Summary
Paradise rounds out its story in Episode 2 by introducing some new characters, perspectives, and mysteries.
Paradise already upended the entire show at the end of its premiere, so it’s no surprise that Episode 2, “Sinatra”, doesn’t have quite the same wow factor. But this is not a show short of mystery either way. This second chapter introduces a few more characters and their attendant perspectives, and it gives us some insight into how a giant secret subterranean city ended up under Colorado, but there remains plenty we don’t know. And those answers will be the key ones moving forward – namely, who killed Cal and why?
Let’s try and piece some of this together, shall we?
The Backstory
“Sinatra” is so-called because it gives us a fair amount of insight into the titular character, Samantha Redmond, who is ostensibly in charge of the underground city that has just suffered its first murder. Once again, flashbacks do the heavy lifting.
They’re out of sequence, though. The episode starts by cracking a window into the concept of the city being floated to an aghast architect, but the more intriguing stuff about Sinatra occurs further back, particularly the stuff involving her family and her initial meeting with President Bradford.
Sinatra was a success either way. She was staring down the barrel of untold billions when she met her husband, Tim, and they had two children, Dylan and Hadley. But Dylan became terminally ill, and it became obvious that money couldn’t buy everything. The experience hardened her.
It was at a conference about global existential threats where Sinatra met Cal, one of the few people besides her present for a talk on an imminent climate catastrophe that would render the Earth’s surface uninhabitable. What was theory then became reality, but the forewarning allowed Sinatra to invest in the Colorado project.
Therapy Sessions
Paradise Episode 2 introduces Dr. Gabriela Torabi, a long-time therapist of the former president and indeed Sinatra, who had offered to buy her services exclusively to help her through what happened to Dylan. She sits in on Collins’s interrogation and then takes a more active, mysterious role in it.
Collins is on the hook for killing Cal based on incredibly scanty evidence, which is ironic considering his immediate superior – which he rightly points out – was having an affair with the deceased. As I noted in my recap of the premiere, this seems to have been a pretty open secret, which you’d think would be frowned upon in the Secret Service, of all agencies, but nevertheless, Collins being the last person to see Cal alive – as well as not-so-secretly wishing him dead – makes him a prime suspect.
Collins is deeply offended by the interrogation process, wherein he’s strapped to a polygraph machine and asked a series of incredibly leading questions. When Torabi intervenes, she asks him the clincher – is there a part of him that is happy that Cal died? She has “say yes” written on her palm, which she surreptitiously shows Collins, and he follows the instruction. Torabi uses that honesty, which is consistent with a complete lack of deception throughout the entire test, to convince Sinatra that Collins is innocent. Why? Well, we don’t know. What we do know is that there’s some history between Torabi and Collins, since she claims to have worked with him once, briefly. Given she’s a grief counselor, that’s a bit of a clue as to what happened with Collins’s wife, though not how Cal was involved.
Those Things Will Kill You
In the premiere, Collins had quietly pocketed a marked packet of cigarettes, one of which had been annotated with the number 812092. Collins burns that cigarette in Paradise Episode 2, having presumably committed the number to memory, but in some scenes shared between Cal’s son and Collins’s daughter, Presley, it’s strongly implied that it pertains to the serial number of an aircraft kept in a giant hanger of old-world relics. More on this in subsequent episodes, I suspect.
In the meantime, Sinatra is repositioned as the prime suspect in the audience’s mind, and certainly Collins’s, if not necessarily everyone else’s. I think it’s worth noting that Collins himself hasn’t exactly been exonerated, but Sinatra’s approach to covering up the crime and telling the people of Paradise that Cal died of natural causes is deeply suspicious and certainly piques Collins’s curiosity.
Cal has a successor, Vice President Henry, but he’s a puppet. In Cal’s absence, the real power of Paradise is concentrated in Sinatra’s hands, and Collins knows this. He intends to prove something’s amiss, albeit quietly, and given that cigarette serial number is the only evidence he has to work on, I suspect that’s the first lead he’ll be following.
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