The Good Place: Has [spoiler] been body swapped?

With the start of the fourth and final season, The Good Place is still setting everything up, but one thing may have already been foreshadowed.

Throughout the course of the previous three seasons of The Good Place, it has proven itself to be a series that burns through plot at an almost frantic pace. This has often been a feature, not a bug, in the way the show will constantly shuffle the status quo.

It’s able to go from one plot to the next in such a way that it often feels masterful while also being rather inspired with how unpredictable it seems. The beauty of The Good Place is how it knows just how long to stick in one place or with one plot line before it knows it needs to move on.

With this season, we have started out with a brand new Good Place as part of an experiment run by Michael, Eleanor, Janet, Tahani, and Jason, with the overview of The Judge, and the quasi-cooperation of the demons from The Bad Place. There’s only a tacet of helpfulness there as The Bad Place is up to a lot of its old tricks.

After it’s discovered that one of the humans provided by the demons is, in fact, a demon himself, there’s a scene towards the end of the premiere where The Bad Place’s train is dispatched to bring the demon back and Michael disappears onto the train to stow him away. He returns a minute later and this has some viewers wondering: Has Michael been replaced by another demon?

It’s a theory that has a great deal of merit to it, beyond just the composition of the scene it

self. The series puts such a spotlight on the moment that it feels almost too obvious that this is what’s happened. Otherwise, why have Michael get on the train at all?

Then, of course, there’s the Michael Suit from the season three finale. Shawn from The Bad Place makes of point of letting Michael know that if this experiment goes wrong, the humans will be tortured by a demon wearing, well, a Michael Suit. It’s pretty much what it sounds like. This is a Chekov’s Gun if ever there’s been one.

With that in mind, has some body-swapping occurred here? Almost certainly, but to what end? In the past, predicting a season of The Good Place has been a fool’s errand. As stated at the beginning, every season so often throws what feels like everything at you and with what one might call controlled abandon.

Figuring out where the series might take a not-Michael figure from her is basically asking what happens after the season is done with the experiment, which is a big ask. Logically, this concludes with everyone going to The Bad Place to get Michael back, but The Good Place hasn’t always done the most logical storytelling.

The Good Place is more like getting on a rollercoaster and accepting all of the twists and turns that you’re going to be hit with. Predicting is fun but sometimes you just have to enjoy the ride.

The Good Place airs Thursdays at 9/8c on NBC.