Is Paradise’s Killer Hiding in Plain Sight? Read a Recap for Episodes 2 and 3
Two of the most important people in Paradise are at the center of its second and third episodes, respectively — and hold onto your vegan cheese fries, because there’s a LOT to take in.
Tragic child death! Insight into the town’s selection process! Wii Tennis! Shower sex! Truly something for everyone in Episodes 2 and 3, so read on for the highlights of “Sinatra” and “The Architect of Social Well-Being.”
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IN THE BEGINNING… | Episode 2 begins 12 years earlier than the events of the premeire, with the woman (Julianne Nicholson) we saw arguing with Cal in Episode 1 addressing a group of people assembled in an airplane hangar. She apologizes for the multiple non-disclosure agreements they had to sign, and she acknowledges that those gathered are the preeminent minds in their respective fields. “If you’re in this room, it’s because you’re extremely special. And you’ve about to be entrusted with something massive,” she says, firmly but kindly, as she leads them out to board a plane.
On the jet, one of the specialists turns out to be a very nervous flier. The woman sits near him and chats to take his mind off things. He’s an architect who builds cities, so she wonders if he could create a city for 25,000 people that feels like “Anywhere, U.S.A.” and is impervious to climate catastrophe or nuclear attack. He says that’s impossible, mainly because the city would basically have to be underground, and where would you even be able to dig the huge space needed? She listens gamely, nods, and says that’s what she’s been told.
When the plane lands, the guests voluntarily put bags over their heads and are transported via SUV into an excavated space in the side of a mountain. Loads of construction vehicles surround the entrance. A helicopter follows the guests’ cars into the mountain; it continues past them and just keeps flying. And that’s when we realize that the woman has already found the space for the city — a massive tract carved out of the earth under the mountain. “Build me my city,” the woman says to the stunned architect.
WHERE’S THE TABLET? | As Xavier tries to figure out what the numbers on the cigarette mean and the woman — her name is Samantha Redmond — attempts to write Cal’s eulogy, we get a little overview of the community. It has existed for three years. Cal, who was president before everything went down, agreed to extend his term after the event that predicated their arrival. Everyone wears wrist bands that act as identification, form of payment, etc. The town has a wholesome, albeit Truman Show, feel.
When Xavier wakes from a nightmare involving his wife — apparently, they were on the phone when The Bad Thing happened — he gets dressed and comes downstairs to find Agents Pace and Robinson in the kitchen. Robinson is leading the murder investigation, and she is definitely the woman we saw leaving the president’s bedroom in the security footage, a point that Xavier angrily makes as soon as she orders him to accompany her to the car. (We also get the sense that these two didn’t like each other much before the killing.) She shoots back that she has an alibi for the night of the killing, but there is currently no prime suspect nor weapon; the autopsy is set to happen the next day. She accuses him of hating the president and acting weirdly — why did he wait half an hour to call it in? — after the first murder “down here.” Also troubling: The fact that Bradford’s tablet is missing. “Very important people are upset,” she warns. “They’ve got questions.”
Meanwhile, Samantha walks into a room full of (I presume) very important men and announces that no one will know about Cal’s murder, because they’re going to tell the public he died of natural causes. The men freak out. She tells them to calm the hell down. Then she leaves the room, meets up with a woman named Dr. Gabriela Turabi (played by Sarah Shahi, Person of Interest), and they watch as Xavier is interrogated down the hall.
He is hooked up to a lie detector and asked a bunch of questions about the morning he found Cal dead. At one point, Gabriela steps in. She identifies herself as Cal’s therapist, and Xavier’s “once,” as well, then stands directly in front of him (but not on camera). “Is a part of you happy that Cal is dead?” she asks, unfurling her palm. “SAY YES” is written on it; only Cal can see. He does as told. Once Gabriela is back with Samantha, she says she thinks he’s telling the truth.
When Samantha questions Xavier, we learn that her code name is “Sinatra” and that everyone always seems to do what she says. She directly asks if he has the tablet, and he says no. Then she puts him on leave for two weeks and tells him to “leave this alone.”
SINATRA’S SONG | Samantha-centric flashbacks are sprinkled liberally throughout this episode (and Julianne Nicholson kicks ass during all of them), but for our purposes, I’m going to condense them here. Samantha was a tech entrepreneur who met her husband (played by Tuc Watkins, One Life to Live) the day she sold her start-up and became, as she put it, “the richest self-made woman in the world.” A few years later, they’d had two kids — a boy and girl — and were grocery shopping when their son, Dylan, mysteriously keeled over while riding a mechanical pony outside the store.
After a year-and-a-half of going to the world’s best specialists, no one could figure out what was wrong with the boy, and he wasn’t getting better. “Unfortunately, I think it’s time for an impossible conversation,” his doctor told Samantha and her husband, introducing them to Gabriela, whom they really didn’t want to talk to. Their son eventually died; in a session with Gabriela six months later, Samantha said her grief was only getting worse. She sobbed as she begged the therapist to help her “be functional enough” to keep her marriage and daughter going.
A year later, Samantha ran into Cal (who was then a senator) at a financial summit. They both were present at a very poorly attended session that warned a tsunami would eventually put the entire Eastern Seaboard of the United States under water. After the talk, Cal gently asked how she was doing after Dylan’s death. The kindness nearly undid her; she admitted that she’d been picking out her hair and was developing a bald spot. We learn that Cal’s father refers to Samantha as “Sinatra” because she was the person everyone wanted to see, while his dad referred to him as one of the legendary crooner’s hangers-on. When the scientist who gave the talk walked by them, Samantha stopped him by yelling, “What do we do?” He replied, “Dig the biggest hole you can, and get in.”
