So with its tremendous heart and unwavering commitment to the stakes of The Good Place’s ethical inquiries, “Whenever You’re Ready” is a delightful return to form. Even the moments that could’ve skewed saccharine, as the show sometimes has, feel like earned indulgences. By the time Eleanor quotes the final line of T. M. Scanlon’s What We Owe to Each Other to her partner, Chidi (William Jackson Harper), while explaining why she’s ready to let him go, The Good Place had delivered on its early promises. Having achieved a tedious bliss in the real Good Place, the original afterlife residents continued evolving: Eleanor, once a raging narcissist, calmly prioritized others’ needs above her own. Chidi, a former philosophy professor embattled by his own chronic indecision, grew confident in even the most final of choices: the quiet urge to walk through a door that would dissolve him forever. Tahani (Jameela Jamil), who arrived in the first afterlife as a glory-chasing socialite, healed her familial wounds and pursued an eternity of service. To my mind, Jason (Manny Jacinto) is perhaps the only member of the once-doomed quartet whose lot didn’t shift profoundly enough—even at the series’ end, The Good Place had yet to meaningfully move past its conception of him as its good-looking dunce from Florida.

Read: ‘The Good Place’ was a metaphor all along

The Good Place has always been a highly serialized series, and its finale thankfully course-corrects some of the winding, less effective plot choices of prior episodes. The Season 3 ending, for example, repeated a machination that ended both of the first two seasons: a total system reset, which felt far less satisfying the third time around, in part because its stakes were far less believable. If Eleanor and Chidi had already found their way back to one another repeatedly throughout three seasons and several interdimensional plot loops, why would viewers believe that something as simple as a memory wipe would be a permanent obstacle for them? Much of Season 4 doubled down on this particular Season 3 drag: The Good Place’s insistence on dramatizing the clunky but inevitable romance between Eleanor and Chidi. As Angelica Bastién recently wrote for Vulture, their friendship felt like “a natural evolution in ways their romance doesn’t … Revelatory questions swirled around their dynamic in its earlier incarnation: How far are you willing to go to aid a friend? How do friendships develop under scrutiny and tension? How do friendships enrich our lives and ethical stance?”

“Whenever You’re Ready” doesn’t dispense with this romantic story line, but it does grant significant attention to the characters’ other relationships. Now that they’ve run countless afterlife experiments and successfully made the case for humans’ ability to change, the crew can luxuriate in the real Good Place along with the reformed demon Michael (Ted Danson) and the all-knowing being Janet (D’Arcy Carden). The spaciousness of this setup lends itself to some rich interpersonal developments, which render the show’s handful of convoluted past narratives nearly irrelevant.