Paradise
Wildcat is Down / Sinatra / The Architect of Social Well-Being
Season 1
Episodes 1 – 3
Editor’s Rating
Photo: Brian Roedel/Disney
Surprise! If you tuned into Hulu’s new thriller Paradise because you thought you were getting a straight political thriller about a secret service agent going rogue to investigate the suspicious murder of the President of the United States, well, you were … partially right? But also very wrong. Yeah, sure, Paradise is about secret service agent Xavier Collins investigating the suspicious murder of President Cal Bradford, but also, as we learn in a whopper of a reveal at the end of the pilot episode, that murder takes place in a bunker in a Colorado mountain after the world gets obliterated from a yet to be fully explained catastrophic event; For three years now, 25,000 selected Americans have been living in this mountain bunker designed to look like the most idyllic suburban town a production design team could ever dream up and the first murder to ever happen in this bunker is that of the President, found on his bedroom floor still in his bathrobe and slippers. So, you know, maybe not a straight political thriller.
Now, if you tuned into Paradise because you realized it was a reunion of sorts between This Is Us creator Dan Fogelman and the best onscreen weeper in the business and This Is Us star, Sterling K. Brown, maybe there was a moment, even just for a second, where you thought hmmm This Is Us liked to toss a twist or two at us every once and a while, is this series going to be twisty, too? Maybe you had a little padding going into the pilot so you weren’t absolutely blindsided when those ducks in that nice pond were revealed to be mechanical or you got a nice long look at the seam in the “sky” made of digital panels and lights. I mean, probably not, but maybe you did!
One might argue that, like This Is Us, it seems a little silly and a little gimmicky to withhold the actual premise of the show until the final minutes of the first episode because the premise is pretty fun and could stand on its own without the dramatic reveal. (Me, I would be the one.) Alas, it doesn’t much matter at this point: Here we are! Under a mountain! When the rest of the world, as we’re led to believe, has gone to shit! And the President has been murdered! We’re in it now, is what I’m saying. But also: Be on alert for more twisty reveals. It is a Fogelman special.
Speaking of, another similarity between This Is Us and Paradise, aside from Brown being able to pull off some dramatic monologues that no one has any business pulling off (“James and the Giant Cherry” monologue, I’m looking at you), is that once again, we’re playing in multiple timelines. At the moment, there are basically three separate timelines: The present day, where the investigation into Cal’s murder is going on; The days and hours leading up to Cal’s death; and various points in the past, before the end of the world, also known as “BB,” or, Before Bunker (personally, to me).
Let’s talk about what we know after three episodes in regard to Cal’s murder. When Xavier shows up to work one morning, he finds it strange that the President is still lolling about in bed around 8 a.m. After knocking on his bedroom door and getting no answer several times, Xavier walks in to find President Cal Bradford face down on the floor near his bed in a pool of his own blood from an apparent head wound. The guy is dead. But instead of immediately calling it in, Xavier assesses the crime scene. He may look calm and collected while he does it, but you can see a lot of what the fuck? going on in his eyes. The door to Cal’s balcony is open and there’s a trail of blood and a partially smoked cigarette out there. There are two wine glasses on his bedside table, a pack of cigs, and a pair of gold earrings. Most importantly, Xavier sees that Cal’s safe has been emptied and the Very Important Tablet With All the Secrets is missing.
Xavier has junior agent Jane put the premises on lockdown without telling her anything else. He visits Mike Garcia, who is operating the security cameras to run through Cal’s previous 24 hours — here we learn that apparently it was a big deal for Cal to get out of his bathrobe, his son Jeremy is ghosting him for dinner, he’s having an affair with head of security Agent Robinson and those are her gold earrings in his bedroom, the guy got a load on the night before he died, including drinks with his dad Kane, and the last person to see Cal Bradford alive before he went to bed around 10 p.m. was … Xavier Collins.
Could this be the reason Xavier waits 30 minutes before calling Cal’s murder into the agency? Is he covering up his tracks? No. Cal tells Agent Billy Pace, his best friend and the only agent he really trusts, that they need to scour the crime scene for any clues they can because once Agent Robinson is in charge, there’s no way he’ll be allowed to stay on the case. And you know what? Xavier is right. Not only does he get kicked off the investigation, but he is, not surprisingly, the only suspect they have for a hot second.
