Chidi And Eleanor's Best Moments In The Good Place, Ranked
There's no denying that Chidi Anagonye (William Jackson Harper) and Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell) are one of TV's strongest (and most unconventional) couples. Hell, they literally meet in, well, hell. During their tenure on "The Good Place," both characters manage to find each other over a thousand times between this life and the next — and if that's not love, what is? Despite having ample issues to work on within themselves, Chidi and Eleanor continually make each other the best versions of themselves as they wade the uncertain waters of the afterlife and fight for a chance to be together in death.
Despite neither character having a real love story when they were on earth, they continually fight for each other no matter what obstacle is thrown their way. They make their own blueprint for what love should be and it results in significant character growth on both sides, as well as the foundation for an impenetrable bond.
Michael (Ted Danson) may set up Chidi and Eleanor as fake soulmates to torture them, but how else can you explain a couple that thwarts the most powerful beings in the universe time and again to be together? These are the best moments between Eleanor and Chidi through their many lives together.
13. Eleanor embraces her unselfish side
Eleanor's entire struggle in the Good Place hinges on her inability to put others' needs ahead of her own. Yet early in Season 1, she realizes just how deeply her entire existence in it torments Chidi, and she wants to make it right. Long before the pair learn that Michael is just forking with them, Eleanor believes she's cheating him out of peace, serenity, and a soulmate. After all, while he should be out enjoying his afterlife, he's busy teaching Eleanor philosophy and giving himself an eternal stomach ache by keeping her secret.
Eleanor gets defensive for a minute when Chidi snaps at her for constantly being around, but she eventually calms down and plans a nice day for him. Having listened to a random setting he described in a fantasy, Eleanor sets up wine, a rowboat, and French poetry for Chidi to partake in alone. It's one of the first unselfish things she does in the show and the first real step we see Eleanor take toward becoming a better person. Later in the series, we also see the couple do this together in one of their many shared lives together.
12. Eleanor is the answer
If there's one thing that Chidi can't handle, it's not having an answer to a question. Whether it's a mundane question like "Which hat is better?" or the massive "What is the purpose of life?" philosophical debate, Chidi is determined to know. During his time on earth, Chidi dedicated his entire life to wading through philosophical theory in pursuit of the universe's biggest questions. Chidi wants a concise and provable answer — but he'll give himself a stomach ache before deciding on that answer for himself.
Yet some things just aren't provable. Despite not remembering most of his shared afterlives with Eleanor, when they come back from their second chance to live their lives on earth, Chidi gives Janet (D'Arcy Carden) a note before he has his memory wiped. Of course, this must be done for an experiment that will change the afterlife forever, but he made what is possibly the biggest self-realization — and biggest choice — of his entire life.
He writes, "There is no 'answer' but Eleanor is the answer." Chidi finally learns his lesson of agonizing over every small detail and admits that there's no "right answer" except for Eleanor. After a thousand lifetimes together, he keeps coming back to her. Chidi is finally making a definitive choice and it will always be Eleanor.
11. A thousand lifetimes end the same
The history of Eleanor and Chidi's relationship is impossible to follow — just like the show's afterlife timeline, Jeremy Bearimy. Chidi and Eleanor live countless versions of their afterlives together, and despite not remembering most of them, they always find and help each other.
So while fans get to see Chidi and Eleanor meet and fall in love a handful of times, in reality, they've done it more times than the series could possibly show onscreen. In Season 3, Michael steps in to fill in some of those blanks when he offers Eleanor the option to watch the missing memories of her Bad Place lives with Chidi.
Some of the highlights include Chidi giving up flying to look for Eleanor's lost pet, a first kiss, and even an "I love you." When they get caught by Michael during their most significant (and profound) life together, despite knowing Michael called them soulmates to torture them, Eleanor says, "No matter what he does, we will find each other, and we will help each other because we're soulmates." Eleanor and Chidi put their fate back into their own hands (and in each other's), using Michael's attempted torture against the perpetrator.
10. Chidi or Good Place mailman?
One of the show's most weirdly sweet and wholesome moments comes when Chidi and Eleanor escape to the Good Place mailroom after their failed stint on earth. They've just decided to be together and confessed their love for each other, and Chidi is determined to give Eleanor a proper date despite all of the chaos. Who would have thought that Chidi would so quickly spring into action?
It's certainly not their first-ever date, given how many afterlives they've lived together, but it's the first date we get to witness in real time rather than in flashback form. However, no matter which iteration of Eleanor we get, her random mailman kink somehow comes up in every lifetime.
And hey, Chidi may not be great at the whole decision-making thing, but he's certainly a great listener. Chidi dresses in a mailman uniform and breaks open a bottle of wine for him and Eleanor to enjoy — despite it being a frivolous gift for someone else. Our boy's breaking his rigid code of conduct, folks. During this moment, Chidi puts Eleanor's happiness ahead of his own strict morals and shoves his fears down to comfort her when she's most distressed at possibly never getting to be with him in the Good Place.
