If It Winds Like A Duck: The Mysteries of ‘Paradise’

You’ve seen Paradise or its like before, it seems at first: dedicated Secret Service agent, check; the dissolute President he’s sworn to protect, check; a hard-riding superior with unclear motives, his loving but motherless children, his sloppy underling, check, check, check. But you probably haven’t seen our hero, Agent Collins (Sterling K. Brown), running past what at second glance appears to be a creek, but isn’t deep enough to go over the shoes of the man who stands in it, winding by hand—a duck.

It takes a good while, in the show’s first episode, before we get to the clockwork duck. Up till that point, Paradise has served well enough as a standard political thriller. Agent Collins is a bodyguard that the President hand-picked, we learn from a series of flashbacks. President Cal Bradford (James Marsden), a walking frat-house of a man, drinks too much, and is sleeping with the head of his Secret Service detail, Agent Robinson (Krys Marshall). Things kick off in high gear, when Collins comes to the President’s mansion—not the White House, mind you—one morning, only to find the President shot in the head, sprawled in a pool of his own blood.

Some Deep State skullduggery ensues, with Collins going through questioning as a suspect, and Robinson, who’d been with the President earlier that night, starting off the interrogation. But then somehow Dr. Gabriela Torabi (Sarah Shahi), the President’s therapist, is there to intervene, which doesn’t seem like standard protocol: Was part of you happy that the President died, she asks. He sits there, boggled, until she flashes her hand at him, scrawled with the words SAY YES. He says Yes. They let him go. And that’s when the show really begins, and starts to kick off its standard thriller gear for something more exotic but no less gritty.

Agent Robinson, it transpires, doesn’t ultimately report to anyone in the government proper, but to Samantha (Julianne Nicholson), AKA Sinatra, who is as wealthy and powerful as she is unscrupulous (as though that needs saying). The show has teased us with a few flashbacks here and there, mostly about the tensions between Agent Collins and President Cal, but when they turn to Sinatra we get the real story. She lost a child to a terrible disease, despite her wealth. Years ago, she became privy to information that made clear humanity, maybe even Earth itself, was doomed. And so she took measures, to ensure the survival of herself and her one living child. Her dead son’s final vision of a place full of hobby-horses would be their world.

I won’t outright give away the twist that makes Paradise so compelling. There are plenty of other reviews that do, most starting with the duck. It’s enough to say that the show begins as a twisty political thriller. And it stays one throughout, adding complications as a bizzaro surveillance-state psychodrama. Everybody in it is convincing and sympathetic, though I give special props to Jon Beavers as Collins’s underling Agent William “Billy” Pace, who gives life to the agony in Just Following Orders, especially for one who only late in life has learned how to love. That tension between love and duty plays out on his face, in the coiled weapon of his body. He’s pure will. But no single will is enough against the power of the machine.

It’s the machine, in the end, that Collins and Billy strive against, but it engulfs them. We see them in surveillance shots again and again; we see Collins on the tiny monitor of an interrogation room, his face set and hard; we see Billy struggling for breath as his lover quotes back to him the words he spat at Sinatra in defiance. The machine has predetermined their lives, orchestrated them down to the slightest move: there is no room for improvisation. They are trapped. The question, then, is whether in the season’s four remaining episodes, Collins, especially, forever a company man, will decide on revolution.