The nuance in The Good Place
One of my favorite things about The Good Place is the level of detail and nuance in the storytelling. An example of this can be seen in the first episode, when Eleanor goes to Tahani and Jason’s party.
She asks sarcastically “oh, how good are these people really?” And the show proceeds to show us three examples.
First, we meet Bambadjan, who “spent half his life in Saudi Arabia fighting for women’s rights and the other half in North Korea fighting for gay rights” (note: I might have gotten that backward, but the point stands. This is clearly supposed to be, to western viewers, an unambiguous, unassailable, good thing.)
Next, we meet Cualli, who said “if the government won’t deal with those land mines, we will, and then we proceeded to dig up over 100 (1000?) unexploded land mines from around the orphanage.” Like Bambadjan’s good deeds, this is also pretty difficult to criticize, and the scale of the good deed is so large that it gains legitimacy by size.
Finally, we meet a third man whose name I don’t think is ever provided, and we get an odd one out. His good deed? Donating both of his kidneys to a stranger he met on a bus a few minutes before. Now, organ donation is a good act. However, this act is actually not good. First of all, it’s incredibly short-sighted. Setting aside the fact that we know this unnamed man is actually a Bad Place actor and taking the scene at face value, this man essentially committed suicide for the sake of a stranger. Unlike Bambadjan and Cualli’s backstories, this isn’t necessarily good. What if the strange man is a criminal? He’s just been granted a new lease on life, and presumably then more time to enact violence. Even if the stranger on the bus is a legitimately good person, giving up your own life for the sake of a complete stranger is a warped, Giving Tree-esque take on selflessness. Why not instead amplify the stranger’s medical needs on social media? Go to medical school to discover new technologies to facilitate organ cloning/donation/transplantation? Do literally anything which could have an impact beyond temporarily extending the life of one person at the expense of yourself? In fact, given that our organ donor’s family and friends had to grieve him as he made the decision to kill himself, it’s arguable that the emotional trauma created by donating both kidneys outweighed the good of prolonging a stranger’s life, thus making the action actually net negative, points wise.
However, this overlooks a key detail. The organ donor’s backstory isn’t that of a good person, it’s that of what a demon imagines a good person to be like. We see in the show that the Bad Place characters are openly contemptuous of anyone from or associated with the Good Place, so it makes sense that a Bad Place version of a good person would be someone so laughably stupid that they give up both kidneys to a complete stranger. It’s nuance like that which just enhances the show.
