee: [00:25:53] The classic, Flatliners. God, talk about like a classic ‘90s garbage movie. But you know, people liked it. Whatever. 

Charlie Jane: [00:25:59] I liked it. It was fun, it was really trippy.

Annalee: [00:26:02] It was a lot of people like running around and looking upset is all I really remember about that movie. One that sticks with me a lot is the movie Donnie Darko, which is kind of in a sub-genre I would call a ghost who has kind of briefly returned from the afterlife to kind of fix something or has unfinished business.

[00:26:24] And you see that in The Lovely Bones. You see that in the movie The Sixth Sense. It's actually a very common theme in folklore that the reason why a ghost comes back is because it has unfinished business and it needs to alert the living. And of course that's literally the plot in The Sixth Sense is that there's all of these dead people who have things they need to say and they have crimes that have been committed against them or like they need to leave a message for someone. 

[00:26:51] And so, but Donnie Darko… I was just thinking a lot about that movie this morning because I was for some reason thinking about nuclear war. I have no idea why that would be on my mind. It's a kind of atomic age version of that with like weird mystical physics and the characters are kind of growing up in this place where a lot of the adults work in the defense industry.

[00:27:14] But basically Donnie goes into this pocket universe and gets to experience some things that he didn't in his life before. He then goes back to the, the main part of reality where he's dead.

Charlie Jane: [00:27:25] But actually The Lovely—

 Annalee: [00:27:25] Sorry, that was a spoiler about Donnie Darko.

Charlie Jane: [00:27:29] It’s okay. The Lovely Bones is actually really interesting because she's sort of a ghost, but she also keeps going into the afterlife. We see her wandering around heaven. And in the Peter Jackson movie, heaven is like this weird CG thing with like giant flowers and it looks like some kind of weird ass Björk music video or something. 

Annalee: [00:27:48] Yeah. I think part of the reason why that movie didn't do well, among many other reasons, was that the afterlife is hard to represent. 

Charlie Jane: [00:28:00] Yeah. It's especially hard, yeah. 

Annalee: [00:28:00] That afterlife representation was like nauseating. Everyone was really grossed out by it.

Charlie Jane: [00:28:06] It was really—it was actually nausea inducing. It was like…

Annalee: [00:28:08] What that other movie with nausea inducing afterlife crap that has Robin Williams in it? 

Charlie Jane: [00:28:12] Oh, What Dreams May Come.

Annalee: [00:28:15] What Dreams May Come.

Charlie Jane: [00:28:15] Right.

Annalee: [00:28:15] Which actually I think did quite well. I think people liked that movie a lot better. 

Charlie Jane: [00:28:19] Obviously Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders made a big stir because it's like Lincoln going and visiting all these ghosts who are trapped between this life and the next. 

[00:28:30] And then there's like a whole bunch of like cyber-punk-y books about like a digital afterlife. I actually did a listicle on io9 about books where people get uploaded to a digital afterlife and there's so many. And it happens in Neuromancer, it happens in the Doctor Who episode, “Forest of the Dead.”

Annalee: [00:28:45] William Gibson’s new novel, The Agency is all about a kind of digital afterlife because one of the main characters is kind of an upload.

Charlie Jane: [00:28:53] And Caprica and the Iain M. Banks novel, Surface Detail.

Annalee: [00:28:57] Yeah, and I love Surface Detail. If you like stories about how the digital afterlife might work, I highly recommend Surface Detail because it's a business, of course. It's a planet that's turned its entire substrate, like it's created huge server farms like under the ground all over this planet to host heaven and hell. And it's run by this kind of authoritarian government that has very rigid notions of what good and evil are. So if you're gay, you're, you will literally be tormented forever and stuff like that. So it's this great thought experiment, which is all too believable about how the morality of a real-life regime could stretch into eternity. Eternal death and horror, eternal torture and horror, I guess is what I'm trying to say. 

[00:29:47] I guess we've kind of gone over a lot of the main tropes. I'm sure we've forgotten some, so definitely let us know. But I think the theme in SF and fantasy is usually either we visit an afterlife or we have a character who's trapped somewhere in between. Or we have everybody’s raised from the dead mysteriously, why, we don't know, and that's kind of the mystery. Or we have these virtual, these sort of digital afterlives so it's uploads. It's a virtual world. 

[00:30:14] Actually Ken MacLeod's most recent trilogy is all about that and kind of digital afterlife. And everyone's living in there and continuing to have political revolution because it is Ken MacLeod so what else would you do? 

