All season long, Paradise has been focused on two central mysteries. The first — what happened to the outside world? — was answered in Episode 7 in spectacularly horrific fashion. The second — who killed President Cal Bradford — is answer this week, in somewhat perplexing fashion. Like, hang on, wait a second: Who killed Cal Bradford?
The answer: the librarian from a few episodes ago, who’s also the failed presidential assassin from a few years ago. I mean, duh, anyone could have figured that out!
I kid, because of course the solution to the mystery comes from so far out of left field it’s in the parking lot. A random minor character (played by Ian Milligan), who is actually another random minor character (also played by Ian Milligan), who snuck in from outside by killing the real librarian (and his wife, whose ID he gave to the diner waitress played by Michelle Meredith) and taking his place?
Under almost any circumstances, I’d say this is cheating. For one thing, library science is no joke, and this guy’s past work experience was as a foreman on the excavation crew that carved out the underground cavern for Paradise to exist in. For another, come on — all these supporting players, all these potential murderers, and the answer is the equivalent of Old Man Withers from Scooby-Doo. It’s a wild creative decision, man!
But that’s Paradise for you; I mean, bringing back the breathy cover of “Another Day in Paradise” instead of doing “Paradise City” at long last is another one. That said…it still works, somehow? The audacity of the gambit, and its painful and surprising origin, won me over. Maybe it got you, too.
The killer’s problem with Bradford began during his time working underground, during which he struck up a close friendship with many of his co-workers, particularly an immigrant whose real name he mangles into “Adam.” The foreman — we’ll keep calling him Trent just to avoid confusion — is white, while Adam and most of the workers are Black; this strikes me as pointed commentary, given their divergent fates.
One day, Trent finds that several of the workers have gotten ill, and discovers why: They’ve tapped a vein of arsenic in the walls of the cavern. Once it’s excavated, the place will be perfectly safe given a little time…but it does need to be excavated for that to happen, and whoever does the excavating will get sick and die. When Trent brings this to the attention of the architect overseeing the project, he is fired, while his men are made to continue working — in protective gear, he’s assured, for all the good it will do them.
Trent spirals into obsession with the underground project, the cover story for which — it’s a recycling facility — is obvious bullshit. His conspiracy wall (gotta have one of those!) centers on Cal Bradford, whom he seems to see as a sort of Manchurian Candidate installed in the White House by his billionaire backers to further their own secret plans. (Gee, imagine that!) He was the gunman whose bullet Xavier caught while protecting Cal. But he wound up incarcerated in Colorado, allowing him to make it back to the Paradise bunker to survive the apocalypse after a prison rebellion frees all the inmates during the country’s last hours. What makes all this extra poignant is that it’s clear his feelings for Adam are more than friendship, but for years he can’t get the man to answer his calls, and when Adam finally does, he’s dying from the poison. The call ends with Trent crying into the prison phone.
But once he gets inside, Trent grows comfortable. It’s not until Bradford, drunk and trying to hide the evidence of outside survivors for his son Jeremy to eventually find, comes swanning into the library in his bathrobe that Trent is reminded of his hatred for this man and the secrets he kept from the world. So on the night of the assassination, he sneaks into the presidential residence and bashes Cal’s head in with a mining tool. And when Xavier arrives at the library to look for Cal’s hidden evidence, Trent knocks him out, steals the Peter Lawford biography (lol) in which all the info on the outside survivors (including Xavier’s wife’s location) is written, and runs for it.
Not very far, though. Xavier and Agent Robinson corner the guy in the catwalk above the sky. He lays down his burden, and says this:
“They chose more of the same. Bloated houses for the privileged few. Guns. They made this place a prison. It’s the American fucking dream. But there are bodies scattered in the dirt down here. People need to know this place is nothing but a gravesite.”
I hear ya, brother.
