We knew Cal Bradford had a rough few days leading up to his death, but we didn’t know just how rough until this week’s rather illuminating — and honestly, downright heartbreaking — “In the Palaces of Crowned Kings.” Our cutie president with a borderline drinking problem received some pretty brutal emotional gut punches from arguably the four people he cared about most in the world (yes, I’m including Xavier in that list because my desire for bromance cannot be stopped, and we already witnessed how harsh he was in their final conversation) in the days and hours leading up to his demise. As if that isn’t hard enough to watch, all of this rejection comes just as Cal is trying to step up and do the right thing. He is finally trying to be a real leader regardless of knowing it will for sure put him in danger, and that is unfortunately the moment — spurned by everyone he loves — the guy takes (allegedly) a rock to the dome. If all of this sounds Very Dramatic, that’s because it is. Haven’t you noticed Paradise is all high-intensity drama, no levity? Even that stupid detour into cheese fries the other week felt quite serious. There is a heaviness to the proceedings, which makes sense in regards to the subject matter here and also typically works in favor of a thriller, but some of the super-seriousness built into this show backfires. Why, yes, the emo version of “Eye of the Tiger” is at the front of that line.
So, who bashes Cal’s heart in, emotionally speaking, before his head is bashed in, literally speaking? First, there is his poor son, Jeremy. We already knew Jer’s last words to his dad were that he wished Cal were dead, but what we didn’t know was that aside from just being a moody teenager, Jeremy was angry with his dad for not warning anyone that the end of the world was coming. We haven’t seen exactly what went down on the last day before the bunker, but the snippets in flashbacks so far show a chaotic scene. Jeremy thinks his dad has blood on his hands and now is allowing the billionaires in the bunker to do whatever they want; Cal is simply their puppet. It’s an ugly fight, which also has Jeremy calling out his dad for hiding behind alcohol, and it explains why Jeremy doesn’t show up when his dad invites him over for a pasta dinner the night he dies. Jeremy, now, will forever be going over that last text exchange when he refused to come by even though his dad wanted to talk to him about a project that he was working on, something he thought his son might want to hear about.
While Cal’s relationship with his son was fraught in the end, his relationship with his own father, Kane, was even more complicated. Back in 1997, all Cal wanted to do was get out of the family business — oil and hydrofracking — and become a high-school teacher like his mother. Not only does Kane say, “No way, you ungrateful little shit,” but he also takes the time to let him know Cal was terrible at “oil” anyway, and now he’s decided his son is going into politics. He will become a great, accomplished man, Kane says. Or, rather, threatens.
Cut to the bunker — which Kane, who now we know was good at holes, was instrumental in building alongside Samantha — and Kane’s dementia is growing worse by the day. In the days leading up to Cal’s death, the president notices his father doing some strange things, like calling Billy Pace “Sniper” all the time and calling Cal a dummy, not just because he thinks he’s an idiot at baseline but because Cal thinks “they were all lost at sea” and “they” deceived him right under his nose.
This is what’s marinating in his brain during a heated conversation in bed with Robinson, which starts when Cal mentions that, uh, yeah, the billionaires definitely made sure there were actual weapons in the bunker; They would never leave themselves unprotected. This is news to Robinson, which is strange since she’s the Special Agent in Charge — someone you’d think would need to know about a stash of weapons somewhere. Their conversation devolves into an argument about how Cal continues treating their relationship like a tawdry affair, and Robinson believes it is much more than that, but after she storms out, you can see the wheels turning in Cal’s head. If the billionaires kept a secret like that from a person you’d assume would be in on that information … what’s to stop them from keeping secrets from him?
It all leads him to the tablet. When he clicks on the files related to the surface exploration, Cal learns they are under restricted access, and he doesn’t have clearance. This seems bad since, you know, he’s the president of the mountain and all. He finds Kane asleep downstairs and uses his fingerprints, and lo and behold, Kane Bradford has the clearance needed. It does seem silly, since Kane is clearly not lucid most of the time and I find it hard to believe Samantha wouldn’t revoke his clearance, but what can you do?
