Paradise “In The Palaces Of Crowned Kings”

Oh, well, that changes quite a bit.

After last week’s rather cliched end, where Billy learned his girlfriend Jane was the other killer working for Sinatra right after promising Xavier he would tell him everything in the morning, this episode does what Paradise seems to be doing best:  going back and filling in what happened before to explain a couple things.  Why did Cal tell Gabriela to warn Xavier about Billy Pace?  Was Cal really as shallow as he appeared to be?

Well, yes and no.  He’s someone whose wealthy (and now showing signs of senility) father Kane more or less determined the entire path of his son’s life, and since he was an oil baron, he was instrumental in building Paradise for the survivors.

By the way, Paradise has a “no pets” rule, but one of Xavier’s neighbors has a cute lapdog.  Yeah, I think I’d try to sneak my pet in as well.  Pets are a responsibility.  Take care of them.

However, the thing is, Cal found out there were files he didn’t have access to, largely made suspicious by how his father kept calling Billy “sniper,” and used his father’s handprint to see what Sinatra decided the President of What’s Left of the United States wasn’t meant to see.  So, Cal learns that Billy is an assassin, Sinatra is preventing people from finding out there are other survivors, and he’s going to tell the people the truth.

Honestly, there’s a part of me that thinks that this is perhaps the dumbest thing Cal could have done, but this episode avoids that because it A) shows a bit about how Cal wasn’t allowed to do what he really wanted to do, and B) while he did confront Sinatra to her face, where he moves to do the right thing and maybe get on his son’s good side, he does so seemingly with the knowledge that he’s going to possibly get killed over this whole thing.

As such, his talk with Gabriela makes sense as he tells her that he only really trusts Xavier if something happens and to watch out for Billy.  Basically, Billy is the only assassin Cal knows about, but he’s smart enough to know the rest of his security team might also be compromised in certain ways, and since Jane is also a killer, he wasn’t wrong.

The big difference is Xavier, he finds a way to tweak Sinatra’s nose without tipping his hat as to who he is.  That would be my guess because Xavier isn’t a knucklehead like Billy or Cal who think their own power or skills will be enough to defy the woman who’s running the city behind the scenes.

Plus, it does seem as if Sinatra’s reasons aren’t 100% the ideas of a madwoman or someone who only has bad intentions, but I’ll see how that turns out, probably soon.