You wake up, and find that you are sitting in a leather chair in a strange room that looks a bit like a physician’s office.  A pleasant bespectacled man tells you that you have died, and are now beginning your afterlife.  “Welcome to The Good Place,” he beams. You soon emerge into a sunny, pleasant “neighborhood” filled with saintly seeming people milling about and eating frozen yogurt. Yet not all is as it seems. For one thing, you clearly know that you don’t belong.  You were a terrible person in life.

This is the opening premise of the entertaining and thought provoking show, “The Good Place”.  Somehow I missed this on NBC and am now binge-watching reruns on a streaming service.  I will confine my remarks to the first season, but will directly discuss the shocking twist of the season finale.

Eleanor, a self-absorbed, semi-alcoholic woman whose life’s work was selling a fake product, finds herself dead and consigned to “The Good Place”, but she knows that she doesn’t deserve to be there.  A mistake has caused her to switch places with another who shared her name.  She decides to try to earn her place anyway and begins ethics lessons with a former ethics professor named Chidi.  Meanwhile she has a troubled and catty relationship with her neighbor, Tahani, a tall glamorous former philanthropist, who seems too good to be true, and has some subtle narcissistic traits.  After doing the right thing in the midst of numerous ethical dilemmas, Eleanor finally realizes something shocking: “This is actually the Bad Place, isn’t it?”

The show has been compared with the play “No Exit” by existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, and this is apt.  The first season unfolds much like the famous scenario in Sartre’s book.  “No Exit” describes a version of Hell. Sartre, who was famous for saying, “Hell is other people” drafted a play in which three main characters are trapped together in a pleasant room. They are dead, and have been consigned to Hell.  They have been assigned to spend eternity together. It dawns on them that they are to be each other’s tormentors:

INEZ: Wait! You’ll see how simple it is. Childishly simple. Obviously there aren’t any physical torments—you agree, don’t you? And yet we’re in hell. And no one else will come here. We’ll stay in this room together, the three of us, for ever and ever. . . . In short, there’s someone absent here, the official tortur

GARCIN [sotto voce]: I’d noticed that.

INEZ: It’s obvious what they’re after—an economy of man power—or devil-power, if you prefer. The same idea as in the cafeteria, where customers serve themselves.

ESTELLE: What ever do you mean?

INEZ: I mean that each of us will act as torturer of the two others.

The three characters proceed to do just that, until finally Estelle cracks:

“Open the door! Open, blast you! I’ll endure anything, your red-hot tongs and molten lead, your racks and prongs and garrotes—all your fiendish gadgets, everything that burns and flays and tears—I’ll put up with any torture you impose. Anything, anything would be better than this agony of mind, this creeping pain that gnaws and fumbles and caresses one and never hurts quite enough.”

These parables accord with a more modern version of Hell, in which psychology replaces fire and brimstone as a metaphor for its torments. I think of C.S. Lewis, who wrote “It’s not a question of God ‘sending’ us to Hell. In each of us there is something growing up which will of itself be Hell unless it is nipped in the bud.”

Some have objected to this idea, as it underplays the justice and retribution aspects of Divine punishment. In Lewis’ view, and that of “The Good Place”, Hell is as much a self-inflicted torment as it is divinely appointed punishment.  

However, does it need to be “either / or”? Might it not rather be both?