Paradise Recap: Making a Scene

Do we think the team at Paradise knew how satisfying it would be at this moment in time to watch a group of citizens so sick and tired of being lied to and controlled by a group of evil billionaires that they finally decide to do something about it? Because I have to tell you, even in an episode with a few wildly infuriating character choices (Gabriela, Presley), “You Asked for Miracles” is deeply satisfying. Sure, we don’t know how Xavier and Robinson’s play against Samantha is going to work out just yet — there are some significant hiccups! — but just seeing Samantha “I’m not a monster, I’m a mother” Redmond squirm a bit really gets me going. Xavier wants to make a scene, and at the very least, the chaos he’s creating is throwing the billionaires off-balance.

So how did we get here? Well, Xavier Collins goes real John McClane on Samantha’s ass. Thank goodness for everyone that Xavier took some time during the three years in the mountain to watch Die Hard after Cal Bradford recommended it to him in the Oval right before the end of the world. It’s honestly big of Xavier to watch a movie recommended by someone he hated at the time — and not just watch it once, but watch it enough times to be able to quote it while trying to overthrow his corrupt government. Maybe it became his comfort watch after his wife’s death. Grief does strange things to us all. And the mountain bunker is basically Nakatomi Plaza if you think about it, so even if Paradise does mix up the Die Hard metaphor it’s pushing pretty hard by having Cal compare Xavier to the calm, calculating villain Hans Gruber when X is clearly the McClane in this scenario, the whole thing mostly works. In a flashback, when Xavier’s wife Teri talks to him about the power simply making a scene can have and how she knows he is a calm, reserved person but that one day he will hit his limit and be forced to make a scene, and how she would “not want to be the motherfucker on the other side of it,” it’s all very John McClane–coded.

In the present timeline, we know Xavier has hit that limit. In fact, with his nifty takeover of the sky, he’s already started making a pretty big scene, and he’s not done yet. The episode is a game of cat and mouse, with Xavier and his team making moves and Samantha trying to figure out his plan and stop him before he starts espousing his theories about Samantha’s involvement in Cal and Billy’s murders. If these accusations see the light of (fabricated) day, Samantha knows her secret about people surviving on the surface will come out, too. Everything will come out.

Samantha is losing her shit, by the way. Only Julianne Nicholson could swing so wildly from Woman Worried She Is Going to Lose Everyone She Loves When Her Secret Is Exposed to Villian Who Chillingly Tells Her Closest Friend She Has Been Spying on Her and Knows Exactly Who She Fucked in Her Shower and still feel like a human. Once Samantha learns Xavier and Robinson have stolen the entire weapons cache — they leave a “now I have all the guns ho-ho-ho” note, in case you were wondering how far the Die Hard stuff goes — she strong-arms Gabriela to “talk to her man” and figure out what he’s doing. You’d think Gabriela would be so appalled at the violation of privacy and trust and also remember how one of the last things the president did before he was murdered was make it a point to tell her that Xavier Collins was the only person he trusted and in turn inform Samantha that she can get bent, but alas, Samantha has a hold over our resident therapist, and she heads off to do her bidding.

Sterling K. Brown is so great in this diner scene. He’s cooly chowing down on some not-steak and makes a deeply unsettling comparison between cows being corralled into small spaces where they eventually willingly walk into slaughter and what Samantha has done to the 25,000 remaining citizens of the United States. When Gabriela feeds Xavier the “she’s not a monster” party line on Samantha — seriously, shouldn’t Samantha be devoted to Gabriela for pulling her from the pits of despair and not the other way around? — he doesn’t get agitated or unload his anger on her. He asks simple questions, needling her about why Samantha might want to kill President Bradford and Billy Pace. He asks her what Samantha thinks of the changes he made to the sky. “She’s trying to take it down,” she tells him. “Yeah, no shit,” he responds before casually cleaning off his steak knife and cutting that fun li’l tracker bracelet everyone has to wear (that should’ve been the first sign conditions weren’t exactly on the up-and-up, no?) right off his wrist. “Tell your girl I’m coming for her,” he says to Gabriela before leaving. I applauded. Get yours, dude!

When Gabriela reports back, Samantha realizes Xavier knew she’d send somebody for him and that he knows every move she’s going to make before she does it, and things start to unravel quickly. While Xavier and Robinson arm a team of people they trust and Xavier gives a rousing speech about justice for Cal and Billy and an end to the lies, the message in the sky changes to “DO YOU WANT TO KNOW THE TRUTH?” Samantha is panicking at this point. There’s no way to get into the system and stop the program without shutting down the entire sky. (Carl is very good at his job.) Gabriela advocates strongly against this; breaking “the illusion of world” would set everyone back three years in their attempt to move on from their old lives. There’d be no denying that they live under a cave, that the world ended, that they endured unspeakable trauma to get where they are now. Possibly even more concerning: If they reboot the entire system, there’s no guarantee they can turn it back on. Knowing all of this and seeing that Samantha is still considering doing it finally makes Gabriela realize that Xavier is onto something. Unfortunately for everyone, Gabriela thinks their disagreement is something that Samantha and Xavier could work out through a conversation. I fear Gabriela is actually a terrible therapist. Read the room, lady! Or, like, read the sky, at least. We are way past conversation. The fact that she doesn’t push Samantha to tell her what Xavier has on her is concerning.