As you may have guessed, Cal now hears Susan Donnelly inform Samantha that there are survivors on the surface. He hears Samantha tell the scientist not to bring that person back. He hears her give Billy the kill order. And now we know why Cal was bothered and in his bathrobe in his final days. He was spiraling from this discovery. He wants to do the right thing, he wants to make Jeremy proud, but the moment he confronts Samantha with his new knowledge, she shuts him down as spineless. Now he knows he is in deep shit. He played his hand to the wrong person too quickly. He knows he might be killed for this, and so he makes plans. He goes to the library and makes a mixed CD for Jeremy. (There has to be something important on this, right?) He goes to see Gabriela and tells her to trust Xavier Collins and look into Billy Pace. He gets rejected by his son. He gets rejected by Robinson after telling her he loves her. (He is drunk, and he only refers to her by her last name, so I get her reaction.) He has another gutting chat with his dad in which he admits he has been miserable living this life Kane wanted for him, but at the very least, has he ever made him proud? Kane practically spits in his son’s face. Xavier reams him out, too. He writes that six-digit number on that cigarette, and he goes to bed. He’s dead by the next morning.
Like I said, it’s rough stuff for the president! And while we still don’t have the full story, and we still don’t know how things inside this mountain are going to play out, his efforts to find a way to get this information out there, even if he is dead, are not in vain. In the present day, we discover the first major ripple effect from Cal’s actions: Xavier and Robinson are teaming up to take Samantha down. Xavier has discovered Billy’s body and he knows that this man, who was like a brother to him, has not overdosed. Of course, deadly assassin Jane is a very good actor, so he doesn’t suspect her involvement one bit, but after Billy’s warning about Samantha, he knows this woman is at the center of both his friend and Cal’s deaths. Robinson has discovered that the DNA from Cal’s murder scene mysteriously never made it to the lab. She knows only one person could have the power to pull such a move, and she sets her sights on Samantha, too. Neither of them have a choice but to trust the other in order to avenge the deaths of the people they love.
Xavier believes there might be one major hiccup in Robinson’s desire to take Samantha down: no weapons. But never fear! Cal had a plan for that, too. The night of his death, during their last fight, he tells her how he wanted to take her to the guns to let her shoot and he tells her where they are and how to access them. This is no accident. So, they have weapons. And Xavier has a plan.
The next thing we know, Xavier tells Presley to pack bags for her and her brother, and then he heads over to see his neighbor Carl — who is illegally harboring a very cute pet dog — and asks for a big favor. Carl works in the tower that controls the sky. And Carl is more than happy to help Xavier by rewriting some code. That night, Xavier stares directly into the new streetlight that was installed outside of his home that he knows was a message from Samantha; she’s watching him. And he stares right up into where he knows that surveillance camera is as if he is staring directly into her eyes. And then, a red light appears in the sky. In big, bold letters, a message for the citizens of the mountain: THEY’RE LYING TO YOU. Oh, it is so on.
Bunker Notes
• That scene in which Kane confuses Jeremy for Cal and apologizes for what he said to his son is a total knockout. “I am not proud of anything I did, but I am so very proud of you. And I am so very sorry, son,” he says. This is why you hire Gerald McRaney, folks. He’ll just rip your heart out. Charlie Evans is great here, too, as Jeremy uses the moment to make the apology to his dad that he’ll never get to do for real. Both men wish so badly they had more time with Cal — the regret is so palpable.
• We do get one mystery partially solved: It was Presley who stole Cal’s tablet the night he died. We don’t know how or why or what she saw (although we do know Kane saw her), but an interesting turn nonetheless. She still has it in her bedroom.
• Jeremy is named after the Pearl Jam song because we are truly beating this “Cal Bradford loved ’80s and ’90s rock music” thing till it dies a slow and miserable death.
• Cal wants Jeremy to watch Rocky III with him because, as he describes it, it’s about a hero at his lowest point who finally gets his shit together. I would joke about how on the nose this is for Cal’s arc here, but I have seen This Is Us and this is the kind of parallel all over that show, too. It is the Dan Fogelman way.
• Oh, wow, that shot of the Washington Monument almost fully submerged in water with McRaney reciting Lord Byron’s “Darkness” (a haunting poem on its own) over it is so deeply unsettling. Another reason you hire McRaney is the poetry readings!