Paradise “Sinatra”

How is it a show features the murder of the American president, and it is somehow the less compelling mystery going on here?

Consider how well the murder of President Cal “Asshole” Bradford was, and the more I learn about the guy, the less I like him.  Xavier may be the top suspect at first, as opposed to the female agent Cal was sleeping with, but it doesn’t last long.  As it is, this episode spends more time looking at Samantha “Sinatra” Redmond, the super-wealthy woman who started building this underground city 12 years before the president’s murder.  Considering Xavier only learned about the impending apocalypse maybe a year ago, and Xavier only met Bradford about five years before, this has been a long time coming.

Now, by episode’s end, Xavier has decided Sinatra is his top suspect because she has the most power in this community and he has a gut feeling about her.  Could she?  Well, sure.  But the episode seems more inclined to make her a remarkably human and even sad character, a self-made tech billionaire that met her husband at a bar when she went out to celebrate her big sell-off, and she seems particularly attached to her daughter when her son dies of an unnamed illness, the sort of thing that shows there are some things money can’t buy.

Meanwhile, whatever ended the world is only kinda hinted at.  Bradford’s son Jeremy takes Xavier’s daughter Presley up to the hanger where the planes that transported the survivors are sitting.  Will I see the outside world?  Something happened involving a bright light, and Sinatra attended some kind of TED talk where a shaggy-haired scientist was talking about the impending apocalypse.  The only thing that I could hear was something about mass liver failure among the world’s livestock.

I don’t think I am going to find out what happened to end the world, mostly because it more or less doesn’t matter.  Since Bradford was killed, the closed environment means there’s a very limited number of suspects, and the episode does show a bit of what life’s like around this underground city.  I am very invested in seeing more of this setting, and I think the series knows that.

But it still has a really compelling mystery involved in the center, especially as the series seems intent on setting Sinatra and Xavier against each other on some level.  Why would Sinatra have Cal killed?  I mean, there are probably a dozen reasons since he’s, like, the worst guy.  But on the other, the show has given much of an impression that Sinatra is a bad person just yet as this episode seems more intent on showing her as a concerned mother who did this, in part, to ensure that her surviving child continued to survive.

Will I be more interested in the murder or the apocalypse going forward?  Now that is an interesting question.