This Is The Worst Relationship On The Good Place

Although many of the core relationships on The Good Place have toxic origins, they all eventually evolve. The show's central premise is that in spite of all of the terrible things that people often do to one another, they are fundamentally capable of growth and change. 

That's what makes the system of awarding humans points based on their good or bad deeds feel so outdated. No person is entirely good or bad, and the bad things a person does can eventually be outweighed by the good they do. So, while Eleanor (Kristen Bell) and Chidi's (William Jackson Harper) relationship starts with her revealing a terrible secret, it evolves into a loving relationship between two people. 

That's true of almost all the show's core relationships. The main characters on the show grow into better versions of themselves without fundamentally changing who they are. As a result, most of the show's central relationships are pretty healthy, but that's often less true of the relationships the show uses largely as jokes. 

At the end of the first season of The Good Place, the show's main characters figure out that they're actually in the Bad Place. They have been specifically collected to torture one another, and that's why their relationships start so terribly. After Eleanor discovers where they actually are, Michael (Ted Danson), the demon behind this scheme, decides to reboot them so they'll forget everything they've learned. 

At the start of season 2, we watch Michael try this hundreds of times, and we see that every time, he fails. We don't spend a ton of time in every iteration of the experiment that Michael is running, but we do get to see some choice tidbits, and others are scattered throughout the series.

One involves Michael pairing each of the show's main characters with a soulmate that is even more ill-suited for them than the pairings that the show started out with. For Chidi, a person who is relentlessly kind but also finds himself paralyzed by simple moral conundrums, that terrible soulmate is Esmeralda (Kate Berlant). 

Although Chidi's relationship with Esmeralda would have taken place in season 2, we don't see it until the episode where he relives his time in the afterlife. Then, we realize that Esmeralda — with her cold, distant persona and obsession with death — is a truly terrible match for Chidi. He tries his best to be kind, but Esmeralda is no Eleanor.