9. The Good Place won't be good without Chidi
Despite Eleanor's status as one of the core four main characters that need to change the most, she's also the one most prone to actually committing those changes the quickest. Eleanor almost immediately improves her selfishness every time she meets Chidi, highlighting how much better they make each other. Of course, he makes progress toward making firm decisions and ignoring his indecisiveness, but it's a bit more of a slow go for Chidi. The philosopher's greatest strides come when his friends (or Eleanor) are in danger. In these instances, he's able to enlist more of a rapid in-the-moment response.
In Season 2, the group has to take a test from the judge to determine whether or not they have, in fact, become better people. Eleanor is the only one who passes the test, which solely hinges on how well she knows Chidi. She immediately clocks that this is a selfish AU version of the love of her (after)life, and therefore, she passes. Even more selflessly, when Eleanor discovers that Chidi failed, she lies to him with a flippant remark of self-deprecation. Eleanor tells Chidi that she failed the judge's test because she doesn't want to go to the Good Place without him, and she doesn't want him to feel like he prevented her from eternal happiness. Pretty selfless for a woman whose most well-known trait is being selfish.
8. Even Mindy ships it
In all of Chidi and Eleanor's shared lifetimes, the one where they say "I love you" at Mindy's (Maribeth Monroe) house is one of the most wholesome moments in the show. Though it comes before we hear the couple say those three words in any of the lives we watch them partake in onscreen, having Eleanor discover a tape of the moment in Season 2 arguably makes it more powerful. After all, the couple isn't yet ready to face their feelings. They barely know each other at this point. Neither character's afterlife journeys have been fleshed out enough for Chidi to make hard-and-fast choices or for Eleanor to feel capable of love. We watch this full love story play out when Michael shows Eleanor the memories she forgot on earth, but we get a glimpse far before that when Mindy attempts to play matchmaker during the early days of a reboot.
The moment is one of their softest and most vulnerable scenes together in the entire show, and it's the first time Eleanor tells someone she loves them. The same is implied for Chidi, at least if he's being honest, because he focused more on what makes sense during his relationships on earth rather than letting himself truly love someone. This moment kicks off the rest of the series and the sacrifices the couple will make for each other in the name of love.
7. A thousand Jeremy Bearimys, baby
After everything Chidi and Eleanor have been through, as they fight to get to the Good Place, the couple finally gets a quiet moment together at the end of the penultimate episode of the series. They did their part in living a thousand lifetimes to fix a broken system and saved all of humanity in the process, so it's about time they got some time to be a boring couple together. Chidi and Eleanor promise each other a lifetime, and we even get to see that play out in the series finale.
The couple lives another thousand lifetimes with their friends, family, and, most importantly, each other. The entire universe is at their fingertips, but more often than not, they find themselves simply being in each other's company in their house. Chidi and Eleanor lounge around to feel the closeness primarily out of reach to them during their first thousand lifetimes together of torture and fighting for their freedom. They've earned this, and it's a beautiful sequence of soft moments to watch — and it's everything the fans wanted for them.
6. A self-sacrificing couple
It's no secret that Chidi is a bit more of a stay-at-home kind of guy, while Eleanor is all about the adventure and living in the moment — which is precisely what makes them work. Their differences fuel the best in each other, but Chidi's quest for peace and Eleanor's constant need for thrills make it inevitable that Chidi would want to walk through the door into peace before Eleanor.
Fittingly, Chidi feels that moment of complete serenity before Eleanor, who wants to keep living her afterlife with Chidi. Also fittingly, in an attempt to spark Chidi's desire to stay, Eleanor brings him on a grand adventure down memory lane to places like Athens and Paris. He immediately clocks what she's doing, but he lets her have the day anyway.
Though Chidi never told Eleanor he was ready to leave, she figured it out on her own and begs him to stay. Selflessly, Chidi agrees not to move on so Eleanor won't be alone, but after he agrees, she remembers all of her lessons on selfishness. After getting to the Good Place by learning to be less selfish, she clocks her behavior and lets him go. Despite her desire for him to stay, Chidi being at peace is more important to her. The moment marks the most significant sacrifice they've ever had to make, but Eleanor chooses Chidi — as she always does in the end.
5. A teary goodbye
Though Chidi and Eleanor went through over a thousand rounds of torture, their most challenging trial happens after Michael stopped torturing them. In Season 3, they have to say goodbye. Up to this point, the couple could weather any storm because they always find each other on the same playing field. But with Eleanor posing as the architect, and Chidi needing his memories erased to participate in the experiment on whether humans can become better, he would forget while Eleanor would remember. Their newly-minted statuses also mean they won't be able to lean on each other much for the entire experiment.
