The Good Place writers in ‘white-hot panic’ over how to pick up the pieces after Season 3 finale

Whether it’s Janets, timelines, afterlives, or unlikely romances, no show takes rebooting all its moving parts to the absurdly meta and self-aware heights that NBC’s The Good Place does. But the emotional and chaos-inducing Season 3 finale may have finally pushed even the show’s creative team right over the edge.

**Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers for the Season 3 finale of The Good Place below. If you don’t want to know how the show leaves things hanging until you’ve seen the episode, then turn around now and head back to an earlier reboot!**

For a show that’s hit the reset button countless times on everything from the heroes’ tortured afterlives to Michael’s use for the alias of Zack Pizazz, the mega-reboot that ended Season 3 may have been the most dramatic yet.

Chidi (William Jackson Harper) must have his memory wiped to save a new batch of Good Place residents, but in the process he’ll forget that he’s in love with Eleanor (Kristen Bell). To make matters worse, Eleanor will remember their whole romance, and she’ll have to keep her composure (while keeping their past a secret) around a newly clueless Chidi, whose body is still there — even if his memory isn’t.

Show creator Michael Schur appears to be just as freaked out by the high-stakes finale as anyone. Via TV Line, Schur says the writing team has just begun blank-slate work on the next season — and the way they left everything hanging at the end of Season 3 has everybody scared to death.

“We just started [working on Season 4] and we’re panicking — white-hot panic,” Schur joked. “The first two weeks of every year — except for Season 1 — have been all of the writers staring blankly at each other and then quietly getting in our cars and driving home. … The idea is always to change everything and somehow still do the same show that people have been watching. So hopefully, that’s what happens.”

Schur, who already had earned a pre-Good Place following by leaving his recognizable comedic stamp on shows like The Office, Parks and Recreation, and Brooklyn Nine-Nine, also says there’s zero chance that he’ll be inviting any characters from his previous shows to cross over into The Good Place (not that they aren’t deserving of an eternally happy afterlife).

Via The Wrap, Schur said the one-off Good Place crossover that featured a pony-sized cameo from Parks and Recreation’s Li’l Sebastian was just a lark, and he has no plans to bring any of the human characters from his other shows into Michael’s neck of the woods.

“I want to make this very clear, that will never happen — end of story,” Schur said. “I’m like literally drawing a shower curtain between the universe and that idea.”

When it comes to The Good Place, a shower curtain’s actually one of the tamest things to separate the fractured bits and pieces of the spacetime continuum. Here’s hoping we can find a shortcut in the Jeremy Bearimy timeline to shorten the months-long wait until Season 4 of the show returns to NBC.