When even a show as clever and thoughtful as The Good Place can’t quite finish the thought on Eternal Progression, then it’s time to acknowledge just how radical and unimaginable the doctrine really is.

Some background: The critically acclaimed sleeper-hit The Good Place (2016-2020) has proven especially tantalizing for LDS pop-culture enthusiasts, particularly given its seemingly-familiar take on the afterlife. Not that the show starts out that way, of course: the initial premise in season 1 is that Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell)–a self-described “human trash-bag from Arizona”–is killed in a freak shopping-cart accident, only to then awaken in the titular “Good Place.” She is greeted in the warm office of a kindly angel named Michael (Ted Danson, in a late-career sitcom resurgence), who assures her that due to her life of selfless altruism, she has received her eternal reward. Just as “in my Father’s house there are many mansions,” it turns out there is not one Good Place but many, with each Good Place unit perfectly designed down to the smallest detail to maximize the happiness of each of its unique inhabitants, even pairing everyone off with their ideal soulmate. Michael it turns out is the lead “architect”, or celestial supervisor, of this particular Good Place, and Danson brings the same warmth to the role as he once did to Sam Malone on “Cheers”.

The comedic twist, however, is that there has been a celestial mix-up: the wrong Eleanor Shellstrop from Arizona has made it to the Good Place. As she confides to her supposed soulmate Chidi (William Jackson Harper), a recently-deceased Ethics & Philosophy professor from Australia, she has been mistaken for a different Eleanor Shellstrop who spent her life exonerating innocent clients and performing human rights missions in Ukraine, whereas Kristen Bell’s Eleanor worked as a telemarketer selling fraudulent pharmaceuticals to the elderly. Over the course of the first season, Eleanor recruits a deeply-ambivalent Chidi to help her “earn” her way into the Good Place postmortem; she meets another misplaced Good Place resident named Jason (Manny Jacinto), a supposed-Buddhist monk who turns out to be a dim-witted petty-thief from Jacksonville, Florida; she clashes then bonds with his supposed soulmate Tahani (Jameela Jamil), a British socialite whose pretentiousness initially infuriates her (this detail turns out to be crucial); all while poor, put-upon Michael despairs as to why his particular Good Place keeps getting so inharmonious and dysfunctional.

Halfway through Season 1, Eleanor finally confesses openly to everyone that she is the reason why the Good Place has become unstable (in a clever retelling of Jonah and the Whale), which only begins protracted negotiations with the Bad Place to swap Eleanors. Her new friends and Michael try to vouch for her before a celestial judge (a hilariously dry Marc Evan Jackson), but the case against her looks grim, and increasingly puts these provisional friends at odds with each other.

If you watched all but the finale of season 1, you might naturally assume that this is all just a slightly-blasphemous, darkly-humorous take on the next life, featuring as it does gross incompetence on the parts of supposedly-omniscient divine beings. In fact, if you go back and read contemporaneous reviews at the time, you’ll find that even among secular critics, the way that these god-like beings get beat with the idiot stick, while still funny, nevertheless seemed to strain narrative credulity.

Then the last 10 minutes of the finale happens, and it just might be the most amazing season finale of the last quarter-century (Heavy, heavy spoilers): Eleanor suddenly realizes that they have been in the Bad Place all along–that in fact the whole reason why the four central characters have been torturing each other emotionally is because they have been intended to. It’s Jean-Paul Sartre’s “No Exit” in TV sitcom form. When she confronts Michael with this revelation, he finally drops his put-upon demeanor and lets loose a devilish laugh that, frankly, should’ve won Ted Danson an Emmy.

Critics and audiences alike raved at this twist, while any LDS-attuned ears immediately perked up. For it is part of LDS theology that “it is by the wicked that the wicked are punished” (Mormon 4:5); in fact, it is a recurrent theme in the Book of Mormon that it is less that God punishes men than it is that he allows men to punish themselves. Indeed, the Book of Mormon itself declares that “ye would be more miserable to dwell with a holy and just God, under a consciousness of your filthiness before him, than ye would to dwell with the damned souls of hell” (Mormon 9:4). Such was indeed foreshadowed earlier in the season when a demon from the Bad Place played by Adam Scott (in a reversal of his Parks and Rec character), during the faux-negotiations for her immortal soul, tells Eleanor that, despite the fact that they will “definitely torture” her, she will nevertheless be happier in the Bad Place than in the Good–to which she tacitly agrees by taking a shot of liquor.

But that’s not where the really meaty LDS resonances come from. Without getting into too much more tedious plot summary, suffice it to say that the remaining three seasons find Michael ultimately joining forces with Eleanor and company after all, as they all seek to not only escape the Bad Place but fundamentally reform the entire system of divine reward and punishment over all. Heaven, it turns out, is broken: a Season 4 twist reveals that no one has actually gotten into the Good Place since the early-1500s. Seems that with our increasingly integrated global economy, everyone is made complicit in the world’s sins; e.g. the good points you get from buying flowers for your lover are negated by the fact that those flowers were harvested under the most appalling slave conditions in drought-stricken Africa. However, since no one is able to escape complicity in the world’s sins–since it is borderline impossible to not, say, buy our clothes from third-world child sweatshops, or eat food not harvested by exploited migrant workers, or power our homes without destructive fossil fuels, or etc.–then it really is impossible for anyone to be righteous even with the best of intentions, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). That is (and almost certainly without intending it), The Good Place makes an argument for the necessity of the Atonement–for only something so infinite and eternal could wipe our ledgers clean and pay the price for our unavoidable sins.

