'The Good Place' Season 3 Spoilers: Is Michael in the Right "Place"?

It’s been a long summer for fans of NBC’s The Good Place, even with some spoilers about the upcoming season spilling out at San Diego Comic-Con in July. Now, the wait for Season 3 is almost over.

The Good Place Season 3 premieres on Sept 27 with a special one-hour episode, and thanks to promos and a sneak peek of the next season, we know that the main characters fans know and love should all be back — yes, including the “lovable nitwit” that is Jason Mendoza.

The initial premise of The Good Place was simple: Eleanor Shellstrop (played by Kristen Bell) dies and ends up in the Good Place (basically Heaven) thanks to a mixup. But she’s not supposed to be there, and throughout Season 1 schemed and plotted to stay out of the Bad Place.

Then, at the end of Season 1, The Good Place delivered an epic twist. The Good Place was actually the Bad Place all along, and Eleanor (along with three other people) were being tortured in a bold new demonic experiment concocted by a demon named Michael (Ted Danson).

Season 2 of The Good Place began with Michael rebooting everything after Eleanor figured it out, but when his plan keeps failing he’s eventually forced to team up with the humans to save his own skin (literally). Working together, the hatched a plan to get into the actual Good Place, and it almost worked. At the same time, Michael began to learn how to be “good” himself — which could be the key to how Season 3 plays out according to some fan theories.

At the end of Season 2 (streaming now watch on Netflix), Eleanor, Chidi, Jason, and Tahani get sent back to Earth to prove they can become better people — just as they did in the Bad Place where it didn’t really count. In the promo above, we see Michael save each of them from their untimely deaths, but it’s unclear where Season 3 will head after that.

Hopefully, we’ll learn more soon, but until then here are a few possible theories.

The Good Place Season 3 Theories: Are they really on Earth?

One of the most interesting theories is that the gang isn’t on Earth at all but in some other new dimension or “place.” Obviously, The Good Place has deceived us when it comes to the show’s setting before. Why not do it again?

“I think it will be revealed in Season 3 that the characters have not been brought back to life at all, but are instead in a simulation of some kind,” Good Place fan on prezuiwf, suggested on Reddit.

This theory hinges on Chidi speaking English in the video Eleanor watches before she decides to seek him out, while on the show he said he’s actually a native French speaker. In the Good Place, people hear the language they’re most comfortable with, but that’s obviously not true on Earth. In addition, prezuiwf notes that “there’s absolutely no reason to believe bringing people back from the dead is a thing. It’s never mentioned before in the show.”

Other fans aren’t so sure about that theory, and the promo seems to suggest that Michael does, in fact, go to Earth in Season 3, but what if Michael isn’t totally aware of what’s going on either?

The Good Place Season 3 Theories: Is Michael in the right “place?”

In the same Reddit thread, another fan writes, “The real twist is that it’s all Michael’s Hell the whole time.”

Fans have been wondering who or what Michael really is, and whether he might be in a Bad Place of his own, for years. Think about it: What if this is all actually a test for Michael to see whether he is supposed to be in a Good or Bad Place?

“My theory is that Michael is the same spieces as the beings from the good place,” Redditor eric_ji7 theorized, “which is why he can feel empathy. I think he was placed in the wrong dimension (the bad place) upon the creation of the universe.”

“It’s all actually purgatory,” another fan suggested, throwing a wrench in pretty much everything we know. It’s already been established that there is a “Medium Place,” but if that’s where The Good Place is actually set then everything we’ve seen so far was fake.

Depending on what happens in the first episode of The Good Place Season 3, many of these theories could disproven pretty soon. But one thing’s for sure, fans sure have had a lot of fun wondering what’s next for Michael, Eleanor, and the rest of the gang.

The Good Place premieres Thursday, Sept. 27 at 8 p.m. Eastern on NBC.