If you hit links we provide, we may receive compensation.

Why?Because they were already there.

The paper read: “Eleanor, find Chidi.”

Hell, yes.)

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Let’s start at the beginning.

When did you come up with the idea for this twist?

“I was like, “Okay, that’s interesting.”

But then I very quickly realized that premise pilots get old real quick.

It was part of the original idea.

Were you worried that the twist was too dark?

How did the online grid react when you pitched it to them?

I wasn’t worried that it was too dark.

We’ll see if I’m right.

I was a little bit happy.

There’s some funny, completely accidental similarities.

Obviously, their show is about robots that are slowly developing a consciousness.

We also have people who were ostensibly human who are trying to improve or get better.

We finished shooting our show beforeWestworldaired at least we were certainly done writing.

So I was like, “There’s nothing I can do.”

That was one thing.

They were engaging in the conversation with the audience.

We had certain surprises and twists, but our show was a comedy show.

They certainly weren’t looking for it in the way that they were looking for it inWestworld.

For example, we were going to have Eleanor stand up and confess halfway through the year.

I would say I was cautiously optimistic that we were going to be okay.

I was, for the most part, proven right.

I’m sure that people somewhere guessed.

But in a large-scale way, I think we got away with it.

How much of what Michael said about it was true?

A lot of the details that were laid out about the world and how it works are true.

Why didn’t Janet figure out that this was not actually the Good Place?

[Laughs] Good question.

That will be the central theme of at least one, if not more, episodes next year.

That’s obviously a huge question.

A) You will explicitly find out.

B) The general thing is we thought of Janet the way that you think of a computer.

That’s the simplest way to put it.

So the Medium Place was real.

Loosely connected to that, Eleanor was listed as file No.

Can we assume that Mindy St. Claire (Maribeth Monroe) was file No.

And will we meet the other anomaly?

We made Eleanor’s case No.

He’s acting like the real judge.

So, also he could just be full of it, frankly.

What were some of the others that we didn’t get see in the finale?

She’s super psyched.

They’re like, “Are you going to tell anyone, Jason?”

But, it turned out, he was a complete idiot and was a total phony.

He didn’t have any friends.

NEXT PAGE: Seriously, why didn’t Eleanor write more on the note?

Why didn’t Eleanor write more than “Eleanor, find Chidi,” on the paper?

This was probably the most debated moment of the whole season, I would say.

We thought about it.

The circumstantial things are that she has almost no time, right?

It won’t work.

That’s the theory; it’s kind of complicated.

I’ll only say that the starting point well, you saw the starting point, basically.

When Eleanor landed in the new Good Place, the welcome sign said, “Everything is great!”

instead of “Everything is fine,” like in the pilot.

Well, he’s going for a different thing now.

So he can’t just torture them individually, because what’s the point?

The fun of it the game of it is getting them to the point where they torture each other.

Again, it was working super well for the first half of the season last year.

It was the same with Tahani.

In that sense, do you worry about the audience being ahead of the characters?

Oh yeah, very much, that’s a huge fear that I have.

When you push the reset button, as they say, your biggest problem is the audience knows everything.

That’s a massive challenge for us.

That’s the biggest challenge.

I believe that we have a good plan for how to overcome it.

Those are a lot of ifs.

If you’re not trying, then forget it, you’re not even in the game.

So, to get in the game, you’ve got to try.

Will Todd the lava monster come back?

I can’t imagine a scenario in which that would be revealed to be true.

Just had to check!

That’s the interesting thing about doing a twist like that.

That’s another new challenge.

because the reality is that people are going to be expecting it.

So, it’s challenging, but it’s fun so far, at least.

Check with me in a couple months.