Meanwhile, Xavier and Robinson — who, along with the rest of the team they’ve assembled, has also cut her tracker bracelet off — head to the airplane hangar and grab some of the flares stored in Air Force One. Xavier makes clear that he wants as few people hurt as possible. Again, he wants to make a scene, and he wants to force Samantha to confess, not create a ton of collateral damage. The message in the sky changes one more time: “WHO IS SINATRA?” This time, the message is accompanied by a one-minute countdown clock and the dulcet sounds of Frank Sinatra’s vocals. He is taunting her, and she is spiraling. She hesitates, again, thinking about her family and, no doubt, how she’ll no longer get to hide behind her whole “But I’m a mom!” deal. When the timer runs out, Xavier and his crew send the flares up, directly striking the tower. In the chaos, Samantha calls out to shut everything down. She tells her people to turn off the sky. “Yippee ki yay, mother fucker,” Xavier says, because of course he does.

Turning off the sky and enabling shelter protocol, in which all the high-clearance residents — that roundtable of billionaires, mostly — get whisked off to a secure location is exactly what Xavier knew would happen. He has Samantha’s number, for sure. He did not, however, account for Gabriela. As she, too, is rushed to a car with Samantha and she watches as all the bigwigs and their families file into the secure location, she realizes that Xavier’s whole speech about cows being led to slaughter may have had more than one meaning. They are all running right into his trap. Xavier and Robinson and their team will have complete control over these people, plus it leaves time for Xavier to run over to Samantha’s house and grab the evidence he needs to prove his case. When Xavier arrives outside Samantha’s place, he finds Gabriela waiting for him. She figured out what he was doing, and she warned Samantha. Samantha is waiting inside to talk to Xavier. Gabriela begs him to have a conversation. The city needs to hold, she tells him. Like Samantha, Gabriela is doing everything in her power to protect the citizens in the mountain bunker, albeit in much less homicidal ways. If Gabriela knows all of Samantha’s secrets and is still defending her, it would be wild. I’m hoping this woman makes a team change before this thing is over.

The sky comes back on, and Xavier agrees to talk to Samantha. She still swears she did not kill Cal, although she admits she probably would’ve if he kept digging. She does cop to Billy’s murder. But then she drops the big reveal on him. “Your wife is alive out there, Xavier. And if you stop all this nonsense, I can help you find her.” So not only are there survivors, but Teri is one of them. Maybe. You can never really trust Samantha Redmond, can you? Regardless, if Samantha thinks all the chaos will die down once Xavier calls his plan off, she is in store for a rude awakening. There’s a few other people who now know about the survivors on the surface and what Samantha did to keep that secret: Jeremy Bradford and Presley Collins. Presley found Cal’s tablet in the bushes the night of his death and took it, hoping to learn more about what happened in Atlanta, where her mom was at the time the world ended. When Jeremy has Kane open the tablet for them, they learn that two thermonuclear weapons hit Atlanta … and also the whole thing about the surface survivors. Jeremy takes this information to the streets. There is simply no unringing that bell at this point, no matter what Xavier decides to do with the news that his wife might be alive.

Bunker Notes

• Samantha has one other move to get Xavier to do what she wants: She’s already ordered Jane to track him down. When she can’t find Xavier, she instead makes a play for Presley. She finds Presley out near the tower just as Jeremy begins to address the crowd with the revelation about the surface and tells her she just really wants to hide inside with ice cream to get away from Billy’s death and all the chaos and that she could really use a friend. And Presley just goes with her? Her boyfriend is up there just shattering life as everyone knows it with the truth, the sky is turned off, her dad is clearly in the middle of something wild, and Presley is just like, Okay, yeah, let’s go eat ice cream. I know they used to play Wii together, but this is bonkers.

• When Presley and Jeremy visit Kane to borrow his, uh, fingerprints, she notices the flower on Kane’s bookmark — the one his wife gave him — and recognizes it. The night of Cal’s death, when she took the tablet, she saw someone walking away from the house with that flower on the back of their jacket. Interesting!

• Maybe it’s just me, but I’m not super into this “guns are so cool” personality trait they’ve saddled Robinson with. She’s talked more about how much she loves guns than how much she loved Cal.

• In the before-times timeline, Cal has Xavier walk him through the Versailles Protocol — the safety protocol that will go down once they are in “flee from the end of the world” mode. Cal gets quite stressed when Xavier mentions Teri is leaving for Atlanta that night. We see him make the promise that no matter where she is when shit hits the fan, they’ll pick her up. And you know from that romantic good-bye kiss between Xavier and Teri that this is the last time they’ll see each other. The end is nigh!