'The Good Place' Heads to TV Heaven: How the Show Handled Its Bittersweet Final Moments

WARNING: Spoilers for the series finale of The Good Place follow.

“I hate to see you walk through the final door at the edge of existence, but I love to watch you leave…”

The Good Place is officially in the Good Place. And it undoubtedly earned its spot.

The series, starring Kristen Bell, Jameela Jamil, William Jackson Harper, Manny Jacinto and D’Arcy Carden and Ted Danson, concluded its first season with one of the biggest twists in television history. And the fourth and final finale was filled with smart, satisfying conclusions — and ample laughs.

As Michael (Danson) and the crew determined in the penultimate episode, an eternity of wanting for nothing in the Good Place ultimately becomes something of a hell. So, with Michael now running things, the Good Place was restructured, allowing people to leave the afterlife once and for all whenever they feel ready.

And Jason (Jacinto), still blissfully in love with Janet (Carden), determined he was ready right at the beginning of the episode — after he finally played a perfect game of Madden.

His friends asked him how he knew, and the sweet Floridian admitted, “It wasn’t like I heard a bell ring or anything. I just suddenly had this calm feeling… It was peaceful.”

The extended episode continued as the characters experienced similar feelings.

Tahani (Jamil) was next, realizing she was ready to leave when she’d finally experienced love with her sister and parents. But when it was really time to say goodbye, she realized she wasn’t ready to leave but didn’t want to stay in the Good Place. So she convinced Michael and others to allow her to train to become an architect.

Just as they’re saying their farewells, Michael asks Tahani if he can tell people he knew her when after she’s a huge success in her new role. To which the former celeb-loving jetsetter responds, “Name-dropping is a little gauche, Michael, but do as you must.”

When Chidi (Harper) was ready, Eleanor (Bell) wasn’t exactly ready for him to be ready. She brought him to Greece and to Paris, where they walked around and had romantic moments, but it was clear it was time. Chidi was willing to stay for Eleanor, but she eventually realized that wasn’t fair.

“I owe it to you to let you go,” she said.

The couple watched the sunset just before Chidi departed, and he gave the most perfect speech: “Picture a wave in the ocean: you can see it measure it, its height, the way the sunlight refracts… and then it crashes on the shore and then it’s gone. But the water is still there. The wave was just a different way for the water to be for a little while. That’s one conception of death for a Buddhist. The wave returns to the ocean, where it came from, and where it’s supposed to be.”

After he leaves Eleanor with a hilarious calendar, Chidi heads to the clearing, and the man who wound up in the Bad Place for his extreme indecisiveness walked through the threshold without a second thought.

Eleanor still wasn’t ready, so she thought perhaps her final mission was helping Mindy and talking her into taking the test to finally leave the Medium Place and go to the Good Place.

RELATED: D’arcy Carden from The Good Place Talks Her ‘Pre-Emmy Rituals’ with Kristen Bell

When that mission was accomplished, she, Janet and Michael headed to the clearing and Michael tried to leave. As a demon though, he couldn’t. But with the newly constructed world order going so well, he was ready for a change. So Eleanor visited the judge (Maya Rudolph) and convinced her to allow Michael to become a “real boy.”

“You will never be at peace until you get the one thing you truly want,” Eleanor explained, later adding, “Goodbye fire squid, hello silver fox.”

He arrives on earth in jeans and sneakers for the first time and takes a deep breath, appreciating the “dry heat.” As part of setting up his new life, he decides to take guitar lessons from a beautiful stranger (aptly played by Danson’s real-life wife, Mary Steenburgen).

Finally, Eleanor was ready — and she and Janet had one last conversation just before she walked through the door.

“What do you think happens when people walk through the door?” Janet asks. “It’s the only thing in the universe I don’t know.”

To answer, Eleanor refers back to Chidi’s speech: “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.”

In the last scene, golden flecks of light lead to a man getting his mail. He realizes he received something that wasn’t addressed to him and throws it away. Moments later, he thinks better of it and delivers the letter… to Michael.

When Michael Realman opens the Coyote Joe’s Marketplace rewards card note, he somehow senses Eleanor’s essence, and just as the man is about to leave, he tells him: “I say this with all the love in my heart and all the wisdom of the universe: Take it sleazy.”

“It was a perfect ending to our story,” Danson said in the short reunion interview that followed the episode. “It was sad but uplifting, kind, gentle and sweet.”

“It’s a little too short,” Bell says of the series ending after only four seasons. “It’s a lot like life.”