There is a particular kind of room that television keeps building. It has a front desk and a sign-in book, or a velvet rope, or a ticket window, or a row of plastic chairs bolted to the floor. The lighting is always a little too even, the kind that casts no shadows and offers no comfort. Someone behind a counter knows your name before you say it. This is the waystation, the inn between worlds, and once you start noticing it you find it everywhere: a hotel that opens only at dusk for guests who have just died, a bar where strangers play darts to settle the fate of their souls, a drab municipal office where the recently deceased fill out forms about how they would like to be remembered. The afterlife on TV is a vast subject, but the waystation is something narrower and stranger. It is not heaven and it is not hell. It is the lobby.
Neither Here Nor There
What makes the waystation work is that it is, by definition, a threshold. The Japanese have a lovely word that the anime Tasokare Hotel leans on directly: tasokare, the dusk hour, the moment when the light is failing and you cannot quite tell who is approaching you on the road. Who goes there? That is the literal meaning, and it is the perfect address for a hotel where lost souls check in at twilight. The waystation is the hour of the day made into architecture. It is the pause between the in-breath and the out-breath, stretched out long enough to hold a story.
This in-betweenness does a lot of quiet work. A place that is neither here nor there cannot enforce the rules of either. Time loosens. The dead can sit across a table from the people who wronged them, or be wronged by them, without consequence, because consequence is exactly the thing that has been suspended. The waystation is a demilitarized zone for the soul, and that neutrality is what lets the drama happen. You cannot have a reckoning in heaven, where everything is already settled, or in hell, where nothing can be. You can only have it in the waiting room, where the verdict has not been read yet and the elevator has not yet arrived.
The Clerk Behind the Counter
Every waystation needs its functionary, and the figure of the afterlife clerk is one of the genre's great inventions. In Death Parade it is Decim, the white-haired bartender who arbitrates the dead through a series of games designed to crack them open and show what is underneath. In The Good Place it is Michael, an immortal architect in a bow tie who treats eternity as a hospitality problem to be solved with frozen yogurt shops and a flying Janet who can produce anything you ask for. In Tasokare Hotel there is the staff who greet each guest with the unhurried courtesy of people who have done this many times and will do it many more. The clerk is never the one with the unfinished business. The clerk has already crossed over, or was never alive at all, and that is precisely why they can be patient with you.
The waystation is a demilitarized zone for the soul, and that neutrality is what lets the drama happen.
The clerk also exists to explain the rules, and the rules are half the pleasure. The waystation runs on procedure. There is a check-in and a check-out. There is a form, a game, a quota, a points system, a length of stay. The administrative banality is the joke and the comfort at once: the cosmos turns out to be a bureaucracy, and somebody has to staff the front desk of forever. After Life, Hirokazu Kore-eda's gentle film and the spiritual godparent of this whole tradition, makes the device explicit. The dead arrive at what looks like a tired old school, are assigned a caseworker, and are told they have one week to choose a single memory. That memory will be filmed by the staff, and once they watch it they will move on, carrying nothing else. The genius is in the smallness of the procedure against the enormity of what it processes.
The Bottleneck Where Strangers Collide
Structurally, the waystation is a bottleneck, and bottlenecks are where stories are made. A whole life funnels down to one room and one task. Strangers who would never otherwise meet are pressed shoulder to shoulder in the queue, each carrying a sealed parcel of regret, and the show gets to open those parcels one at a time. This is why so many of these series are anthologies, or near enough: the setting refreshes its cast every episode while keeping the clerk and the counter constant. Death Parade brings a new pair of the dead through the bar each week. After Life gives us a fresh intake of the deceased and lets us watch them rummage through their decades for the one image worth keeping. The waystation is a machine for generating short stories about the longest possible subject.
And underneath the procedure and the anthology structure is the real reason the genre endures, which is that it is about release. Everyone who arrives at the waystation is holding on to something, a grudge, a guilt, a love they never named, and the building exists to help them set it down. The threshold is comforting precisely because it is temporary. You are not asked to stay. You are asked to finish, and then to go. There is a tenderness in that proposition that ordinary drama, with its insistence on living forever past the credits, cannot quite reach. The lobby for the dead turns out to be one of the few places on television where a person is allowed to be done. The light is failing, the desk is staffed, the book is open to your name, and somewhere past the elevator the road continues on without you. It is the most uncanny comfort the medium offers, and we keep checking in.