Paradise “Wildcat Is Down”

I wasn’t really planning on going to Paradise next.  I saw the banner image on Disney+, and I didn’t know what it was but Sterling K. Brown was there with James Marsden, even if I didn’t quite recognize Brown (an actor I like) because he was clean-shaven for once.  Then I saw Ryan and Watson raving about it, so sure, why not check it out?

One episode in, and I am truly glad I did.

Let me explain it thusly:  this is a show that started off looking like one really impressive sort of show where Brown’s Xavier Collins, a Secret Service Agent assigned to guard American President Cal Bradford (Marsden), shows up at work to find the President shot in the head and dead in his own bedroom.  That, by itself, is quite the hook.  There’s a lot of things happening here in this first episode.  Flashbacks show that Cal was kind of an asshole that Collins once took a bullet for but that now can’t forgive for some as-yet unrevealed reason, and Collins seems to be a single father of two kids.  I can see Collins’s not getting along with Cal for a number of reasons, but why isn’t Cal in the White House?

Well, it looks like he’s a former president since it’s five years after the flashbacks started when Cal picked Collins for his head of security, and Cal said he’d just started his second term.  So yeah, he’s a former president unless I misunderstood what was going on.  Plus, it’s not like Cal is short on enemies considering someone in the press corps took a shot at him, he has an estranged wife, and yeah, he’s an abrasive guy trying too hard to be cool.

Oh, and there was a part of me that thought Marsden might be too young to be president, but the guy’s, like, my age.  He’s old enough.  He just looks too young and handsome to be president.

So, the president, or ex-president, is dead.  Collins finds the body.  There’s some suspicious activity.  Security footage didn’t see anything because someone sabotaged the feed while the nightshift agent took a nap.  Collins doesn’t want to report what happened right away before he and the nightshift guy, Billy Pace, do a quick recon to find some clues without taking notes, and Collins might have been the last guy to see him alive.  So far, this is a good murder mystery, and if the show never went any further than that, it would probably still be a great show if it can hold the quality of the pilot for the long haul.

And then the other shoe dropped, one that raised more questions than answers, but the questions they raised were less about who killed the president so much as what’s actually going on with this setting.  Towards the end of the episode, there’s some hints of an extinction-level event.  And then that other shoe?  The entire setting isn’t some small resort town where the president has property he got after he left office.  No, it’s an underground city with artificial sunlight (and ducks, that’s kind of a bummer actually).

What the hell?

That ending comes in pretty much out of nowhere.  It leads me to believe the unforgivable thing Cal did was secure a spot in Paradise for Collins and his kids, but Collins’s never-seen wife?  She didn’t make it would be my guess.  And yeah, that would explain why someone in the press corps took a shot at Cal.  I would even wager Cal might be responsible for some of the horrors that happened, or at least the living conditions underground.  I may or may not find out why they’re living underground, but the whys and hows could prove fruitful.  How many people are down there?  Where do they get their food from?  Are there other underground cities like this one?

Oh yeah, I’m in for this.