The Good Place constantly throws audiences for a loop with its cliffhangers, but none have been as cruel as the season four fall finale, which leaves about 45 minutes for the characters to save humanity.
Last week’s episode ended with Michael (Ted Danson) and Eleanor (Kristen Bell) winning the experiment but dooming humanity when The Judge (Maya Rudolph) decides to wipe it all away. She decided to individually search each Janet (D’Arcy Carden) until she found the remote to delete humanity. The group decides that they have to wake up Chidi (William Jackson Harper), as he is the only one who can save humanity.
This week focuses on Chidi remembering everything that’s happened to him while Michael is waking him up.
It begins when Chidi is a baby and jumps to when he’s a young child and is first introduced to philosophy. His parents are fighting, so he creates a presentation answering the question of why they shouldn’t get divorced. Chidi believes that by solving this, he’s discovered that there’s an answer to everything if he reads and studies hard enough.
Chidi then jumps to when he’s older with a girlfriend. The two of them break up because she tells him he doesn’t have any emotion and needs to understand that not everything can be solved with an answer.
In the same week, Chidi is scolded by his adviser for his philosophical papers because it’s too scrambled and ridiculous to make sense of. He talks to his roommate, who tells him that he needs to start listening to other people, and suddenly, it jumps forward to the moment where Chidi dies because of his indecisiveness.
The audience then sees Chidi wake up in the good place for the first time and get accustomed to everything happening around him. Then, after asking Janet a lot of questions, it jumps to her wedding with Jason (Manny Jacinto).
Chidi talks to Jason and asks him how he learned to make big decisions like getting married. Jason tells him he can’t think too long about decisions or else he’ll talk himself out of them.
Chidi then goes through a montage of meeting terrible soulmates after the core four figured out Michael’s evil plan. He ends up with the wrong person, and eventually finds his way back to Eleanor, thanks to Tahani (Jameela Jamil). Chidi asks Tahani for help about confidence, and she gives him some tips.
This starts Chidi’s memories of Eleanor, with them kissing after studying for hours, arguing in the middle of the street and cuddling on the couch talking about how lucky they are to be together. He sees her helping him work through his philosophy paper, asking him for guidance with ethics, telling him she loves him and saying goodbye to him before Michael erased his memories.
Right before Michael erases his memories, the two of them talk about the answers to big questions. First, they determine that there’s probably no such thing a soulmate but that they’re created through love and work.
“If soulmates do exist, they’re not found; they’re made,” Michael said. “People meet, they get a good feeling and then they get to work building a relationship.”
Chidi finally understands that life can’t just be solved one time and then it’s done, but that people have to wake up every day and solve it again. Chidi writes a note and asks Janet to give it to him if he ever gets his memories back.
That’s when Chidi finally wakes up and is ready to get to work on finding a way out of this. Though everyone expects him to have some sort of answer, he asks Janet for the note back, saying it’s some of the best writing he’s ever done.
“There is no answer, but Eleanor is the answer,” Chidi wrote in the note.
The two share a look, and just like that, The Good Place takes its break until 2020.
Here’s how audiences reacted on Twitter:
The Good Place will return in January 2020 on NBC.
