Paradise “Another Day In Paradise”

I’m a bit behind on this show ’round these parts, but Watson and Jimmy, as I recall, were both very disappointed with this season, suggesting it would have been better as a single season run.  The first two episodes were fine, seemed to fit in with the series thus far.

Then I watched this episode.

This episode decides to check up on Paradise because Sinatra woke up, and before the flashbacks tells us she learned that the catastrophe from season one was only phase one of the bad things that would make the planet uninhabitable.  Sinatra then opted to do something about it.  Jane seems to be doing this whole “stick to my story or else” bit.  And the former Vice President, now President, is a chuckle-head who thinks the thing to build morale in Paradise is to give the underground city seasons by making the days hotter for a bit like summer.

Talk about solving a problem no one asked for.

Anyway, that guy is dead by the end of the episode, all because Sinatra gave Jane a codeword that led her to lead the dummy for a midnight jog, just the two of them, and then slitting his throat when he stopped to rest, framing another Secret Service agent for the death.  So, that’s two dead presidents in the same underground city within a span of, what, a couple weeks?

That sort of behavior puts Sinatra, a more nuanced character who, yes, was used to control but also wanted control to ensure the survival of Paradise and the people who lived there.  She wasn’t heroic or anything, but she wasn’t a cartoon villain.  Ordering the murder of a president, that’s the work of a cartoon villain.

The flashbacks, showing Sinatra hiring Billy–who I didn’t recognize until I looked him up, part of the problem when there’s a big gap between seasons for the viewer, though Billy in the flashbacks wears a knit hat to probably hold the long-haired wig in place–to kill this quantum scientist who wouldn’t sell his business because he was caring for his dying wife, a fact that was left out of the earlier scenes, and when both are dead, at the dead man’s urging, Billy lets the man’s young protege, Link, go.

The flashbacks are fine, but the other things happening seem to be a bit much.  Jeremy Bradford just arrested off the street and taken to an underground…something.  Bugged rooms.  The whole “idiot president dies” thing.  Sinatra has a codeword she can drop at any time to let people know she wants someone else dead.  It just feels like…a lot.  Like, not a good lot either.  Like this was a much more grounded show, and now there seems to be this idea that Sinatra is part of some secret group running things in the underground city.

Like, this feels like a different, less serious show that is still trying to be the show it was.  It needs a mystery apparently, but I suspected as much.  Season one asked who killed President Bradford.  How do you top the murder of a president, a moment that is the second most shocking moment in the pilot?  There may be no good answers to that, but it looks like it’s trying.

God help me if this gets crazier.