Have no fear: Paradise doesn’t try to get tricky here and make us think Xavier could be guilty for very long. In fact, the show does a really nice job using the first three episodes to give us a look at the complicated relationship between Xavier and Cal and how it had changed over the five years they worked together. We see Xavier’s initial interview with Cal in the Oval Office the day after his re-election, where Xavier remains professional and reserved despite Cal’s prodding for a little fun; We see him open up a bit in his first week on the job about his wife Teri and their two kids (Presley and James); We watch as the two men trauma bond when Xavier takes a bullet for the president and begin to form what really feels like a friendship; And then we get to see their last conversation the night before Cal was killed in which we learn that Xavier blames the President for Teri dying in whatever the End of the World event was because he couldn’t “get her on a plane,” as he promised. In fact, Xavier’s last words to Cal are, “I’ll forgive you when I can sleep again, and I’ll sleep again when you’re dead.”
It is pretty wild that in just three episodes, through flashbacks that you know aren’t fully filled in just yet, we not only completely understand the scope of this relationship but also that it is so easy to connect with. Brown and Marsden have an easy, believable onscreen chemistry, and to be honest, I’m kind of bummed they’ll never make up! While we know Xavier to be a man of great moral code and dedicated to his job, this tragic ending to their relationship must also play some part in why he’ll stop at nothing to get answers here.
And if you weren’t sure that Xavier was innocent, the one major lead Xavier walks away with should do the trick: Seemingly, in his last few seconds, Cal uses his own blood to mark an “X” on his pack of cigarettes to make sure Xavier takes them. Inside, he has written a six-digit code on one of the cigarettes — 812092. Xavier has no idea what they could mean, but we get a pretty good guess when Xavier’s daughter, Presley, and Cal’s son, Jeremy, explore the airplane hangar from bunker arrival day, and we see that a lot of those planes have six-digit ID numbers painted on their tails. Interesting, no?
So, if Xavier didn’t kill Cal, who did? Xavier’s number one suspect is Samantha Redmond. She’s the billionaire who spearheaded the entire mountain bunker project and she’s the one pretty much running things down there. Everyone, including Cal Bradford, follows her lead. She wears a lot of great pantsuits. She tells all the whiny men at the Billionaire and Government Cabal meeting to go tug their dicks to stay calm after Cal’s dead (these weenies aren’t sad about Cal but worried for their own safety). But Samantha — security codename ‘Sinatra’ — isn’t just some evil billionaire caricature. Paradise spends episode 2 filling her character out. When she has a flirty meet-cute with her husband the day she sells her start-up and becomes the richest self-made woman in the world, she seems easy and free. She is in stark contrast to the icy woman we’ve been spending time within Colorado.
We know why: In another flashback, we learn her older child, Dylan, has an incurable disease. She has all the money in the world, but after a year or so of doing everything possible to help him, her son dies. It breaks Samantha irrevocably. Julianne Nicholson is so heartbreaking here and also just so believable playing all these shades of Samantha; I buy her every step of the way.
A year after Dylan dies, Samantha goes to an international financial summit where she sits in on a sparsely attended talk by a scientist titled “The Antarctic Giant Lies Sleeping” about a catastrophic, apocalyptic event involving a tsunami submerging the Earth that this scientist is beyond sure will happen in the next decade. No one wants to listen to him. In fact, there might be three other people in that seminar and one happens to be … Senator Cal Bradford. They sort of know one another — they at least know one another enough to share a moving moment in which Cal talks to her about Dylan. She’s moved — no one wants to even mention him to her. It’s a real kindness. He also mentions to her that his father believes she is one of the real, true leaders out in the world. She runs off to talk to the scientist a little more — this is a guy who’s only advice at this point is to “dig the biggest hole you can and get in” — but this is clearly the start of these two trusting one another.
