This post contains spoilers from the Paradise season 1 finale from this point forward.
After a thrilling debut season, Hulu's hit series Paradise dropped its season finale, and the episode provided so many anxiously awaited answers. For starters, we learned who killed President Bradford (James Marsden), which was the inciting incident that rather brutally displayed the foundational cracks in this show's titular underground society.
The last few episodes found Xavier (Sterling K. Brown) fighting back against the leadership regime that hasn't been honest with the residents of Paradise, and that has put him in a very dangerous battle of the wits with Sinatra (Julianne Nicholson). Their tense battle reaches its most shocking fever pitch in the finale, which leaves one life hanging in the balance.
Even though we did receive plenty of answers about our lingering questions, the Paradise season finale connecting all of the dots was a slight let down. Perhaps it's a matter of high expectations or looking for the answers in the most obvious of places, but the season finale's storytelling felt contrived and purposefully misleading to maximize a shock that just didn't payoff.
The librarian killed President Bradford
Sinatra didn't kill President Bradford. Jane (Nicole Brydon Bloom) didn't even kill President Bradford. The person who assassinated Bradford wasn't a character we had spent a significant amount of time with. The reveal came out of left field and was not satisfying, if we're being completely honest. The killer? Paradise's librarian, "Trent" (Ian Merrigan).
His name isn't actually Trent, as we learn through the extensive flashback sequence from 12 years earlier that opens the finale. He's the project manager of the Paradise construction site. He became close with a member of his team from Western Africa, who prefers to be called Adam since others often mispronounce their name. "Trent" seems to also grow into romantic feelings for Adam.
But when Trent discovers that the digsite features toxic materials that will kill his team, he's fired and the architect puts the team back to work in spite of the health hazards. Trent becomes radicalized by the government turning a cold shoulder to the risk and uses a 3D printed gun to attempt an assassination on President Bradford while posing as a member of the press. That's the shooting attempt that hit Xavier instead. Obviously, Trent went to jail.
There's a riot at the jail, and Trent uses the opportunity to again disguise himself and fall in line with the authorities. He tricks the real Trent and his wife Maggie, who are on their way to Paradise, out of their cars and shoots them to death, stealing their identities to get into Paradise. When he becomes the librarian, Trent lets go of his vendetta... until Bradford dropped by the library to make his son a mixtape and leave notes in a book for Xavier.
So, how did the librarian kill President Bradford? He hits him over the head with a heavy metal rod that's on display in the library. The first hit doesn't kill Bradford, and that's when he's able to draw an X on the cigarettes with his blood, but the second whack kills him. See? It's kind of anticlimactic that it was the librarian. Trent ties up Xavier and explains this all to him, and when Robinson (Krys Marshall) cuts Xavier loose, they find Trent before he dives to his death through the sky of Paradise.
No, Sinatra isn't dead
Honestly, it was disappointing to watch the reveal of Bradford's killer because it relied so much on information that we hadn't known in the seven previous episodes. Everything we know about "Trent" was shown and told to us in the opening moments of the season finale. It's just not satisfying. Is it shocking? Sure, it's shocking how unexpected it was. But the librarian being the killer doesn't necessarily add up with everything we had previously seen in real time and other flashbacks.
After dealing with Bradford's killer, Xavier has another matter at hand: Sinatra. She has his daughter, and he wants Presley back and out of danger. Previously in the episode, it had been alluded in text message exchanges between Sinatra and Jane that Jane had killed Presley. (We never actually saw Presley again after Jane grabbed her at Jeremy's rally and they went back to Jane's place.) Xavier kills both of Sinatra's guards and holds her at gunpoint, right on her forehead.
Jane sneaks up behind Xavier and shoots Sinatra in the throat before Xavier can pull the trigger. She informs him that Presley is alive. What were all of those text messages about then? What actually even happened? It's unclear if there's more to the story here, because Xavier simply reconnects with his children. But no, Sinatra does not die. Jane wants her alive in order to have control over her... and to get her Wii back? It's incredibly bizarre, and very a little of this situation makes sense.
Xavier uses Bradford's notes to man one of the planes that were used to bring the citizens to Paradise. He's ready to fly out of the bunker and go find his wife, if she's even really alive. These final moments seem to hint that much of Xavier's story in season 2 will take place outside of the bunker. But we're surely in for more flashbacks and maddening plot twists that don't fully add up. All in all, Paradise season 1 episode 8 was an effective episode of television but a disappointing one at that.
Watch Paradise only on Hulu and on ABC beginning on April 7.