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Paradise Season-Finale Recap: Don’t Sleep on Those Cheese Fries

Paradise

The Man Who Kept the Secrets
Season 1 Episode 8
Editor’s Rating 5 stars
The Man Who Kept the Secrets

Paradise

The Man Who Kept the Secrets
Season 1 Episode 8
Editor’s Rating 5 stars
Photo: Brian Roedel/Disney

Paradise, you son of a bitch, you did it. You gave those nut-cheese fries actual plot purpose. What a feat. Okay, more importantly, you were able to follow up last week’s stunner of an episode — the crown jewel of the season, one of the best episodes of television this year and, yes, I know it’s only March — with a worthy predecessor. No, “The Man Who Kept the Secrets” isn’t as intense or gripping or sweat-inducing as “The Day,” but what could be? Still, the season-one finale serves up a satisfying answer to the mystery surrounding Cal Bradford’s murder by cleverly tying various threads of the season together, revealing that the answers were right in front of us the entire time, and, on top of that, setting up several compelling places for Paradise to go in season two. A wonder!

Now, aside from the cheese-fries thing, there is one other task I believed impossible that Paradise pulls off, and that is making Cal’s death sadder than it already is. It was bad enough watching this guy, on the precipice of doing something heroic and noble, be rejected and scorned by the people who mattered most to him, but in this episode we learn that Cal might very well be alive if not for one pit stop on his spiraling bathrobe tour. We learn that his murder was not methodically planned to occur the night it did, but rather someone with a long-simmering vendetta had mostly brushed their feelings aside until they ran into Cal that day and were inspired to lean into those feelings once again. It’s a spur-of-the-moment decision, and one fueled by incorrect assumptions as to who is the real villain here.

If only Cal hadn’t gone to the god damn library. To be honest, I can’t believe Paradise is picking on libraries and librarians in this current climate (is someone on the writing staff a Parks and Rec fan?), but it’s true. The answer to who killed President Cal Bradford is the librarian, in Cal’s bedroom, with the rotary drill bit. The answer to why he killed Cal Bradford is a little more complicated. Let’s walk through this final chapter to season one together, tenderly whispering the lyrics to “Another Day In Paradise” just like our bunker overlords would want us to.

Back in Samantha Redmond’s living room, Xavier Collins is out of options. His wife is alive, his daughter has been kidnapped, and Samantha holds all the cards. He needs to call off his coup and figure out who killed Cal lest he lose everything important to him. Now, why he doesn’t attempt to explain even the basics of what’s at stake to Agent Robinson, no one knows. But he tells her to let the evil billionaires go, that according to the DNA, whoever killed Cal either snuck into the bunker or was already here before they arrived and they need to figure it out ASAP. Robinson decides to look at irregularities during Arrival Day, while Xavier is headed back to the scene of the crime to see what he missed the first time.

Robinson’s intuition proves fruitful. She bangs on Gabi’s door, demanding that the shrink who has personnel files on everyone in the city help her look into the list of people who either had issues with their wristband or were flagged heading into the bunker, to see if there’s anything suspicious going on. Unfortunately, Robinson finds Gabi getting absolutely lit in the middle of the day. Our resident therapist has decided to sink her face into a trough of white wine in these trying times because she has just learned from the woman herself that Samantha Redmond is actually the monster everyone claims she is. Now, I’m very sad that Gabi has realized she’s been defending a supervillain for ten years, but also glad that we can put all this “I’m not a monster” “I am a monster” talk to bed. Can we all agree to not use those lines even once in season two? I’ll even trade you a reprise of emo “Eye of the Tiger” for it. And you know that’s saying something!!

Regardless, Gabi pulls herself together to help Robinson look into these lists and lo and behold she finds something VERY interesting. According to the files, Maggie the Waitress, the one we’ve watched shovel nut-cheese fries into her face like 300 times on this show because she has been given no other character traits, has a deadly nut allergy. How can this be?! Gabi and Robinson head to the diner to entrap Maggie with yet another plate of cheese fries. (Admittedly, a ridiculous sentence to write and also, I love it? Every show should be this serious about cheese fries.) They tell her that the real Maggie Davis was so allergic to nuts that she carried an epi pen on her at all times! Fake Maggie fesses up real quick: She’s relieved that she’s been found out, she is not who she says she is, but she has only been lying because “he” made her do it. Who is “he?” Xavier is about to find out the hard way.

Xavier’s decision to go back to Cal’s bedroom is a smart one, too. His job, as he informed us so many episodes ago, is to watch. He is supposed to notice things. He replays his last interaction with the president over in his head to figure out what he missed. He remembers: He saw Cal stealthily pull a CD out of his bathrobe pocket and hide it in the stack on his console. It’s the mix CD Cal made for Jeremy at the library. It starts off with a message from Cal: “Hey kid, it’s your dad. I came to the library to make you a mixtape and bury a few national secrets while I’m here.” Xavier heads to the library.

Remember the six-digit number Cal wrote on the cigarettes he left for Xavier? It turns out, it’s the Dewey decimal classification number of the book in which Cal hid his notes on everything he found about what’s really happening on the surface. The book? Not the Sinatra biography that Xavier picks up first, but the Peter Lawford biography, The Man Who Kept All the Secrets, sitting next to it. Remember how Cal told Samantha that his father told him she was the Sinatra and he was the Peter Lawford? It wasn’t just to set up the joke about Samantha always wearing hats, which in actuality we only saw her do once, after all! Another redemption point for Paradise, how nice! Xavier starts reading the notes — about Atlanta, about the hit Samantha ordered on the scientists, about how to get out of the bunker — but is rudely interrupted when Trent the Librarian slams him over the head with a fire extinguisher and ties him up.

