The Link and Alex Connection

Well, when Samantha Redmond mysteriously says, “It was never just about the bunker,” it’s best to believe her. Season two of Paradise finally returns to said bunker, only to reveal there is something much bigger and, to me, a person who does not have a degree in quantum physics, much more complicated going on down there. That’s right, it looks like Paradise might actually be about time travel? Or a multiverse situation? As the late great Billy Pace (who returns in some flashbacks) so eloquently states it, “Fuck if I know.” The show is short on details at this point, as is its way, but dots are beginning to connect, and that’s not nothing.

When Samantha Redmond wakes up from her coma it’s been about a month since Wii stan Jane shot her in order to stop Xavier from shooting Samantha in the head during last season’s big finale standoff. (“You’re no use to me if you’re dead” is such a sweet sentiment, no?) In her absence and following the death of President Cal Bradford, the dopey VP Baines has assumed command. He’s doing things like hanging posters with his big face on them around town, disappearing anyone who dissents to a secret prison, and trying to figure out ways to distract the general public so they stop leading pesky insurrections against him and the billionaires. Wild, huh?

Since Xavier blasted the news via digital skywriting that Samantha and the other bunker leaders are big lying liars, Jeremy Bradford, Cal’s son, has taken up the cause. He and his friends are spray-painting red Xes all over town in honor of Xavier, who decided to take the fall for shooting Samantha before he took off for Atlanta in order to keep Jane clean, whom he still believed to be a nonfactor. (Robinson has ever-growing reservations.) In his infinite wisdom, Baines wants to distract bunker citizens by giving them something he thinks they’ll really like: summer. That’s right, he wants to crank up the temperature about ten degrees for a few months and let people feel some summer warmth. He is told by more than one person that this isn’t feasible. A big portion of the electrical power generated by the nuclear reactors they use to power the bunker is siphoned off for Samantha’s mysterious side project. No one has any details about what that project is, exactly. As Baines pushes, Anders, the man we met in season one who designed the bunker, gets more direct: The energy load in this place is already maxed out, and if you try to increase it, it will lead to a meltdown; he adds in sweet nothings like “You absolute dipshit” and “Are you fucking stupid?” before he inevitably gets dragged off to that secret prison. No one speaks to the president like that. He is a very important man, didn’t you know?

Baines hauls Samantha in directly from the hospital and hooks her up to the lie detector for questioning. He has Gabi run the questions in the room, a job she seems to relish. Their friendship imploded last season, and Gabi has yet to forgive Samantha for, you know, being evil. She tries to rattle her with her baseline questions, which, yes, includes asking about her dead son. Hell hath no fury like a therapist scorned. Finally, to the juicy stuff: She asks Samantha if she has a project that is siphoning energy from the bunker for her own personal gain. When Samantha coolly responds no more than once, Baines can’t take it. He bursts into the room and starts yelling at her to respect him! This tactic doesn’t elicit much of a response either, except for Samantha to note that Baines needs a breath mint. Hey, it makes Jane (who is totally on Samantha’s side, she told her) smile.

If you’re paying attention to the flashbacks, Samantha technically isn’t lying. Like most of her plans, whatever project she’s keeping secret at least starts out not as something for her own personal gain, but as a way to save the world. Paradise takes us back to the conference we saw in season one, when Samantha first saw Dr. Louge’s presentation on the caldera eruption and the end of the world. This time, we get to see her conversation with Dr. Louge, and if you can believe it, the news actually gets worse. He tells Samantha that the eruption and the global tsunami and the ash cloud are all just the first act of the apocalypse.

Louge goes on to explain the Venus Syndrome. (You can also look up the “runaway greenhouse effect,” if you’re into it.) The cooling will stop, and things will stabilize after a few years (we’ve seen this play out in Annie’s story), and everyone will believe that they’ve made it through the worst part. But trapped greenhouse gases will increase the heat slowly at first, then all at once — it will get so hot the oceans evaporate and eventually the pressure “crushes everything still standing.” Louge sums it up nicely: “Anyone still around for that will wish they died on the very first day.” When Samantha asks how to go about fixing that problem, Louge laughs. The only way to fix it is with something even she cannot buy: time. I don’t know, Louge; Don’t threaten Samantha Redmond with a good time.