Later, in a heartbreaking peek at one of Dylan’s last days, the boy asks Samantha if he’s going to heaven. “It’s OK. You can tell me,” he says. “I think you are, yes,” she says, barely holding it together. He asks what she thinks it’s like up there, and she tells him it can be anything he wants. He says he wants something like the place they live, “but with more horse rides.” Present-day shots of the under-mountain community show that his mom, indeed, had a lot of them installed in this grave new world. “Well, then,” she tells him, “that’s what it will be like.”
ON A NEW MISSION | The whole town gathers for an emergency meeting, where Cal’s death is announced by the vice president, who’s now the commander-in-chief. The president’s teen son, Jeremy, isn’t there, though; he’s hanging out at the library, listening to the 1980s and ‘90s music his dad loved. Xavier’s daughter, Presley, finds him there. They don’t seem to be good friends, yet he confides in her that he fought with Cal the last time they talked, and now he feels horrible about it. He’s listening to Starship (“PLEASE LET IT BE ‘WE BUILT THIS CITY,’ I write in my notes) and when he lets her hear, I get my wish.
At the arena, Xavier asks Billy if he knows of any six-digit codes that are important “down here.” Pace doesn’t. Xavier then lets his friend in on the fact that he suspects Samantha/Sinatra is up to something. Billy reminds him that she’s the most important person in their community. “Yeah,” Xavier says, “and I’m going to take her down.”
Later, at home, Xavier burns the cigarette with the numbers on it.
XAVIER GOES TO THE SOURCE | At the start of Episode 3, Xavier’s first order of business is to show up at Gabriela’s, unannounced. “Why did you tell me to say yes” during the questioning, he wonders? She immediately asks him to join her for a walk, later admitting that “Sinatra and the billionaires” may have bugged her office. She confides that Cal was tired and burdened right before his death. “Something happened that last week,” she says. But when Xavier asks again about the lie-detector test, she deflects. “Tell me about your relationship with your father. Why did you two stop speaking?” she asks.
Through a series of flashbacks, we meet Xavier’s father (played by Glynn Turman, A Different World), a commercial airline pilot. They tend to meet up at airports, to accommodate Xavier’s dad’s work schedule; the first time we see them together, Xavier is telling his dad that he’s going to be a grandfather. Over the years, it’s clear that the two men have a warm, easy, loving way with each other… until Xavier learns his father has Parkinson’s Disease but hasn’t disclosed it to the airline. So he goes above his father’s head and files the paperwork giving notice that he’s retiring; the move has an extremely chilling effect on their relationship. Xavier tells Gabriela that the disease progressed quickly, and his father died not long after their falling-out.
WII THE PEOPLE | Meanwhile, the president’s autopsy reveals only that he was hit in the head a few times, hard; DNA results from what’s under his fingernails will take some time to return. Over at the president’s home, Jane is freaking because Samantha is having Agent Robinson try to figure out who paused the cameras on the night of the murder. Billy tells her not to worry and kisses her, but it doesn’t really calm her down.
And with good reason: When Samantha summons Billy, Jane and Agent Robinson together, she asks Jane and Billy, “Why did you two shut down the cameras the night of the murder?” Jane whispers to Billy to tell their bosses, but he won’t, so she blurts out, “We were playing Wii!” With the truth out, Jane starts singing like a canary about everything else they did when the cameras were off: eating candy from POTUS’ junk drawer, trying on the commander-in-chief’s socks. (Ha!) “My god, you absolute idiots,” Samantha says, exasperated, and orders them out before threatening to replace Robinson if she can’t find the person who killed Cal.
‘BILLY PACE IS DANGEROUS’ | We learn a lot about Gabriela, as well, during her day walking around with Xavier. She helped design the psychological aspects of their new city. “I like to think of myself as the architect of social well-being,” she says. Over lunch at the diner, she a) hypes up the restaurant’s vegan cheese fries, and b) makes reference to how everyone lost something in the event that led to their relocation. “I didn’t lose my wife. I know exactly where she was. She was in a different city, and she died, because he didn’t get her to a goddamned plane,” Xavier tells her. When they discuss the action Xavier took to keep his father and everyone on his father’s planes safe, Gabriela points out that it was a tough thing to do. “It’s the way he wired me,” Xavier replies, simply. Seemingly satisfied with the strength of his moral compass, she decides to tell him what she knows.
First, Xavier is part of Humanity: The Reboot because she chose him. “Everyone’s here because I chose them,” she says. A flashback shows us that Gabriela suggested Xavier as Cal’s new lead agent, and the president went with him because of her imprimatur. She adds that Xavier was her “wildcard”: “If something went wrong, I needed the person who would do the right htin, no matter what.” He asks her again what the message on her hand was all about, and have I mentioned that this conversation has oddly sexy overtones? Their faces are getting closer and closer, and then she kisses him. “I’m married,” he says. “I know,” she replies. Then they keep kissing as they enter her home.
When he starts to ask a question, she shushes him. They strip and get in the shower, where she sits on his lap and whispers in his ear: “I have a message from the president. He said if something should happen to you, I should find you. He said Billy Pace is dangerous.”
Just then, we see Billy drive up to Xavier’s house with a gun on the passenger seat beside him. Presley is looking out the window, probably wondering where her father is so late. And Billy? Yeah, he looks pretty damn scary.
Now it’s your turn. What did you think of the episode? Sound off in the comments!
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