It was Fake Trent all along! He unloads his full story on Xavier: It started 12 years ago, when Fake Trent was actually a project manager on the excavation of the Colorado bunker site and fell in love with one of the men working for him named Adam. What I wouldn’t pay for a full rom-com about two construction workers falling in love while they blow up the insides of a mountain! It’s not long, however, until Fake Trent discovers that the site is full of an arsenic compound that, while it won’t make the site inhabitable long term, will make all of his workers sick, and eventually die. He brings it up to the lead engineer Samantha hired to build her city, and while he feels for Fake Trent, he can’t shut the operation down. The men who will die from this are nothing more than collateral damage here. Fake Trent has no idea who they’re dealing with.

Fake Trent is fired and commits his life to trying to make the public aware of what’s going on in Colorado. He ties everything to the Bradford company — which he and his team worked for, notice the flower logo on their coveralls — and Cal Bradford. He vows to make people listen to him. Surprise! Fake Trent was the guy who tried to shoot Cal Bradford on the South Lawn when Xavier took the bullet for him. We’ve known Fake Trent all along.

Fake Trent goes to federal prison, conveniently located in Colorado, learns that Adam is dying, and continues to harbor anger and vengeance toward Cal Bradford, whom he sees as the head of this entire conspiracy. On “The Day,” all hell breaks loose in the prison and Fake Trent is able to escape. Okay, now this is the part where my suspension of disbelief was fighting for its life: This guy dons a law-enforcement uniform and walks through a line of cars headed toward the bunker until he finds, I guess, just any tall-ish white guy on the bunker list. He finds Real Trent and his wife Real Maggie and tricks them into following him through a shortcut, where he blows their brains out and steals their identities, finding a crying woman in a car — the waitress — to play the part of his wife. He fakes a chaotic panic attack so that the woman checking them in at the bunker, a woman terrible at her job, pushes them through without much hesitation.

So, he’s in. But he confesses to Xavier that upon arrival, he started to get comfortable. He could have a do-over down here. He let his vendetta go. That is, until three years later when Cal Bradford waltzed into his library and all of his anger came flooding back. Now, you’d think what happened to his team and to Adam would be at the forefront of his mind, what with the display about the excavation of the bunker set up directly in front of his desk at the library, but no. It’s not until he sees Cal in person that he remembers he wants to kill him. Fake Trent dons the coveralls in that display, grabs a rotary drill bit, and sneaks onto Cal’s property where he bashes his head in. Reliving Cal’s death yet again leaves me emotionally frayed. This man was not perfect, but he didn’t deserve to die this way! If only Fake Trent knew Samantha Redmond was the mastermind behind it all. (I mean, you’d think with all of his research he would’ve stumbled onto her at some point, but okay!)

After reigniting his mission, Fake Trent steals Cal’s notes from the tablet so he can get out of the bunker and spread the truth — admittedly, he has not fully thought this plan out. Alas, Xavier and Robinson, who arrives at the library after the cheese fries revealed the truth, catch up to him on the catwalk above the sky before he can get out. Fake Trent spits some truths about how they all had a chance to start over in the bunker but “instead they chose more of the same,” and call me crazy but maybe billionaires shouldn’t be making decisions for society as a whole. Anyway, the guy jumps to his death, through the sky and onto someone’s house below. Do they have homeowner’s insurance in the bunker? Someone should find out.

Xavier has figured out who murdered Cal, but he still needs to deal with Samantha. Thankfully, Samantha winds up dealing with the consequences of her own decisions when Jane arrives to keep up the ruse that she’s one of the good guys while also revealing to Samantha that Jane is in control here. (She shoots Samantha in the chest to stop Xavier from shooting her in the head, but to Xavier it looks like she is misguidedly helping him.) Out of all the twists here, Jane going full psycho when Samantha laughs at her demand to have Cal’s Wii is my favorite. Samantha set this woman loose in the bunker, and now she’s going to pay for it. She’ll be recovering in the hospital for a long time and when she gets out, no doubt there will be a new world order within the bunker.

Meanwhile, Xavier is relieved to have Presley back safe and sound (no one knows Jane’s true identity yet, she kept her cover even with Presley), but his job is not done. Both Robinson and Presley convince him to head up to the surface — the former urging him to finish the job Cal died for, the latter urging him to bring her mother home. And so Xavier hops on a plane, uses the notes Cal left behind to open the bunker, and flies out into the unknown.

Bunker Notes

• If any of the billionaires think they’ll get back to the status quo — the wimpy new president does make a surprising show of strength in the end — they’ll have to deal with Jeremy Bradford. Thanks to what he saw on the tablet and the sweet message Cal left him on that mix CD, he’s going to pick up where his father left off, spreading the truth about what’s really going on. And, as it turns out, he already has dozens of people joining his cause.

• What happened to Cal’s wife? She doesn’t want to check in with her son ever? Or, like, ask a few questions about Cal’s murder? What is she doing all day?

• Very Important Question: In Paradise season two, do we think they’re going to stick with the maudlin covers of ’80s rock music or will we get maudlin covers of some other genre? If so, what’s on your wish list?

• No, but seriously, the Wii thing is cracking me up.

Paradise Finale Recap: Don’t Sleep on Those Cheese Fries