We ranked all of Gwyneth Paltrow’s The Goop Lab episodes from goopy to goopiest

By Avanti Dalal6 February 2020

Is everyone discussing this new Netflix Original at your office too? We review each of the episodes to help you catch up

Gwyneth Paltrow’s The Goop Lab is one of the most scary, entertaining, confusing and awe-inducing shows you can binge watch right now. Paltrow, who isn’t afraid to make fun of herself, opens it up by saying that she wants her calling in life to be “something else besides, you know, making out with Matt Damon onscreen.” On the show, Paltrow and her Goop staffers (self-confessed Goopers) try everything from jumping into a freezing cold lake to getting their past lives accessed, making sure they stand at the forefront of experimental wellness. The show suggests that you watch the episodes in whichever order you’d like, and since you might as well save the best for last, we watched all the episodes to give you our take—from barely goopy to goopiest.

Episode 3: The Health-Span Plan

This episode, for all intents and purposes, is barely even goopy. If you follow Gwyneth Paltrow or Goop on Instagram, or their website or podcast, the content in this episode will feel almost commonplace. To recap, Paltrow goes on a five-day cleanse that has her eating protein bars, packaged soups and olives for five days, while Elise Loehnen, chief content officer and Wendy Lauria, senior vice president of marketing, try pescatarian and vegan diets respectively—all in an attempt to improve their chances at longevity while reducing their ‘biological age’.

Like you’d imagine, everyone at the bright and cheerful Goop office discuss their ageing fears here—“I’m terrified of it. I am constantly putting stuff on my face through the day, I’m always in the bathroom putting stuff on,” one person reveals in the meeting, while another speaks about their fear of injectables and botox: “I think every woman fears coming out of their doctor's office having that one face.” To bring down their ‘biological age’, the three woman supplement their diets with in-office dermatology treatments; Paltrow tries a vampire facial, Loehnen goes with facial acupuncture, and Lauria opts for thread fillers. You won’t be surprised to know that Paltrow wins—shaving almost 1.7 years off her actual age, and proving that intense diets and shocking the system could result in spikes of better health. However, keep in mind that this could become just as problematic when done without supervision.

Episode 6: Are you Intuit?

Seeing psychics and mediums on mainstream TV isn’t that surprising anymore, so this episode doesn’t come as a huge shock. (When you compare it to watching a person get exorcised, this is a bedtime viewing.) Laura Lynne Jackson, a psychic and a medium reader, teaches Goop employees how to access the dead around them, suggesting that if one thinks and feels hard enough, they can become more intuitive to themselves and other people. “In order to do the work that I have to do, I kind of have to forget I exist. I have to surrender,” Jackson confirms in the episode. Paltrow is a big fan throughout. “I thought that this is all Google-able. You can find anything out about me. But when I sat down with Laura, she was saying things that are not Google-able. She knew stuff even my husband doesn’t know,” she says. While the mind reading isn’t all that goopy on its own, the emotional readings and Paltrow’s incredulous (yet effusive) conversation about it makes this one a worthwhile watch.

Episode 2: Cold Comfort

Here, things get pretty goop-like. In this episode, six staff members go to Lake Tahoe to practice yoga in the snow—barefoot in bikinis—after which they jump into seven degree water—all while using a breathing technique they learnt from Wim Hof, a wellness coach who claims to able to cure inflammation and anxiety by forcing the mind to fight against them. In the scariest moment of the whole episode, Hof talks about being injected with E Coli bacteria, after which he used a breathing and mindfulness process to prevent himself from getting sick at all.

Kate Wolfson, executive editor of Goop, who suffers from postpartum anxiety, eventually uses the aforementioned breathing technique to finally jump into the freezing cold water. It can be problematic to suggest that a cold shower and a breathing technique can cure anxiety or depression, but you’ll find yourself really rooting for Wolfson, so it’s very satisfying when she finally makes it.

Episode 1: The Healing Trip

You can’t help but laugh and be freaked out for the entire duration of this episode, where Goop staffers head to Jamaica for the most trippy team-building exercise of all time. Everyone tries a specific dose of magic mushrooms, after which they all cry, laugh, hug and as one woman says, “get five years of therapy in these five hours.” It’s goopy enough to have everyone try magic mushrooms in a traditional Ayahuasca ceremony, but it’s off-the-charts on the goop scale to do it all while being on camera. “At Goop, we try things that may seem too out there or controversial, so that people can have all the information and make up their own minds,” Loehnen says at the outset, and this really sets the tone for the rest of the episode (and the series).

Episode 3: The Pleasure of Us

Paltrow is famed for her candid thoughts about sex, and the products and content Goop creates around the topic. If you thought the This Smells Like My Vagina candle or the Yoni egg was shocking, wait till you see this one. You’ll see a literal slideshow of vaginas flashed across the screen, and a particularly intense scene of a doctor assisting her co-worker with a vibrator. The content by itself is outrageous, but this one fully leans into the goop of it all—shared experiences, talking about uncomfortable issues, and educating people about the lack of sex education. The sex positive episode is sensational but honest, which makes it one of the most critically acclaimed and discussed episode of the series. If you’re looking to jump into all the conversations that are currently happening around the water cooler in your office, this is the one to start with.

Episode 5: The Energy Experience

This episode is a special level of goopy. For one, it’s difficult to actually grasp what’s happening, but it involves people (including actress and reality TV star Julianne Hough) being exorcised in front of your eyes. The Goop team brings on John Amaral, an energy healer who can cure diseases with his mind, for this. “I’m not treating a particular condition when I’m working with people, but I have a hypothesis. If you just change the frequency of vibrations of the body itself, it changes the way that cells regrow, it changes how the sensory system processes,” he shares, and then proceeds to show the team what he can do. “It’s a transformative experience,” they all echo in unison after its done.