Paradise Reveals Cal Bradford’s Killer In a Totally Unsatisfying Manner

The following story contains spoilers for Paradise season 1, episode 8, “The Man Who Kept The Secrets.”

PART OF WHY we invest our time into all of the books, movies, and shows that we love to take in is because something of an unwritten contact that exists: we give our time, and in the end, we get a feeling of fulfillment. Sometimes, that comes from just purely well-done stories. Sometimes great acting, or excellent filmmaking do the trick. But when something is setting up a mystery, and our time is being invested, and we’re expected to speculate and wonder along the way, it’s pretty important for that mystery to come together in a way that makes sense and is rewarding for it all to ultimately feel worth our time.

Paradise, Hulu’s new hit dystopian/political/conspiracy thriller, has gone down the mystery road in two different ways. The initial mystery is a grounded one: someone killed President Cal Bradford (James Marsden), and we’re left wondering who could have done it. The second is more out there: everything we’re seeing takes place in a hollowed-out Colorado mountain, and the rest of the world has more or less become a barren hellscape following a series of disasters.

Honestly, a wild set of circumstances for a show. But while the jury is still out on the second, more expansive mystery (and will likely be explored for the remainder of the show as it continues for season 2 and beyond), we can say with reasonable certainty that the initial mystery of who killed President Cal Bradford came together in a way that was unsatisfying to say the least. That comes in large part due to the fact that there was no reason for anyone to suspect what the outcome ended up being.

Let’s be clear for a second: A twist ending or turn in the storyline can often times be very good and very fun. But these things need to be telegraphed, and hinted at, in a way that looking back at what you saw earlier feels like a paradigm shift. If you can rewatch something you saw earlier and see it entirely differently given a new situation, that’s how you know a twist was done well. If the resolution to something you’ve been wondering about for any extended period of time is something from entirely out of left field, that’s not satisfying to anyone in the grand scheme of the storytelling we’re engaging with. It’s breaking the contract, because it’s essentially saying that the clues we’ve been taking in, and what we’ve been trying to use to solve this mystery, doesn’t matter. This other random thing that you didn’t show us until way later in the game is all that mattered. And we had no reason to think about that.

Unfortunately, Paradise did not keep up its end of the bargain with the reveal of who killed Cal.

So, who actually killed President Cal Bradford on Paradise?

In short, it was revealed in episode 8 of Paradise that President Cal Bradford was killed by Trent, the librarian.

Except it was revealed via flashback that Trent the librarian was actually an identity stolen by a project manager who had previously warned the powers that be about arsenopyrite poisoning of the workers during the construction of the mountain paradise; he was cast out, lost his mind, and was the same person who previously attempted to assassinate the president, hitting Xavier instead (a sequence depicted via flashback throughout the season). He eventually escaped from prison and found his way into the Paradise by killing the actual librarian, and convincing a random woman sobbing outside a gas station to join him as the librarian’s wife. He then took his place in the mountain as the librarian and was content for a while, until Cal came into the library and all of his hatred and feelings came back; he eventually broke into Cal’s house and beat him with a construction tool that had been on display in the library.

This is an extremely unfulfilling resolution to what was the most compelling mystery of the first season (and, throughout the course of things, clearly took a back seat to the larger mystery of whatever is going on in the outside world). Part of what makes this fall so flat is that there was absolutely no hint or reason to suspect anything about this prior to getting the information about the poisoning and the project manager that we got at the start of the episode. If you saw that librarian previously and clocked that he had a fake bald head, good for you. But there was no reason to suspect anything otherwise, because there was nothing presented in the text that previously gave us any reason to further examine the fact that he was… just kind of an awkward dude.

The episode revealed all of this, and all we can do is just kind of say… “… OK.” The librarian eventually jumped to his death after being figured out and cornered by Xavier and Agent Robinson, and it all just feels kind of half-baked. Paradise introduced a ton of characters throughout the course of its first season, and while some of them are very good and portrayed very well (the main trio of Marsden, Sterling K. Brown, and Julianne Nicholson are all tremendous, and Nicole Brydon Bloom has been a fun revelation as the sociopathic Jane), there could have been an easy way to write a character we actually know into a motivation for killing the president that actually made sense.

But instead, we got this out-of-nowhere answer to a question that probably deserved a bit more thought. We’ll see where season 2 goes, and what will become of Xavier in the outside world—and hopefully any resolution we get there is executed to better effect.