At the end of Paradise‘s thrilling penultimate episode “The Day”, two big reveals are dropped right before the credits hit; Cal’s murderer was someone from outside the bunker – and more dramatically, that Xavier’s wife still alive. This, of course, followed a harrowing hour of television set inside a White House self-preserving at all costs at the end of the world, after a centuries-long ruse about its existence to supposedly represent and protect its people; which turns out to be an oddly fitting metaphor for “The Man Who Kept the Secrets”, a wildly disappointing finale where every character makes the self-serving choice, at the expense of the people they’ve chosen to keep close (and the approximately 50 million people that might be alive on the surface) – with the added bonus of another one of the worst Phil Collins covers humanity’s ever experienced over its closing moments.
Picking up right where “The Day” left off, “The Man Who Kept the Secrets” strips away the Xavier-led coup, the dumb plots about teenagers and their grandparents, and the anger towards billionaires, to circle back around to the Clue-esque mystery around Cal Bradford’s murder – which turns out, was the result of a disgruntled project manager-turned-failed political assassin, who spent three years lying dormant as the bunker librarian known as Trent, only to become triggered when Bradford comes in to make the mixtape full of government secrets we saw alluded to in “In the Palaces of Crowned Kings”. After seeing Bradford, he immediately sneaks into the president’s heavily guarded compound to visibly, loudly, and violently kill the President of the Underground United States, but a few hours after it “all came rushing back to him” (his words, not mine).
Forget how the reveal of “it was the librarian in the bedroom with the mantlepiece” is a laughably shallow twist; Paradise only gives the audience a five-minute opening montage to explain his motivation, that he was fired after warning of the release of dangerous gas, leading to his co-workers and newfound friends getting sick and presumably dying off-screen at some point. From there, Paradise‘s season finale bounces back and forth between Xavier’s strained face (as Sinatra/Redmond tries to convince him that his daughter’s being held hostage), a defeated Gabriela who spends the entire episode eating shitty cashew nut cheese fries – and of course, Jane the Assassin, who gets all pissed off when Redmond doesn’t let her have the Nintendo Wii she used to play with the boyfriend she murdered.
If all of that sounds ludicrously unsatisfying, that is because it is; though I certainly didn’t have high hopes for the reveal of Bradford’s murderer (for what it’s worth, I thought it was Teri somehow), revealing that the librarian, who murdered a couple to plant himself and his fake partner – who he picked up outside a gas station, a stranger smoking cigarettes and housing junk food on the last day of the world – had built a life for himself inside the bubble (one we never see, of course – do we ever find out what happened to the woman he brought in? of course not!), a facade that instantaneously snapped the moment he saw Cal Bradford entered his holy library – to plant not one, but two esoteric clues about how someone could escape the bunker via plane.
While I appreciate the gesture towards building out a believable character arc for Trent the Librarian, the reveal of him only works as a curiosity of his master of disguise; also being the failed assassin from “The Day”, we know he also was able to imitate the behaviors of a boom mic operator, as well as convincingly make himself bald. As a dramatic device to provide an appropriate dramatic crescendo, it feels like a cliche, the dramatic equivalent of the Community episode where Jack Black inserts himself into random, more interesting scenes of the show’s past. In this case, revealing the Librarian’s proximity to the main characters throughout the season feels imitative, offering little to the genre – and to the narrative – with a one-dimensional character, driven by the death of his co-workers and the obfuscation facts from the public in ways that are never explored, other than as superficial drivers of plot.
By the time we get to the predictably suicidal reveal of his vaguely pro-labor motives (you know, because he was one of the good supervisors of underpaid immigrant workers), “The Man Who Kept the Secrets” has lost all of its momentum from “The Day” – and completely abandoned any of the dystopian political uprest or shared sense of humanity it explored in that episode (and occasionally in others). With Sinatra/Redmond relegated to a chair for the entire hour (which – jfc, can this show just decide what it wants to call this woman consistently?), the “billionaires vs. regular people” plot at the heart of the series becomes a complete afterthought, the complexities of its philosophic ponderings lost in the more traditionally structured interpersonal dramatics of its boring characters. And by doing that, it loses what actually makes it a dystopian sci-fi series of any interest (even if the plot is basically an underground version of so many other shows and films – Altered Carbon season two, anyone?), its nascent ideas of class and privilege surrendered in the pursuit of some wildly undercooked climactic moments.
