Last things first: You know how every episode of Paradise ends with some preposterous slowed-down moody spooky breathy cover of a huge ‘80s/‘90s radio rock hit? This week’s is actually quite good! It’s “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” by RAIGN, a frequently selected sync for big emotional TV moments. Since the Guns n’ Roses version the show is riffing on was already a cover, of a song by not only one of the best but also the most coverable songwriter in rock history, this cover works quite well. It’s a whole lot better than hearing someone doing “We Built This City” and singing phrases like “knee deep in the hoopla” in the exact tones of Mozart’s “Requiem.” And it really helps this show when it doesn’t end with a music cue that makes you laugh out loud at the screen.
First things second: This episode is titled “You Asked for Miracles,” and boy, have we ever. It’s a timely exploration of what to do when a mega-rich cabal under the command of a single unscrupulous billionaire seizes control of the government and circumvents democracy. So far, Xavier Collins, the Secret Service agent leading the resistance, has come up with two approaches to the fight, and they may be worth studying.
Xavier’s first move was using Paradise’s programmable sky-dome to broadcast a series of text messages at the public, designed to gradually build interest until a final reveal of the crimes of Samantha “Sinatra” Redmond, this dystopian future’s answer to our own dystopian present’s tech lunatics. There’s something rather quaint about the notion that telling, or even showing, the public that their leaders are lying to them will make any difference whatsoever.
But at any rate, Xavier never gets the chance. Over the strenuous objections of her therapist sidekick Dr. Torabi, Sinatra pulls the plug on the entire sky for a hard reboot so that the final message can’t be displayed. Torabi is horrified by the actions of the woman she’s helped maintain power, gaping at the terrified citizens running around in the dark the way Alec Guinness got that thousand-yard stare at the end of The Bridge on the River Kwai. She realizes Sinatra would rather traumatize the entire population by casting their safety and future in doubt than give up her grip on power. Imagine that!
Running parallel to all this is Xavier’s second path to victory: guns, and lots of them. Using info entrusted to her by a drunken President Bradford prior to his death, Agent Robinson cleans out the billionaires’ weapons cache and distributes them to a hand-selected team of agents and their closest associates. As the billionaires flee into a special safety bunker, the gun-toting agents take control of the city, or would have if the lights hadn’t gone out. Meanwhile, Xavier — who’s been quoting Die Hard left and right as he makes a John McClane of himself — pursues a fleeing Sinatra to her house on foot. In short, it’s a coup by the praetorian guard. That’s one way to depose a self-appointed dictator, historically speaking, all the end result is usually not so hot.
But though Sinatra is repeatedly caught flat-footed by developments in the sky, she has the situation on the ground under tighter control than first glance would indicate. Xavier finds this out when he corners her in her house, only for her to react to his locked and loaded gun in such fearless fashion it’s as if she’s bulletproof. Why? For one thing, she finds his grandiose speechifying and tough-guy talk kind of laughable. (“Who talks like that?” she asks Dr. Torabi in exasperation.) But like Xavier, Sinatra has two plans for victory in the works.
The first is to send her loyal agent Jane — wisely excluded from the rebel alliance by Robinson despite Xavier’s endorsement — to intercept his daughter Presley, who’s gone off the grid since Xavier detached her monitoring bracelet along with his own. She instead follows Presley’s new pal Jeremy Bradford, whom she finds rabble-rousing on the back of a pickup truck with the president’s missing tablet in his hands and Presley in the audience. He and Presley used his grandfather to unlock it, and they found a trove of information about both Presley’s missing mom and “something else.” Presumably, it’s the execution of the exploration team to cover up the existence of survivors on the surface. Anyway, with Presley in hand, Sinatra has her stick.
As for the aforementioned survivors on the surface, well, there’s the carrot. Sinatra tells Xavier that his wife Teri (Enuka Okuma), a doctor whose work often took her from Washington to Atlanta and thus made her harder to evacuate when the unspecified shit hit the fan, is still alive out there. (It’s pretty clear now that President Bradford somehow reneged on his promise to Xavier to go out of his way and pick her up.) If Xavier backs down, Sinatra help him find the woman he loves, whose loss consumes him.
As much as this episode focuses on Xavier — the flashbacks involve both his relationship with his wife and his attempt to find out from Cal just what the hell disaster it is they’re preparing for — it’s Gabriela Torabi who’s central to it. She’s the most underwritten of the main characters; her therapeutic ebullience makes her sound detached from the reality everyone else is facing, and it feels like with a little more time in the oven, the writing would bring out more from actor Sara Shahi.
Nevertheless, she’s interesting here because she’s a Gríma Wormtongue figure, whispering poison into the ears of Rohan at the behest of her powerful master, only to realize her master is a monster. Watching Torabi react to the mayhem Sinatra unleashes to keep her secrets safe, I keep thinking of that shot in The Two Towers of Brad Dourif as Wormtongue, tearing up as he sees the massive army of uruk-hai super-orcs he’s assembled to slaughter the people of the country he once called home. In fact, one of the reasons she keeps doing her job is because Sinatra reveals that she spies on Gabriela in her home, and watched her and Xavier having sex, as if she possesses a palantír, or at least the creepy company named after it.
The question now is whether Paradise is destined for the same fate Saruman had in mind for the Rohirrim. In a tense scene staged at a diner, Xavier makes such an accusation outright, telling Torabi that Sinatra herded the citizens of Paradise down there so they could be more efficiently slaughtered. Will it come to that? More importantly, can people do anything to stop it from coming to that?
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
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