After two long weeks of work, its always the same every time I have to implement something at work it just burn me down to the point I disconnect from everything for a few days, including Hive. So over the weekend I catch up on multiple series I have been wanting to watch, one of them been Paradise and it did not disappoint, even though this is a Hulu series similar to my expectations from anything Peacock related, it still a good series. The series begins as a standard political thriller about a Secret Service agent and the President of the United States, but it turns into something else entirely as you start watching, its already on episode 3 so I don't think this will be any spoiler.
- IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt32411552/
- Platform: HULU
Sterling K Brown stars as Secret Service agent Xavier Collins who has to come to grips with the murder of President Cal Bradford played by James Marsden, and this is where things get interesting since he is the last person who saw the president and on top they had this love hate relationship going on. The show does start building tension as it goes, giving us pieces of information through flashbacks that show us how Collins and Bradford’s relationship began as a professional one and then became something personal, but complicated.
From the first moment, what really drew me in was that the show doesn't try to be over the top in presenting itself, it's about creating this little bit of a feeling that perhaps there's something off about the world that we are watching and it took me a few minutes starting with the ducks, robot ducks at the pawn. Even the suburban setting feels just too good, that old 50s commercial where everything is just a little off, you know there is something going on. The relationship between Collins and Bradford is definitely the strongest element of the show and both actors deliver great performance bringing their A game to create a complex dynamic beyond the usual "agent who protects president at all cost" scenario.
The series is set in what seem to be a extremely clean classic American town from the 60s, everything was just too neat and clean. Xavier lives with his two kids, Presley and James, he works at the president detail but soon I start to understand not only that the town they live in seems synthetic but also the amount of people in it, its when he goes to the President mansion with only 3 agents inside and two outside to guard the President, but it makes complete sense when you reach the end of the episode. Xavier finds Bradford dead in his bedroom and the murder investigation kicks off, but from then on we begin to get more pieces of the puzzle, which is much bigger than just who killed the president.
Brown’s performance as Xavier is really where the episode shines, he strikes me as the funny guy but during the entire episode he is sad, angry and tries not to smile, as we see a man who is obviously dealing with personal loss while trying to keep his professional composure. The flashbacks show how he got the job and Bradford is dead honest about how he wanted to hire him partly because he’s Black and it would look good for a Southern politician. These moments also help to set up both character and their relationship.
Even if you're not sure where the story is going, the writing manages to keep you engaged wanting to discover more about it. The dialogue is natural, the character interactions are believable; although a bit predictable but not entire, and there is this certain amount of tension building as the episode goes that something larger is taking place. Potential suspects in Bradford’s death are revealed to be Agent Robinson, who was having an affair with the president and a series of security breaches that took place the night of the murder making things way more interesting.
Closer to the end of the episode is when the Sci Fi aspect of the series kicks in hard when we realize this whole story isn’t happening on the surface of the world we know, but rather in an underground city built beneath Colorado’s mountains. But this was humanity's last resort, this vast shelter was built in case of an extinction level event and it had artificial sunlight and robot ducks in the ponds to keep the illusion of normality, same as other artificial sounds that make things feel more natural. This twist changes everything we have seen before and gives context to all the oddities we had seen throughout the episode.
We understand by the ending that Xavier has a grudge against Bradford for something that happened to his wife when people were chosen to live in this underground city, its this context, the last words between them, when Xavier tells Bradford he will only forgive him when he can sleep again and when he can sleep again he'll be dead, its just bait for the audience to think he killed the President but its obvious he didn't, Xavier is the hero of the story. There is also the fact that after the President death, there is missing a tablet that has all human kind secrets until before the end of the world as they know, Xavier left behind what I think is the code to access the tablet, written on a cigarette the number 812092 that Xavier found and only he knows about it but doesn't know where the tablet is.
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