So what does she do about a seemingly unsolvable problem? On the night Cal Bradford is elected to the presidency, she is already working on this side project in addition to the Colorado bunker, but she’s hit a roadblock, she tells Cal’s dad. Again, everyone is speaking in vague terms, but there is someone with technology so important “the fate of the world depends on it,” and the person with that tech won’t sell it to her. She’s made generous offers, yet he won’t budge. Kane Bradford tells Samantha it’s time she took a different approach.

Kane sets Samantha up with an assassin and that assassin is … Billy Pace. It’s like a little evil billionaire–contract killer meet-cute! All Samantha wants is for this tech guy, Henry Miller, to sign a contract giving her his company, but if he can’t do that, well, she’s embarrassed to ask, but yes, Billy would have to kill Henry. Billy finds Henry at a bar, and they have a nice chat. He’s a professor and he teaches a course called “Advanced Wave Functions, Superposition, and Quantum Entanglement.” He has a genius protégé whom he thinks of as a son and who is his partner in his business, Vestige Quantum. When Billy passes him the contract and tells him to sign it, or else, Henry tells him that “there’s a lot that you don’t know” and, curiously, asks him if he thinks things happen for a reason. Instead of signing the contract, Henry writes down an address.

Billy shows up at that address the next day, and it’s Henry’s house. He has Billy follow him back to his bedroom where his wife, Alex (!!), is in bed, semi-unconscious. She has Huntington’s disease. Things are getting weird. He injects something into Alex’s IV, and it kills her. He talks to Billy about things happening for a reason. He is choosing to believe that Billy is supposed to be here with him and Alex. He is “choosing to believe that it all worked.” And if all of this is in fact true, then Billy will need a tissue. He tells Billy to promise that when his protégé shows up, Billy won’t kill him. He is adamant. “The fate of the world may depend on it,” he says. Billy shoots him in the head. When Billy steps back out into the living room, his nose is bleeding. He did need that tissue. Henry’s protégé, the genius kid who is like a son to him, walks in the door, and Billy tells him to run away from here and that this is the luckiest day of his life — he is going to let him live. That genius kid is Link. Paradise is slowly connecting dots here. Now, it makes sense that Link has a Caltech student ID and that he knows about Alex — what Henry named his tech — in the bunker. There’s more and more evidence that all these nosebleeds and headaches have something to do with Alex. I mean, sure, there are more questions than answers, but there seems to be, at least, some sort of destination for this season.

All the Link and nosebleeds and Alex tech will have to wait — we have more bunker issues to deal with. That flashback ends with Billy informing Samantha that Henry is gone and the company and the tech are hers, and she inquires about using his services in the future. Billy tells her to cool her jets and also that all she need do is send a name and picture and tell him they “need a breath mint.” All of this, of course, means that, well, for one, Samantha is into contract killing now and, two, that line about Baines needing a breath mint wasn’t some offhand insult, it was an order for her other assassin, who happened to be in the room — Jane.

And wouldn’t you know? Jane has charmed her way into being Baine’s favorite secret-service agent, and that evening, she is the only one he’ll allow to come with him on his much-needed jog around the neighborhood. The guy is stressed and hasn’t had one moment of privacy since becoming so important and powerful, you know?? It’s like two minutes into their run when Jane slits Baine’s throat. In a fortunate turn of events for our psycho killer, Robinson has grown more and more curious about Jane — things just don’t add up with her. Her entire file is redacted. Her statement about Billy and his death doesn’t make any sense. When she learns Jane is alone with Baine, she goes to find her. Jane sees her coming, strangles her until she’s unconscious, and then frames her for Baine’s death. She pulled off the hit for Samantha with some real flair.

While that obstacle in the way of Samantha’s “side project” has been handled, she isn’t really in the clear. Jeremy gets himself tossed into the secret prison so he can chat with Anders about how to “blow the fucking doors open” on the bunker. Meanwhile, Gabi bugged Samantha’s office using the pretense of an official friend breakup to get a framed photo with a listening device on her desk, and now she can hear Samantha talking to her “housekeeper” Carmen about the current status of Alex. (Carmen’s response: “She is getting closer.”) Oh, and perhaps most telling, we’re back on the emo ’80s-music covers. Not to go all Venus Syndrome on you, but things are really heating up in that bunker.