But the necessity of the Atonement is not what causes The Good Place to appeal to an LDS eye specifically, but it’s proposed solution: spoiler alert, they do indeed reform heaven in the series finale, and they do so by learning the lessons of the faux-Good Place from season 1. For Eleanor did in fact make incremental improvements as a human being, almost in spite of herself, over the course of the show, and hence she and Michael ultimately argue to the judge of the universe that all people who die should pass through their own faux-Good Places–not as places of punishment, but of learning and improvement (almost like Temples, you might say), till they make enough changes that they at last qualify for the actual Good Place.

For a certain LDS ear, this has definite valences of “kingdom jumping” (that old theological chestnut between Bruce R. McConkie and Eugene England, Brigham Young and Orson Pratt), the idea that there is still progression to be made in the next life, that we are not restricted to where we end up. Certainly we learn from Doctrine and Covenants 138 that there are missionary activities occurring in the Spirit World, meaning that the chance to repent and be redeemed from “Spirit Prison” are still available beyond this mortal coil. Our missionary discussions even have a tidy term for it: “Eternal Progression”.

The series finale, in fact, leans hard into this concept of Eternal Progression, wherein everyone is granted all the time in eternity to learn and master all possible skills and virtues. This is indeed what we as Church members, generally speaking, believe we will spend the endless eternities doing: learning and growing and mastering every needful thing.

But it is also here that the LDS resonances to The Good Place falter. For one of the final problems that Eleanor and the gang have to solve once they initially reach the actual Good Place in Season 4 is how crazy and bored everyone there has become due to the unending monotony of eternity. The gang’s solution is actually quite simple: they create a doorway that allows anyone who steps through it to cease to exist. No one is required to use it, but anyone who chooses to may. Since death purportedly gives life its meaning, this doorway immediately transforms the Good Place into something infinitely precious to cherish and enjoy while it lasts–you know, like life itself. The series finale indeed follows the moment in the distant eternities when each of the main characters at last decides it’s time to pass through the doorway, having mastered everything they ever wished to master.

There is something vaguely Buddhist about their rationalizations for the wisdom of the suicide gate; as Eleanor tells Janet (goodness, I haven’t even gotten to the heavenly-android played so ably by D’arcy Carden!): “The wave returns to the ocean. What the ocean does with the water after that is anyone’s guess. But as a very wise not-robot once told me, true joy is in the mystery”. We are all just manifestations of the Brahman-Ahtman, as the Hindus might say. There’s a sense of returning at last from whence we came in this final act of annihilation.

But to my LDS-attuned imagination, this supposedly feel-good finale feels like a missed opportunity; and for all of the show’s impressively gutsy creative risks, it nevertheless still feels like a stumble at the finish-line, a failure to pull the trigger. For if the point of all eternity is to tinker and play and learn all there is to learn till we’ve run out of things to do, then frankly, what is the end point of eternity?

Hugh Nibley was fond of saying that both the secularists and the sectarians were locked into debates as to the nature of the stage–whether the Earth is 6,000 or 4.5 billion years old and so forth–that what Joseph Smith provided was an actual plot: namely, we existed before we were born. We were sent to this Earth to be tested–with a Savior provided to ensure we could get back. If we prove ourselves, then we would continue to progress through eternities to become…what? Kings and Queens, Priests and Priestesses. “As Man is now, God once was/As God is now, Man may become.” That’s the conclusion of the play, that’s what the entire gospel is building towards. It’s an idea so positively radical that even The Good Place couldn’t conceive of it. CS Lewis once said something to the effect of that, the surest evidence of the truthfulness of Christianity was that it proposed ideas that would not occur to anyone in a million years. Even more so, then, with the Restored Gospel.

The Good Place even hints at this potential apotheosis! By way of comparison, we believe via The Pearl of Great Price that God, having achieved his highest exaltation, decided to spend eternity trying to help everyone else–all these “intelligences”–achieve it, too; and what else do the characters of The Good Place do but try to help everyone come down the same path as them, as well? But the show-writers don’t finish the thought, they don’t take it to its natural conclusion. Tahani even decides to become a Good Place “architect” like Michael, but neither she nor Michael appear to have any ambitions–indeed, no idea–of becoming full-on creators of universes themselves. No one does. It’s simply not an idea that occurs naturally to them or us, no, not even to our most religiously devout or brilliantly imaginative. These ideas remain high heresy as far as most of the Christian world is concerned–or even the rest of the religious world–but The Good Place obviously didn’t avoid these ideas out of an abundance of deference, but simply because they didn’t think of them, either.

Joseph Smith could hardly articulate it till 3 scarce months before his assassination in the King Follet discourse. I’d say something about Brother Joseph’s purported “religious genius”, but I honestly don’t think he was a genius, frankly, because I don’t think the potential godhood of humanity ever honestly occurred to him: I think it was revealed to him, by God himself–and it’s an idea we’re still unprepared for.