1Pilot
Eleanor has just died and her spirit has arrived at its final resting place. In her first conversation with Michael, the spirit who designed the "neighborhood" which will be her home in the afterlife, he tells her some key pieces of information about the afterlife in general and where she has ended up, including that the concepts of heaven and hell are not exactly accurate, but rather that there is a bad place where most end up, while only a handful of who were the most selfless on earth end up in the good place, where she is. The good place is designed to provide total happiness for its residents, including a residence specifically designed for his or her likes, and being paired with another spirit who is truly a soul mate, that spirit for Eleanor being who was a Senegalese man named Chidi Anagonye. Another important spirit in the good place is Janet, a non-judgmental but ever knowing spirit who can appear at a moment's notice and will provide almost any information requested. After ...
2Flying
Eleanor tries to prove to Chidi that she's worthy of his help; Tahani and Jianyu try to help Michael cope with a mysterious flaw in his neighborhood.
3Tahani Al-Jamil
Eleanor is determined to find out who wrote and anonymously slipped her a threatening note. After being the recipient of Tahani's latest good deed, Eleanor is certain that Tahani is the culprit, her goody goody act just that, an act. Despite Chidi's efforts to impress on Eleanor that Tahani is truly a good person in spite of her flaws, Eleanor proceeds to try and discover that Tahini is indeed the note writer, which to her dismay means actually spending "quality" time with Tahini. Meanwhile, Michael wants to expand Chidi's horizons by finding him a hobby, especially one that may go beyond his comfort zone, as Chidi's human life was focused solely on his academic work on ethics and putting his theories into practice. While Michael has an ulterior motive in this task which may affect Chidi's work with Eleanor, Chidi has an answer which addresses Michael's concerns but which may be a little closer to his heart than the direction Michael was proceeding. In the process, Michael also wants ...
4Jason Mendoza
Eleanor discovers that the person sending her what she believes are threatening notes is not Tahani as she initially believed, but rather Jianyu. The notes are not meant to be threatening but rather a call for help, as Jianyu is a fraud like her, and should not be in the good place. He is not Jianyu Li, a Taiwanese Buddhist monk as everyone believes, but rather Jason Mendoza, an ethnic Filipino from Jacksonville, Florida, a not very good electronic dance music DJ and drug dealer with a frat boy mentality. The problem for Eleanor and eventually Chidi, who also learns about Jianyu's true identity, is that once Jianyu opens up about his Jason life, he has opened up a floodgate of frat boy emotions which may not be able to be rebottled. As such, he has no real desire to stay in the good place as he just wants to return to his partying ways. And if Jianyu gets caught, it is inevitable that Eleanor will also be exposed at the same time. So Eleanor and Chidi have to try and convince Jianyu ...
5Category 55 Emergency Doomsday Crisis
Eleanor believes she's reached a true breakthrough in that she did a good deed without even thinking about it before she did it. As such, she is buoyed by Chidi's lessons, thinking that they are paying off for her, which leads her to want even more and more of his time, which is almost all devoted to her already. Conversely, Chidi is feeling that Eleanor is monopolizing his time, instead of he being able to enjoy paradise as he thought he was supposed to in the good place. This incompatibility in priorities leads to bad feelings between the two, who want to split up in private, but maintain their soul mate personae in public. That becomes difficult when Michael issues a directive where no one is allowed outside, leaving Eleanor and Chidi confined to her house together until the directive is lifted. What makes matters worse is that Michael asks if Eleanor's neighbors, Bart and Nina, can stay with her and Chidi temporarily, which may place their already strained relationship under the ...
6What We Owe to Each Other
Eleanor is freaking out about meeting with Michael, to who she promised to help discover the problem with the neighborhood, knowing full well that she is the problem. If she is true to the spirit of her word, she will help Michael and expose herself as a fraud. If she doesn't help Michael, she will break all that she has worked toward being a good person. So she figures she has to both help him and not help him for her to be able to save herself. In her initial meeting with Michael, she thinks she has a way to protect herself, at least in the short term, if she can only get Michael to go along with what she has in mind. Meanwhile, Jianyu is consulting a Magic 8 ball in how to answer anything Tahani says to him. In doing so, he inadvertently agrees to a couples spa outing so that they can really get to know each other. Believing that he will out himself as a fraud spending such intimate time alone with her, he asks for a third on their couples outing, that third being Chidi, who tries ...
7The Eternal Shriek
Eleanor considers Michael's belief that he is the neighborhood's problem and thus should abandon his experiment of an architect living in a neighborhood he designed (effectively meaning he would leave the neighborhood forever) as a win-win situation as Michael will get the retirement he so rightly deserves and needs and she will no longer feel the stress of getting caught by him as a fraud and the true cause of the neighborhood's problems. Chidi, on the other hand, disagrees, as Eleanor's reasoning is built on a lie. Eleanor concedes that she has to reconsider Michael's move after they all learn what retirement for a being like Michael means, it called the eternal shriek. Eleanor comes up with another solution to the resulting problem which would require a sacrifice. Chidi is conflicted by Eleanor's solution as he vowed to help her, but still feels the sacrifice is morally wrong despite it not hurting "anyone". Through the process, Chidi remembers back to a lie he said on Earth, one ...
