The Good Place Easter Egg You Totally Missed
Contains spoilers for The Good Place
The most inventive sitcom in recent memory kept tricks up its sleeve right until the very end.
Mike Schur's groundbreaking afterlife-based comedy The Good Place aired its series finale on NBC on January 30, 2019. Amid all the narrative arc wrapping-up that the episode did, there was an incredibly creative Easter egg floating around in the background — one that was actually hiding throughout most of the series.
Throughout his time on network television (and NBC in particular), Schur has amassed a reliable gang of regular performers, many of whom showed up on The Good Place. These include leading actors like Nick Offerman of Parks and Recreation and Andy Samberg of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, as well as welcome supporting players like Marc Evan Jackson and Jason Mantsoukas.
One such Schur favorite is Adam Scott, who played the lovable Ben Wyatt on Parks and Recreation and popped up during The Good Place's first season as Trevor, a super-irritating Bad Place demon cut from the same cloth as Scott's unforgettable character Derek from Step Brothers. After a couple of seasons, the afterlife's all-knowing Judge Gen (Maya Rudolph) flicked Trevor into a void after finding out he interfered with the humans.
But as it turns out, Trevor stuck around for longer than anyone figured out.
Trevor's lasting legacy
For multiple seasons of The Good Place — or, in the show's language, multiple Jeremy Bearimies — Adam Scott's Trevor has been drifting through every void featured on the series. And according to Schur himself, he doesn't think anyone has noticed.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Schur explained, "The last we saw of Adam Scott's character, he was on the bridge with the judge [...] Trevor tries to suck up to her, and she flicks her finger and he explodes backwards and disappears into the void. Once or twice since, in a scene where the crew was walking on a bridge or someone was on one of those bridges in the interdimensional doorway system, we put him in the distant background, flying through frame. He's very small, but you hear his voice going, 'Whoaaa!' like he's been flying backwards for 10,000 Bearimies. No one has said to me ever, 'Oh, that was really funny when you did that,' which makes me think that far fewer people saw it then than I thought they would."
It's no surprise that this super-clever show still had some deep cuts literally floating around for viewers to find, but it's extra-impressive that Schur's smartest Easter egg went unnoticed for so long.
The first three seasons of The Good Place are streaming on Netflix, and the final season is streaming on Hulu and NBC.