[00:30:27] But it goes back really far, right? I mean I feel like these, these stories about visiting the afterlife, go back to like Dante…

Charlie Jane: [00:30:32] Oh yeah, Orpheus. 

Annalee: [00:30:34] Yeah. You and I visited Angkor Wat in Cambodia where the walls are just covered in crazy representations of hell and there's some pretty damn cool and intense pictures of hell. Heaven, I was like, there are pictures of heaven, but I was less interested in those. I keep thinking about there's one image carved into the wall of like people who were unfaithful to their partners. And so for all of their afterlife, they have to climb naked up a spiny tree together. There's a very like explicit carving on the wall of this naked man and woman strapped onto either side of the spiny tree. So anyway, don’t fuck around, I guess, is the whole message there. 

Charlie Jane: [00:31:21] So the thing that really comes to mind after listening to all these tropes and thinking about The Good Place and all these other depictions is why is it so much easier to depict hell in pop culture than heaven? 

Annalee: [00:31:34] Well, I mean, I think one obvious answer is that hell is endless suffering and torture. And I mean that's something we do on earth all the time, right? Like almost every torture you can name other than the spiny tree thing is stuff that people have done to each other. Humans are great, I love humans, but we're also experts at horribly torturing each other and murdering each other. So these are things we've already seen. It's easy to imagine hell because we've all seen what terrible things people can do. And we've also all been stuck in horrible bureaucratic nightmares.

Charlie Jane: [00:32:11] Right, and there's so much great artwork like Hieronymus Bosch and stuff. Edward Gorey and those temple paintings you mentioned that depict hell. And it's like, there's so much great imagery and it’s flames and demons and you know it's very metal and you can kind of just, I don't know, I feel like hell has a lot of iconography that's really cool and very kind of distinctive.

[00:32:36] Whereas when you think about heaven, it's like, well there's fluffy clouds, there's wings, there's harps. Depictions of heaven are often kind of deliberately gauzy and it's hard to imagine something that's nice forever because it's just like the more concrete and specific you get, the less it's going to seem nice, the more it's going to seem like, oh God, that would be awful. Or, I would get sick of that after three days or whatever. And you know, I feel like The Talking Heads of this song where they say heaven is a place where nothing ever happens. And I remember listening to that song when I was a little kid and being like, wow, that sounds shitty as fuck. Like why would you want that? Why would you want to be in a place where nothing ever happens? That sounds like the worst.

Annalee: [00:33:17] And I think that's exactly what The Good Place posits, right, is that nothing is happening in heaven and everybody in heaven has become really dumb—

Charlie Jane: [00:33:25] And just complacent and just shitty.

Annalee: [00:33:26] And complacent, like all they have done for millions of years is binge Netflix or whatever. They have to find a solution to make it kind of spikier so that people are enjoying their afterlife, which is why they have to invent death in the afterlife. 

Charlie Jane: [00:33:43] Right.

Annalee: [00:33:43] But the other thing about heaven is that it's very individual. I think that it's easy to imagine hell because we all kind of share and understanding that pain sucks. I mean nonconsensual pain sucks.

Charlie Jane: [00:34:00] Right.

Annalee: [00:34:00] And surprise pain, or pain caused by—

Charlie Jane: [00:34:05] Uninvited pain.

Annalee: [00:34:07] Uninvited pain with a political aim. Ooh, that was like a little rhyme there. And so we have kind of a consensus on what's painful, but what's pleasurable is kind of shaped by experience. And… try to come up with something that everybody wants to do on a Saturday afternoon and then expand that out to the entire human species. You're just never going to have like one thing.

Charlie Jane: [00:34:36] I mean, we know all women are gonna want makeup. We know that.

Annalee: [00:34:38] All women are gonna… Thank you, Philip Jose Farmer. Yep. No, that's true. And of course, it'll be really easy to tell who the women are and the men are too. 

Charlie Jane: [00:34:50] Well, that's you know, of course. 

Annalee: [00:34:50] That’s another part of the afterlife is that that's really obvious.

Charlie Jane: [00:34:54] To Your Gendered Bodies Go. 

Annalee: [00:34:56] Exactly. 