8Most Improved Player
Michael is in a quandary concerning what to do about Eleanor ever since she admitted that she is a fraud and is in the good place by mistake. What makes the situation even worse for him is that no one in his position in the good place has ever had to deal with such an error, and Janet is still rebooting her system following being murdered by who he now assumes was Eleanor, meaning that Michael via Janet can't yet get access to Eleanor's file. So beyond the bare minimum of having an interview with Eleanor to learn directly from her her story, he decides to have an interview with who seem to be her closest friends in the neighborhood, namely Tahani, Jianyu and most specifically Chidi. Those latter three interviews may cause even more problems for especially Jianyu and Chidi as Eleanor learns and passes along to her friends that Michael has a lie detecting machine, meaning that Jianyu also may be exposed as a fraud, and Chidi identified as Janet's real murderer. As such, Tahani, Jianyu ...
9...Someone Like Me as a Member
Because of Chidi's plea on her behalf, Michael has decided to fight to keep Eleanor in the good place. As such, Trevor and his bad entourage are still in the good place for negotiations. Such negotiations are outside of Michael's mentality - he only knowing how to be good and give in to what others want - so he calls in backup in the form of Tahani. Regardless of what Tahani may or may not be able to teach him, it will still have to be Michael who carries out the actions. Meanwhile, the real Eleanor, Chidi, Eleanor, and Trevor go on a double date of sorts, for the real Eleanor to experience what it's going to be like, especially the food, in the good place after being in the bad place, and for Trevor to give Eleanor a taste of what it's going to be like for her with him in the bad place. Especially as the real Eleanor and Chidi are supposed to be soul mates, it also gives Eleanor an opportunity to see what Chidi's time in the good place is really supposed to be, while giving Chidi an ...
10Chidi's Choice
Now that Michael has decided to do whatever he needs to keep Fake Eleanor in the good place, he has to be prepared for whenever Shawn will make an unexpected visit so that the collective they can defend the decision. Good Eleanor and Bambadjan are to act as her legal counsel. In preparing that defense, they question Fake Eleanor about her life, both on Earth and in the good place. In the process of that questioning, Fake Eleanor comes to believe someone in the good place is indeed her soul mate. In discovering that Jianyu is also a fake, Tahani believes she has also discovered who is really her soul mate in the good place. Simpleminded Jason, who has felt lost in the unfamiliar surroundings ever since arriving mistakenly in the good place, also believes he has fallen in his brand of love with someone in the good place, the one person who has shown him unconditional acceptance. And Chidi, who has always had problems with indecision in his mortal life until the end which has carried on ...
11What's My Motivation
After Michael shows them the scores and rankings of everyone in the good place, the collective working on the defense to keep Fake Eleanor in the good place decide that what she has to do to stay in the good place is amass enough points in doing good deeds from now on before Shawn arrives. It is a steep climb as they figure she will need in the vicinity of 1.2 million points, while she currently is in the -4,000 point range. Tahani decides to help Fake Eleanor in this task. They believe the key to achieving the goal is the fact that everyone else in the good place hates Fake Eleanor for the bad things she's inadvertently caused which have negatively affected them, such as the sinkhole. As Fake Eleanor and Tahani work on this premise, Fake Eleanor comes to the realization of what she has to do to get the necessary points before Shawn arrives. Meanwhile, Jason aka Jianyu, who has married Janet, wants to tell Michael, who he mistakenly believes is Janet's father, of the marriage to get ...
12Mindy St. Claire
After discovering its existence from Janet, Eleanor decides to hijack Shawn's train and live her afterlife in the medium place. Jason and Janet are also in tow as Jason wants to live in a place where he and Janet can live as man and wife, something they can't do in the good place but that they can probably do in the medium place away from Michael's scrutiny. What they find in the medium place, as Janet had mentioned, is exactly one person, Mindy St. Claire. The medium place was a compromise by the authorities in both the good place and the bad place to deal with the unusual situation of Mindy, who was basically a bad person who did one spectacularly good thing before she died in the 1980s. While Jason's sole initial goal in the medium place is to figure out a way for he and Janet to have sex, Eleanor finds that mediocrity may not be all it's cracked up to be as witnessed by Mindy. But what Eleanor does, regardless of what she really wants, is dependent upon Jason and Janet. Meanwhile ...
13Michael's Gambit
With Fake Eleanor and Jason making it back to the good place a fraction of a second past Shawn's deadline, Shawn has to make a call on whether his initial ruling of sending Chidi and Tahani to the bad place in place of Fake Eleanor and Jason still stands. What Shawn rules is that the bad place is still short two people, he no longer caring which two go, leaving that decision for them to decide among themselves. As Fake Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani and Jason argue among themselves about which two should go, external forces come into play. Amid all the kerfuffle, Fake Eleanor comes to a unilateral decision about the two people, she having a very specific reason for her choices, about which she knows deep in her heart are the right choices and ones with which Michael cannot argue. Although Fake Eleanor is correct in her assessment, she is unaware that the decision will have dire consequences beyond the on the surface repercussions of who will go and who will stay.
