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Oct. 11th, 2020 12:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyficSince I watch The Good Place on Netflix, I'm a bit late to the finale game, as I had to wait for Netflix to get it. I have many feels about the finale.
While I agree that the ending was satisfying, and in a way--any other way of ending the story would have left open the possibility for story continuation through more Bad Place shenanigans, ultimately, I found it very depressing. Because the basic posit of it is that eventually all the characters we know and love grow tired of existence and essentially commit suicide.
I'm fully on board with the existential ennui of endless existence, but...I still wish they'd left us at the beginning of our 4's time in the Good Place, rather than taking us to the end.
And when I said I found it depressing, I mean, upsetting enough that I had a hard time sleeping. Also--to take this to a real place--I think we sometimes comfort ourselves with the idea that the elderly are ready to go. In the case of my grandfather he was, but only because he was tired of fighting his body so hard every day to keep living. If he had had his health and his friends, he absolutely would not have wanted to go. So what I'm saying is, The Good Place hit rather hard on actual grief? So.
I'm going to process this for awhile.
While I agree that the ending was satisfying, and in a way--any other way of ending the story would have left open the possibility for story continuation through more Bad Place shenanigans, ultimately, I found it very depressing. Because the basic posit of it is that eventually all the characters we know and love grow tired of existence and essentially commit suicide.
I'm fully on board with the existential ennui of endless existence, but...I still wish they'd left us at the beginning of our 4's time in the Good Place, rather than taking us to the end.
And when I said I found it depressing, I mean, upsetting enough that I had a hard time sleeping. Also--to take this to a real place--I think we sometimes comfort ourselves with the idea that the elderly are ready to go. In the case of my grandfather he was, but only because he was tired of fighting his body so hard every day to keep living. If he had had his health and his friends, he absolutely would not have wanted to go. So what I'm saying is, The Good Place hit rather hard on actual grief? So.
I'm going to process this for awhile.
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Date: 2020-10-17 10:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-10-18 07:40 pm (UTC)I appreciated that the archway/threshold was presented as fulfilling and peaceful and the natural endpoint, and that the glowy bits of our heroes were dispersed to rejoin the universe after crossing it. I like to think about actual death that way; the loss of the individual but the continuation of their...physical components? Atoms? I like that we're all here together, the living and the dead, that we were part of this world.
My father wasn't ready to go, I don't think. But that same existential endpoint that upset you gave me a little comfort -- to see the same natural resolution for so many different characters, and to have that internal acceptance of an ending be inevitable no matter how they individually came to it, felt reassuring to me. We don't live long enough to get there, of course, but if the true endpoint would be to seek release/oblivion anyway, somehow it makes death seem less...unfriendly?
And it reinforces the idea of drive/ambition/desire/struggle being a fundamental part of life, validating my day-to-day human fumbling and anxieties. Sigh. :P