Charlie Jane: [00:34:58] For me, the ultimate theme of a lot of these stories is that the afterlife is kind of an absurd concept intrinsically. The idea of anything continuing for an eternity is absurd and weird and ridiculous. And especially the idea of eternal torture just feels kind of something that a sociopath would come up with. It feels like there's no sin, there's no kind of bad behavior on earth that would be bad enough that it justifies being tortured for millions and millions or billions and billions of years. It intrinsically a weird and kind of nonsensical concept. And I think that that's part of why the more we try to imagine in a concrete fashion… And I think even hell ultimately, you can have a static scene of like people being hit with burning pitchforks, but ultimately the idea of hell is as ridiculous, as impossible to imagine as heaven just because of the timescale involved and the sheer number of people and the amount of moral judgment involved. 

[00:35:54] It's basically something that the only way to really wrap your mind around it is to say that it's beyond human comprehension and that it's really something that we're incapable of understanding but with our limited brains. But really I think it's something that when you investigate it, it makes no sense. 

Annalee: [00:36:10] Yeah. And I think that's why for people who do believe in them, it is a matter of faith and it can be about, kind of an inspiration or aspirational idea. And I also think that's why The Good Place kind of turns to all of these metaphors and ideas borrowed from other faith traditions. Like the idea of rebooting to me feels a lot like reincarnation.

Charlie Jane: [00:36:34] Kind of does, yeah.

Annalee: [00:36:35] Especially because the idea is improvement, you know? And so as soon as they reform the system, it goes from being the horror of reliving the same mistake over and over again to being a situation where each time you reboot, you learn from that experience, right? And that's kind of a little bit about what reincarnation is supposed to be about, that you eventually become a better and better soul over time. Yeah, I mean it is something that is impossible to imagine so that when we finally try to, in a show like The Good Place we call on, you know, really common tropes from earth. Like the sitcom, the work family. 

Charlie Jane: [00:37:15] Yeah. And I think as somebody who is obsessed with genres, it's really interesting to see that marriage of like the metaphysical kind of soul [dirty?] story married to the kind of workplace sitcom. I think it's actually, it's something that shouldn't work but does partly just because they keep the story turning and twisting so fast. They don't try to do the typical sitcom thing where there's just a bunch of standalone episodes of like, here's an episode where there's just a new boss or oh, they've got to solve a problem. There's a new case or whatever. Like, Brooklyn 99. The reason Brooklyn 99 can be on it's seventh season and have hundreds of episodes is because it's a format that lends itself to just endless standalone episodes where—

Annalee: [00:37:58] Endless reboots.

Charlie Jane: [00:38:00] Endless reboots, basically. I mean the sitcom is a genre that that does basically reboot itself at the end of every episode. Maybe characters eventually get married or have kids or whatever, but from episode to episode, they're the same people every single time and The Good Place is unable to do that, which is part of why it only lasted four seasons and actually kept changing it status quo on a pretty regular basis.

Annalee: [00:38:22] That makes it a very meta show.

Charlie Jane: [00:38:23] It does.

Annalee: [00:38:23] It’s sort of about escaping from the sitcom. 

Charlie Jane: [00:38:27] That's so true. 

Annalee: [00:38:29] In a weird way. Yeah, I like that. 

Charlie Jane: [00:38:32] I like that too. Cool. 

[00:38:33] Thank you so much for listening to Our Opinions Are Correct. We really appreciate your support. If you want to support us more, you can leave a review on Apple or any place else that podcasts are reviewable. And you can also support us on Patreon where we're at Our Opinions Are Correct and—

Annalee: [00:38:47] You'll get lots of good freebies. Extras.

Charlie Jane: [00:38:50] You get audio extras, you get to ask us questions, you get to have writing prompts. 

Annalee: [00:38:55] Yeah, and we post our works in progress on that so you can get like a little glimpse of what we're writing right now.

Charlie Jane: [00:39:00] What we're fomenting and yeah. And you can follow us on Twitter at @OOACpod and Facebook at Our Opinions Are Correct. Thanks so much to our incredible, heroic, brilliant producer, Veronica Simonetti at Women’s Audio Mission. Thanks to Chris Palmer for giving us awesome music and thanks again to you for listening. You're the best.

Annalee: [00:39:19] You’re the best. 

Charlie Jane: [00:39:21] You're totally going to the good place. You're going all the way to the good place.

Annalee: [00:39:24] You’re going to have to reboot a lot before you get to the good place, but that's going to be okay. 

Charlie Jane: [00:39:28] Just like unplug yourself and plug yourself back in a few times. Okay. Bye.

Together: [00:39:33] Bye!

[00:39:33] Outro music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.

Annalee Newitz