Paradise “The Architect of Social Well-Being”

Well, I never expected to see Sterling K. Brown’s bare ass on Disney+, but it is a Hulu show.

I said a lot last time about how the setting for this show seems a lot more interesting to me.  This episode doesn’t do quite so much, instead having Xavier go off to ask Cal’s therapist Dr. Torabi some questions since she fed him an answer during his polygraph.  The results is she asks him as many questions as he asks her, maybe pulling an Hannibal Lecter-style quid pro quo, revealing a bit about how Xavier’s relationship with his late father, a pilot that Xavier forced out of his job due to his Parkinson’s Disease, and then by episode’s end, the two are sharing a shower.

Huh.  That was a wee bit abrupt.

It should be noted that Torabi has connections to a lot of other characters.  She was the one trying to help Sinatra Redmond move on from the death of her son.  She was President Bradford’s therapist, as mentioned.  She’d even met Xavier before, and it was her recommendation that got Xavier the presidential detail, not Cal’s being a somewhat callous jackass.  The callous jackass bit was an act, maybe?  Huh.

I seem to be saying “huh” a lot for this episode.

As it is, Xavier’s focus on Torabi means that his buddy, Agent Billy Pace, has to try to cover for all kinds of stuff going on with the murder investigation.  Billy has been portrayed, up until this point, as something of a big goofball, and the fact that he has something going on with a female agent who was maybe covering for his habit of napping.  It just turned out the big secret was she was using the president’s Nintendo because he got all the top of the line stuff before the world ended.  That just fits with the character that Billy has been depicted as all this time.

You know, until Torabi tells Xavier that, in the event of Bradford’s death, she had a message for him:  Billy Pace is apparently dangerous.  Cut to Billy with a gun outside Xavier’s house.

Oh man, that’s creepy and…why did Torabi pass this message along as soon as she and Xavier stepped out of the shower?  They’re all naked and wet and whatnot, they were just having shower sex in the sort of shower that looks like it was designed for shower sex, not like real showers where there isn’t a lot of room for that sort of thing, and the nozzle’s placement means only one of the two people in there are probably getting wet.  I mean, do you have a shower that nice?  Or were you so distracted by Sterling K. Brown’s bare ass to notice the shower?  It just felt like the most awkward pillow talk of all time, I guess.

Well, if that’s the way things are in the underground city of Paradise, all I have to say is…huh.