It’s true: Samantha’s plans for the Colorado Mountain project are born from her grief in more ways than one. She couldn’t save Dylan, but she sure as shit is going to do everything she can to keep her daughter safe. As Dylan begins to realize he’s dying and asks his mother about heaven, she tells him it could be anything he wants it to be. He wants it to look just like it does here, in his little suburban life, except he wants more of those motorized horse rides. And you know what the Paradise bunker city has? A whole bunch of motorized horse rides. Is the reveal that Samantha actually made Dylan’s version of heaven cheesy beyond belief? Yes. Did I cry about it? Also, yes.
Let’s not get it twisted, though; Samantha is definitely the villain of our story. I don’t think she killed Cal, necessarily. They seemed to be friends (toxic friends, but still). But she is certainly surveilling everyone in Paradise and she’s definitely hiding stuff about who knows what — the bunker, the apocalypse itself, time will tell. Still, it could’ve been so easy to make Samantha one note, and it makes the story richer by giving us insight into her motives.
By episode three’s end, Paradise offers a new possible suspect: Agent Billy Pace.
Thanks to an assist from Dr. Gabriela Torabi, the president’s therapist, Xavier is saved from a lie detector test that Samantha is closely monitoring. Gabriela knows that Xavier had nothing to do with Cal’s death, and she knows this because Cal told her that if anything should ever happen to him, she should go find him. But before she passes along the message from Cal, she wants to make sure she can really trust the guy. The two spend the day walking around Paradise getting to know each other.
Gabriela, as it turns out, was also Samantha’s therapist when Dylan died. She brought Gabriela on to the Colorado project not just to help design a city that would help traumatized, grieving people function again but also to select the 25,000 people they would save. I would love it if Paradise got more into the guilt this woman must carry with her — she mentions it briefly, but come on! What an absolute mind fuck that must be — but there is no time at the moment! She gets Xavier to open up about his wife and also about his father, and after that and some cheese fries (so much about the cheese fries!) she decides he is indeed trustworthy. She brings him home and they have shower sex. Partly, this is because they are two hot people in an underground bunker at the end of the world, and partly, this is because she is paranoid about Samantha surveilling her, and she wants the shower to drown out what she has to tell Xavier: Cal said trust only Xavier and also that Billy Pace is dangerous.
I in no way think Billy killed Cal. When Agent Robinson learns that it was Billy and Jane who turned off the security cameras in Cal’s house for two hours the night he died, the two of them confess that it was so they could play Wii tennis (and probably have sex). Also, Billy seems to really care for Xavier and his two kids — would he do something that would hurt him? And finally, babes, we’re only in episode three! There’s no way we’re figuring out the killer just yet. But surely, like everyone on this show, there is more to Billy Pace than just a guy who loves talking about his dump schedule. Now that he’s on Xavier’s radar, he’ll be forced to take a closer look at his friend.
• Oooh, there’s a little teen love story seemingly brewing between Xavier’s daughter Presley and Cal’s son Jeremy. In the best twist thus far: I am not annoyed by these teenagers!
• Jeremy tells Presley that the last time he saw his father, he, too, told him he wished he was dead. Uhh, Cal’s not a perfect guy, but damn, his last few days sound rough.
• It cannot be for nothing that Paradise goes hard to make sure we know that Xavier has his pilot’s license, loves planes (his dad was a pilot, his grandfather a Tuskegee airman), and wanted to become a pilot if not for his eyesight. And there are all those planes just sitting around in that hangar? I’ll be monitoring this development closely.
• Other things I think we should remember about Cal: He refers to himself as going from being one of the richest men in the world to the Presidency practically overnight; even before the bunker, he seemed quite happy to follow Samantha’s orders, and he has some major daddy issues. And his dad, Kane, who now has Alzheimer’s but was working on the mountain bunker project with Samantha at one point, lives in his guest house in Paradise! Complicated!
• That scene after Cal’s autopsy in which both Agent Robinson and Samantha go barf in the bathroom? A great character moment for both of them.
• Oof, three episodes in and I am already so annoyed with the choice to end each episode with an emo cover of an ‘80s song. Enough already, I am begging.
• Please don’t hate me, but I legitimately laughed when Cal asked Agent Robinson if she wanted a “Presidential debriefing.” I’m only human!!
