Summary
Paradise Season 2 finally returns to the bunker in “Another Day in Paradise”, but even though many things have changed, Sinatra is still in charge.
Rounding out the triumvirate of Paradise Season 2 premiere episodes, “Another Day in Paradise” is the most like what we’ve come to expect from the show after the first season. It finally returns us to the Colorado bunker where that entire run was set – only took until Episode 3! – and reintroduces several of its key players, including Sinatra, Jane, and Nicole. It’s also much denser with stuff than either of the first two outings was, with much more to keep an eye on.
Already, it’s immensely satisfying to see what Dan Fogelman is doing with this season, how it’s all looping and contorting to create these little connections and “aha” moments of new understanding. Lots of people have described Paradise as post-apocalyptic This Is Us, but more and more, it’s beginning to resemble Lost more than anything else, which can’t be a bad thing (unless it ends like it, obviously, but let’s not get carried away.)
Anyway, Sinatra. One of recent TV’s most deplorable characters makes her return here in a coma, having been shot by Jane in the Season 1 finale, but her reminiscences make up a good chunk of the episode, even after she wakes up. Initially, she thinks back to her earliest show-offy conversations with the doomsday scientist who predicted the eruption of the caldera in the first place, but the extended conversation reveals more about what Sinatra knew ahead of time. The point was made pretty clearly: The disaster would be unavoidable. Sinatra couldn’t buy her way out of it. But it would also evolve with time. The Earth would cool, but people would survive. They would adapt. But that wouldn’t be the end of the coming cataclysms.
Sinatra has always been living with more knowledge of what’s going on – and what might go on in the future – than anyone else in the bunker, which perhaps explains why her viewpoint on it has always been so different (although she’s clearly also a psychopath, which probably helps). And things in the bunker have changed in her brief absence. Xavier’s act of rebellion has incensed the population, and led by Jeremy, there’s a growing youth movement of dissent. Since Xavier took the fall for Sinatra’s shooting, Jane has been branded a hero and promoted, while Nicole has been demoted and is left largely in charge of keeping Presley and James safe. The former is still having clandestine communications with Jeremy, while the latter is mostly pining after his dad.
And there’s a new president, a blistering moron named Henry Baines, who thinks the best way to placate the people is to reintroduce varying seasons. It’s not the worst idea in the world, but you can tell he thinks it’s the best thing anyone has ever come up with. Unfortunately, he can’t do it, since a huge amount of power is being siphoned from the bunker to facilitate Sinatra’s special project.
Sinatra denies this. She even passes a polygraph test, proving that she knows nothing about it. But she does know about it, obviously; she’s just able to pass a polygraph, for reasons that are hinted at later. Either way, Sinatra isn’t seen to be doing a great deal directly in Paradise Season 2, Episode 3, which is kind of the point, since it’s all about establishing how she’s still pulling the strings – how she has been pulling the strings the whole time – despite the change in the status quo.
Hence, more flashbacks. Some of them involve Billy Price, showing us how Sinatra initially recruited him to her cause by enlisting him to retrieve a technology for her special project that its custodian wouldn’t be inclined to give to her. There’s a profound note of tragedy to everything involving this guy, and even to Billy’s assassination of him. The only bargain the man makes is that Billy leaves his protege alone. His protege? A beardless Link, explaining how he knew about the bunker (and why he’s out for revenge).
Billy and Sinatra had a code. If she gave him a name and photograph and told him the person needed a breath mint, he’d take them out, no questions asked. This seems like a pointless detail until later, when Sinatra tells Jane, who is working personal protection for the new president himself, that Baines needs a breath mint. Jane is still working for Sinatra, fulfilling the role that Billy once did. And part of that role is getting the new president out of the way.
The only person who has even an inclination that something might be amiss with Sinatra is Nicole, who pores over her heavily redacted file and sees the acronym “CIA”, which is never a good sign (and probably explains the polygraph thing). But this only positions her as an ideal patsy for Jane. When she kills President Baines, she frames Nicole for the assassination, maintaining her own cover and taking two potentially problematic players off the board at once.
Now, it seems like Sinatra has a clear run for ultimate power in the bunker and free rein for whatever her special project entails. In Xavier’s absence, who’s going to stop her?
