Summary
Paradise Season 2 nails it again in “The Mailman”, another absolutely stellar hour full of powerful sentiment and surprising turns.
Paradise is a really, really good television show. I’ve been thinking about this a lot throughout Season 2, since every episode just keeps nailing it. At first, I was worried that I’m just a sucker for the Dan Fogelman brand of schmaltz, which remains a possibility, since the previous chapter laid it on really thick. And there’s some of that in Episode 5, “The Mailman”, too. But the real genius of this hour is that it uses those expectations to deliver a killer fake-out, redirecting all that accumulated sentiment into a last-minute heel-turn cliffhanger that recontextualises most of what we’ve seen. What was excitement becomes worry instantaneously, and what was a grand plan for a romantic, action-packed reunion becomes a slightly terrifying proposition.
As ever, things are divided between the present day and flashbacks; the structure ping-pongs between the two, but in a neat inversion of the norm, what we see is predominantly set in the past, with occasional jaunts to the present to build more suspense around those historical events. I won’t recap it quite like that, since the text would be all over the place, but some flitting back and forth is unavoidable. You’ll see what I mean as we go.
But the past. At the end of the previous episode, Xavier met a man who claimed to have been Teri’s best friend for the last three years. This is Gary, the titular mailman, and we meet him as a friendless loser who is nonetheless the sweetest guy who has ever lived. He had a dead-end job and spent most of his time online gaming with his virtual best friend, “Normus P*Ennis”, but he was well-intentioned and decent. You like Gary immediately, which is perhaps just as well, since he’s the focal character for basically the entire episode.
Gary and Ennis learned about the bunker conspiracy through the manifesto of the guy who tried to assassinate Cal Bradford in Season 1 (and ultimately succeeded, if memory serves). The idea of surviving an apocalypse became a thought experiment. They’d have to assemble a team of specialists and stockpile supplies. Ennis was an engineer (supposedly), but while Gary didn’t have any special skills of his own, he could offer something even more important. During the Cold War, many American post offices were fitted with nuclear fallout shelters, including the one Gary worked at. This provided a home base as the world really did end.
It was quite by chance that Gary and Ennis picked up Bean, a kid from Gary’s mail round with neglectful, junkie parents, and again entirely by chance that Bean attracted Teri, who happened to be standing in the street when Gary and Ennis went to collect some eggs. Gary reflexively invited Teri to the bunker, too. And there she stayed for three years, against the wishes of Ennis, who considered her another mouth to feed.
In the present-day scenes in Paradise Season 2, Episode 5, Gary explains this to Xavier. He also tells him that his best friend — meaning Ennis — gave their location to some bad actors, some of whom came and kidnapped Teri and Bean. He knows where they are, but lacks the skills to mount a rescue effort, since he’s just a mailman. Xavier, however, is not.
In hindsight, it’s kind of obvious that there’s something slightly amiss with Gary’s story. But you’re supposed to root for him. You’re supposed to like and trust him, as Teri did, since the scenes of the two of them bonding in the past are really lovely. They celebrate Christmas with Bean, fashioning a tree and passing around presents grabbed from the unsent packages left over in the post office. Time passes. Bean gets taller. The chickens grow (and get eaten), a relationship blossoms between two of the survivors, Jackie and Crystal, and an evolving mural depicting all of the survivors becomes more and more fleshed out. Ennis, meanwhile, keeps sulking, eventually so much so that he destroys the radio Gary built for Teri to contact Xavier.
Everything Gary is saying tracks with what we’re seeing. There’s even a moment where Gary makes a bit of a fool of himself by meeting Teri’s hug with an attempted smooch, but she lays out her boundaries, and they move forward as friends — nay, partners — after that. Gary’s analysis of Ennis being frightened of people leaving the shelter, of ceasing to feel as powerful as he now feels being ostensibly “in charge” of the group, rings true. There’s no reason to doubt someone as impossibly earnest as Gary.
But holes begin to develop. Gary tells Xavier that Teri is being held in a train yard, and when he and Xavier scope the place out, Xavier recognises that they seem to be guarding something. But what? When we see Gary and Ennis meet this group in the past, nothing about their behaviour suggests they’d be capable of kidnapping a woman and a little boy. They’re just passing through, refuelling the train with the renewable diesel at a nearby military base. They’re on their way to Chicago, mostly minding their own business.
It takes a while for the penny to drop, but it does eventually. Xavier plans to build a bomb to use as a distraction to lure the group away so he can rescue Teri. For that, he needs a working battery and some other supplies, which are acquired via a swap meet, where he meets Jackie and Crystal, who agree to take care of “Annie’s Baby” — which is what Xavier is calling the kid — until he returns. Xavier knows Gary is hiding something, but he eventually confesses that he was in love with Teri. She never felt the same, though, so the only thing he can do now is help Xavier get her back. He and Xavier shake hands.
But Gary is lying! In the flashback, we see that after meeting the train group, he realized that Teri and Bean would leave with them to get to Colorado, which is where they were planning to head on their own. Ennis, who never liked Teri much anyway, was keen on the idea. He couldn’t wait to tell her, even though it would leave him and Gary on their own again. Gary, though, didn’t want that, so he shot Ennis dead to keep the secret to himself.
Bean, however, saw what happened. So, we can logically infer that Bean tipped Teri off about what happened and that she and Bean fled for their own safety, finding refuge with the train group. They are guarding something — they’re guarding Teri and Bean from Gary. And now Xavier is going to lead Gary right to them.