He jumps, tying off that loose end, but there’s still Xavier’s daughter Presley to rescue from the clutches of evil mastermind Sinatra and her assassin, Jane the Secret Service agent. It’s not until Jane demands Cal’s Wii in exchange for murdering the girl, then grows bizarrely imperious and terse when denied it, that we realize just how crazy this woman is.
Pity for Sinatra she didn’t realize it first. She tells Xavier she had Presley killed, then silently commands her guards to do the same to him. But his grief-stricken collapse is just him playing possum: He pulls out a hidden gun and plugs the guards, then puts it to Sinatra’s head. Julianne Nicholson is fabulous in these moments, her mouth flapping open noisily but wordlessly, like a fish gasping for oxygen when dumped on dry land. Naturally, that’s how real danger would feel to someone whose money insulated them from the end of the world.
But Jane arrives and shoots Sinatra in the throat, preserving her life but taking her out of commission for a long long time. “You’re of no use to me dead,” Jane tells her. “Long recovery ahead of you. Probably should have just given me the Wii.” Listen, if ever there were a game console worth maiming someone for, that’s the one.
The episode, and the season, ends with an around-the-horn look at the surviving characters. Jeremy Bradford, Cal’s son, is now an anti-government rabble rouser, armed with the secrets on his dad’s tablet. (Sinatra mentioned messing with the tablet in some way but I couldn’t quite figure out what she meant, to be honest.) He’s doing all this with his father’s posthumous blessing: “If you don’t like this world I’ve built, fix it” he says on a track on his mix CD (which has been providing the show with all its winkingly awful music choices; Cal admits no one likes his taste).
Dr. Torabi, the show’s most underwritten character, is reeling from the knowledge she played Dr. Melfi to a Tony Soprano, enabling Sinatra rather than improving her. She does the screenwriterly thing and pushes away her beloved plate of diner cheese fries, since she can no longer enjoy them.
The high council of government officials and billionaires is in an uproar, until the heretofore ineffectual new president with the Dick Cheney hairstyle gets mad and takes charge. Perhaps he’ll be the new big bad.
Sinatra convalesces in the hospital. Jane plays the Wii. And Xavier gets in a plane and opens the hangar doors to the outside world. “I’m coming, baby,” he says, as the blinding sun washes the screen white.
And with that closes the first season of this peculiar show. As far as slightly science-fictional political thrillers that have been rendered somewhat obsolete by the nightmare currently unfolding in Washington, this one has Zero Day beaten cold. It’s built not from goofy centrist non-politics like the De Niro thriller was, but from creator Dan Fogelman’s mastery of wringing tension and drama out of human emotions basically everyone shares. Trent’s love for his coworker Adam winds up being the driving force of the whole thing The same can be said for Xavier’s love for Presley, or Cal’s love for Jeremy. Sinatra would be sure to tell you even she was motivated, at one point anyway, by love for her family, as so many reactionaries love to claim.
And while I’d still rank it well below the similarly themed post-apocalyptic bunker yarns Fallout and Silo…that seventh episode, man, ooh-whee. That’s some really, really strong end-of-the-world sci-fi-horror, and it elevates the whole project in my eyes, the way the Trent/Adam material elevates this episode. (That, and Jane’s psychotic Wii obsession.) I’m sure nighttime soap operatics will remain a key part of the show’s makeup, but it’s not hard to imagine a second season that much more firmly establishes the show’s sci-fi survival bonafides, placing the competition with its peer shows on a bit more of an even playing field.
I’m not gonna sit here and tell you Paradise is one for the ages, or even for year-end best-ofs. But it’s competent, its three leads (Sterling K. Brown, James Marsden, and Julianne Nicholson) are extremely talented people who make a feast of everything they’re given, it got really nasty and scary when it needed to, and it solved its main mystery by using a killer librarian, like a half-forgotten slasher film set at a high school in the early ’80s. Like its knowingly ridiculous needle drops, the combination is fun almost despite itself.
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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