In one of the saddest TV kisses of all time, Michael shows Eleanor and Chidi some memories he wiped while they say goodbye to each other for a full year. Eleanor is visibly devastated and Chidi isn't too far behind her. Both of them are sobbing and it's just a lot, okay? This selfless moment, after everything they've been through, is proof now more than ever that the afterlife system is forked — and after a thousand after-lifetimes fighting for each other, they give up being together to save the world.
The scene is even more bittersweet when Eleanor chooses to give Chidi another soulmate during the test to give the humans the best edge she can offer to prove that humans are capable of change. After all, just look at her and Chidi.
4. Eleanor thwarts Michael's plans
Speaking of sacrifice, Eleanor's first showing of complete selflessness in Season 1 changes everything. During the initial iteration of Chidi and Eleanor in the Good (read Bad) Place, Chidi spends months teaching Eleanor about ethics. And without fully knowing it, she's been falling in love with him the entire time.
Eleanor realizes just how much she's put on Chidi when everything blows up toward the end of the season, and Chidi accidentally kills Janet. He still hasn't learned the concept of self-preservation and lying at this point, deciding to come clean to Michael about killing Janet.
Yet instead of letting Chidi go down for something Eleanor blames herself for, she tells the entire neighborhood that she doesn't belong in the Good Place — there's been a mistake. And from this point on, nothing can ever be the same. No matter how many times Michael tries to repeat the torture and reboot the core four, Chidi always helps Eleanor become a better person. Its effectiveness is something Michael never accounted for as a demon — human love, kindness, and our innate desire to be better. This one action from Eleanor sparks the rest of the show's events, and without it, Michael would still be torturing the group in the first round.
3. Wading through an identity crisis
Nothing about Chidi and Eleanor's love story has been traditional leading up to Season 3, so why should their biggest kiss in the series? Sure, we've seen the couple kiss before this point, but it's the first significant kiss during an iteration of Chidi and Eleanor that we've gotten to follow in the series rather than getting in flashback or fleeting form.
Instead of being in their own bodies, D'Arcy Carden played both Chidi and Eleanor during their kiss. Eleanor and Chidi are in Janet's void when the wild yet touchingly beautiful kiss happens, making the moment one of the wildest onscreen kisses we've ever seen on TV. Eleanor is in the middle of a full-fledged identity crisis when Chidi is forced to make a lightning-quick decision about his love for Eleanor without spending eons weighing the pros and cons of each option. His love for Eleanor wins out, and the kiss snaps Eleanor out of her crisis. Toward the middle of the kiss, both characters find themselves back in their own bodies. Basically, things get real at this moment, and it's the first significant milestone in their pursuit of forever.
2. A Chidi-less Jeremy Bearimy
What could possibly be more gut-wrenching than saying goodbye to the love of your many (after)lives? Waking up to them gone and finding a thoughtful gift in their place on the bed. In the series finale, Eleanor tells Chidi to leave her without saying another goodbye because she can't handle watching him walk away into an abyss without her. Yet watching Eleanor wake up to find Chidi's empty bed is a punch to the heart. In his stead, Eleanor discovers the ridiculous and raunchy calendar that Chidi made for her. The gift solidifies how right they are for each other and how well Chidi knows his hilariously thirsty soulmate.
No one understands Eleanor like Chidi does — and vice versa. Chidi wants to ease some of Eleanor's pain of having to live Jeremy Bearimys without him, so he makes her a tastefully sexy calendar wearing costumes that showcase her many eclectic kinks. Between a mailman photo and channeling his best Stone Cold Steve Austin, Chidi gives Eleanor another year with him in a small way. It's somber, sweet, and tragic all at the same time.
1. None of this is bad
Before the calendar, after Eleanor decides to let Chidi go, they say goodbye to each other in the same beautiful location they promised each other a lifetime. After over a thousand Bearimys, they certainly fulfilled their promise to each other, but it's heartbreaking nonetheless.
The quiet moment with the sun setting on the day, and their life together, speaks volumes of metaphors that Chidi would no doubt love to dissect in a philosophy lesson. The scene is filled with lighthearted moments (courtesy of Eleanor's usual need to mask her feelings with humor) and Chidi's patented wisdom when he quotes the Buddhists, saying, "Picture a wave in the ocean. You can see it, measure it, its height, the way the sunlight refracts when it passes through. And it's there. And you can see it. You know what it is. It's a wave."
He continues, "And then it crashes in the shore, and 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. You know, it's one conception of death for Buddhists: The wave returns to the ocean, where it came from and where it's supposed to be."
We don't quite know what happens after Chidi (and later Eleanor) walks through the mysterious door in the Good Place and into the unknown. But hopefully, it won't be the last time their souls find each other again.