What’s left is mostly a race to the bottom; with entire plot lines, like the teen romance and whatever is motivating Crazy Jane (besides her pursuit of the presidential Wii, one of the dumbest “quirky psychopath” notes I’ve seen in awhile) relegated to the far, far background, behind the coup fallout and Bradford’s “mixtape”, Paradise has a lot of time to focus on its cascade of big reveals. Too bad not a single one of them have any emotional thrust behind them, except in the very brief moment Xavier believes his daughter’s been killed (though even the faux plot twist is telegraphed from a thousand miles away). Jane shoots Redmond in the chest for a clearly disgruntled Xavier (and then proceeds to laugh and sneer about keeping her alive), Bradford’s son begins preaching to a faceless group of people – and laughably, Xavier leaves his children in the fucking dome with all those psychos, so he can fly a plane into the light and see what’s left of the world outside of the underground Colorado bunker.
He leaves a government in chaos, Sinatra alive and still pulling strings – and Paradise at a crossroads with itself; does this series want to have something to say about the world, or is just a series using loose allegory to fuel a series of incredibly rote character notes? Because it does neither well in this final episode, especially as it fumbles through the aforementioned terrible Phil Collins cover, digging its heels into the most unsatisfying, surprisingly narrow set of reveals imaginable before heading into the sunrise (?) outside the bunker, as if the entire first season was the first hour of Fallout.
(Perhaps the most frustrating of those is how little agent Billy’s death mattered; after spending an entire episode building out his character, his outsized death ultimately served no real purpose on the season’s narrative – especially as Jane ends the season a supposedly trusted person in Xavier’s circle, though I’m sure that will become its own conflict in season two.)
Mostly, as Xavier flies off into the light, unburdened by the corrupt government and children he struggles to still connect with, Paradise’s season finale labors to find anything to say about its world and characters; while finely acted (and often well-lit), its terrible dialogue and unnecessarily convoluted mysteries spend eight hours leading its audience to a random, suddenly suicidal dude who has been shaving the middle of his hair willingly for the past three years (we also don’t even get a final Cal/Xavier scene, which seems like an incredible oversight). That’s not a great sign!
What’s curious is how little is has to say about Sinatra (begging the question of why she survived the finale in the first place); she knew she didn’t kill the president, which means she probably could’ve saved us all a shitload of time by pointing out there was a mole inside Paradise a lot sooner than they did. Her unconvincing id aside, Sinatra being an absolute zero in terms of her influence on any of the show’s narratives (except ordering Billy to kill those people, something everyone’s pretty much forgotten about) is perhaps the biggest surprise of the finale; built up as a genius visionary billionaire with a thorn in her side, she ends up being nothing but a time-wasting speed bump (who doesn’t even get out of her chair in the final two and a half episodes of the season!) on Xavier’s incredibly underwhelming journey to the truth.
Paradise‘s first season is a frustrating mess of undercooked ideas, delivered in what often feels like a caricature of Dan Fogelman’s own stories, in how frequently it bounces around in time (we even get a quick montage going through all of Xavier’s wide-eyed revelation moments this season, a reminder of how often this device was employed) for pandering emotional moments, or teasing the next bread crumb of its central mystery, one that ends with a balding guy, who 3D printed a gun that fits inside a boom mic, jumping through the fake sky dome. Just about everything in “The Man Who Kept the Secrets” is too tame and convenient to be endearingly illogical, and too convoluted and undercooked to be enticingly cerebral, in spite of itself (I mean, this is an episode where a character stares at a plate of fries and says “I may have been telling people for the past decade that a monster is not a monster”). It’s neither smart enough or dumb enough to work; by the time the groan-worthy cover of
Though I, being the sicko I am, have a morbid curiosity on what exactly season two of Paradise will look like, “The Man Who Kept the Secrets” presents an unconvincing case for the show’s attempts to blend character with mystery, and its flat sociopolitical observations with its many conventional dramatic devices, especially when centered itself around an 11th hour reveal that has not nearly enough time to find resonance in its antagonist, or any of the ripple effects it had on the events of the six episodes preceding it (not including “The Day”, which at this point, feels like an episode of a completely different television show). In totality, it makes for a maddening, head-shaking finale that is an incredibly underwhelming end to the first season – and more disappointingly, a criminally soulless follow-up to one of the better episodes of television so far this year.
Excellent review and right on the mark. This was a most underwhelming finale to a show I had high hopes for.