Summary
Paradise Season 2 isn’t at its best in a Jane-focused episode, but it does manage to subvert expectations with the title character’s psychotic backstory.
Paradise has always been resistant to the idea of a simple antagonist. We’ve seen this play out a number of times with even the show’s most deplorable figures; the relatively sympathetic backstories of Billy Pace and Sinatra, and here in Season 2, an entire hour devoted to the tender one-sided love story underpinning Gary’s selfish but nonetheless villainous motivations. It’s easy to assume that Episode 6, “Jane”, is going to do the same for the titular character, but it’s almost the opposite. It proves her general nutcase demeanour was nature over nurture, and she was destined even from childhood to be a monster.
This reversal of expectations is central to the entire episode, since you keep expecting it to try and wrong-foot you, but the real deception is that there’s no redemption on offer. Jane was crazy from the jump, born a minute after midnight and foretold to be a killer like some sort of horror movie demon. Sure, her mother was pretty cold and unfeeling with her on account of the whole soothsaying thing, but one gets the sense that she would have turned out the same either way.
The surprises here are that Jane is even weirder than we expected. Being an immoral killer is one thing, but being an immoral killer who hears voices is a bit of a different proposition. It changes the terms. Jane can’t be reasoned with, bribed, blackmailed, or even understood on the level of a normal, functioning adult. She’s a killer to her very core, and her only ambition is to fulfil that mandate at every given opportunity. And she delights in doing it. You can see it in how she always chooses the nuttier option in any given situation.
This, flashbacks reveal, is a longstanding thing. There’s a brief aside for her spy training at the Farm – that’s the CIA training ground, I believe – that sees her becoming dangerously obsessed with a well-meaning mentor who is overlooked for a promotion in favour of a male colleague. Jane interprets a comment about the man’s penis being the reason – a not-uncommon summarisation of institutional sexism – a little too literally, and decides to remove the offending member to fast-track her meditative pal’s career. This is crazy enough, but she also presents the penis in a gift bag, seemingly earnestly. That’s more than a few sandwiches short of a picnic.
Paradise Season 2, Episode 6 returns us to the bunker for the first time since Episode 3 to remind us why all of this is a big problem – Jane has attached herself to Sinatra. And Sinatra is pulling the strings of everything. It’s a marriage of convenience, since Sinatra is openly terrified of Jane and her obvious psychopathy, but she also needs to get things done, and Jane can keep her safe. It’s the murder equivalent of a meal ticket. Jane wants to keep killing and tormenting people, and the only way she can is by keeping Sinatra in power. And Sinatra isn’t one to look a gift horse in the mouth, especially given how much suspicion is mounting around her, so she’s willing to use Jane as a tool. Thanks to the flashbacks, though, we also know that Jane is beginning to see Sinatra as a replacement for her former CIA mentor. And given the kind of gifts Jane likes to present to people she apparently likes, Sinatra may be on the hook for much more than the Nintendo Switch she gave Jane as a reward for her service thus far.
Despite being named after Jane, this episode doesn’t remain with her entirely. It also spares some time for Robinson, who has been imprisoned for the President’s murder along with Jeremy Bradford, and ultimately ends up helping him enact an escape plan from the prison camp, and it also briefly checks in with Xavier and Gary, as the former finally realizes the latter has set him up. It even ends with Xavier, his ears still ringing from the explosion that Gary tried to kill him with, reuniting with Teri, but we fade to black before we see how that goes, which is annoying.
That’s a point, to be fair. If I had to nitpick – and, of course, I do – I probably wouldn’t have wedged the Xavier stuff in here. After the previous episode benefited so much from the singular focus, a full hour set in the bunker would have likely helped to build anticipation for our eventual return to the outside world. But beggars can’t be choosers. And besides, Jane even ventures into the outside world briefly to invite Link and a few of his men to a private meeting with Sinatra, but, again, that’s a matter for another episode.
“Jane” isn’t the kind of firing-on-all-cylinders episode that Paradise has been capable of in Season 2, not emotionally – as with the gut-punch of Episode 4 – or even narratively, like last week’s tightly-orchestrated chapter. But it is a reminder that this show still has the capacity to surprise in unusual ways, this time by refusing to add too much depth or nuance to Jane despite that depth and nuance being the selling point of the story more often than not. She’s an uncomplicated, irredeemable villain who has now maneuvered herself right into the middle of the drama. I wonder what she’ll do next?
