Take every other mystery box you’ve ever opened and bury them in the Hatch: This episode of Paradise is the most “Previously on Lost” thing I’ve ever seen in my life, outside the original article of course. In a series of flashbacks, a mysterious and sinister character gets a backstory that answers some questions but raises many others. In the present, groups of survivors, the best supplied and most ruthless of which lives in a simulated village created by an eccentric billionaire and a team of scientists, struggle against one another for survival in conflicts that are often tragically misguided or undone by betrayal. Why, I can practically hear Sawyer calling Kate “Freckles” even now!
The subject of the flashbacks, the star of much of the present-day material, and the title character of the episode is Jane, the ruthless killer embedded in the Secret Service by her benefactor Sinatra. In addition to non-lethally plugging Sinatra to save her from a killshot by Xavier, her crimes also include killing her fellow killer agent and boyfriend Billy, assassinating President Baines, and framing Agent Robinson for the murder.
Was she cursed from the start? Actually, scratch that: Was she cursed from before the start? In the episode’s cold open, a seemingly random Circuit City employee (Francois Batiste) receives countless anonymous messages warning him that a killer will be born at 12:01 A.M. on June 1, 1997, and that he must deliver the message that she can be stopped.
The killer is Jane, of course. Her mother (Laura Campbell) endures a difficult labor, doesn’t bond with the baby after she’s born, and yells at her to stop crying rather than comforting her. But even she is taken aback when the Circuit City guy accosts her, determining this is the baby he’s been looking for and informing her mother she’ll grow up to be a killer. “I have a message for that little girl!” he screams.“She can be stopped when it matters!” The exchange, Jane says later, colored her mother’s perception of her from then on.
This is intriguing. When the messages poured in, it looked like they were saying his job was to deliver the message that the little girl is a killer but that she can be stopped, presumably to her mother. But instead, he delivers the message “She can be stopped when it matters!” to infant Jane, not her mother. Personally I don’t think it’s too hard to guess who the “she” is that Jane the Killer will be able to stop when it matters.
Jane’s mother goes on to be emotionally and physically abusive. Young Jane (a convincingly disturbed Kayla Anjali) takes commands from an imaginary friend named Climby to lock her mother and her boyfriend in their sauna and crank up the heat. She winds up getting locked in there instead after she frees them; her mother yells through the door that crazed Circuit City guy was right about her. “You’re the worst goddamn thing that’s ever happened to me!” she yells at her own daughter. I’m genuinely surprised we never get a scene where Jane kills her mother once and for all after that.
Years later, Jane’s in training with the CIA, but her small size and awful psych eval are counting against her. Her commanding officer, Thomas (Ryan Michelle Bathé), takes pity on her, partially out of solidarity with a fellow woman and partially because she finds Jane “incredibly special,” all the more so since she’s never been told so. Thomas teaches Jane to meditate to silence the voices in her head. (Personally, I think the Central Intelligence Agency should not employ people who hear voices in their head; that’s the White House’s job.)
The technique helps Jane gain the kind of hyperfocus that the protagonists of AAA video games use to find useful objects and identify enemy weak spots. Seriously, there’s even a spotlight effect on the things she focuses on in this state. This helps Jane finally gain the upper hand on Radner (Konstantin Melikhov), the sexist meathead who kept besting her during training exercises.
But her mentor can’t share in her happiness. Radner, Thomas learns, has gotten the promotions she herself deserved. Why? “Because he has a dick.” I know, I know, it’s impossible to imagine the United States government promoting mediocre men over qualified women, but please, keep in mind this is science fiction.
Never in one million years would I have guessed what happens next. That Jane would show up at Radner’s to kill him and clear the way for her mentor to get that promotion? Oh, that was thuddingly obvious. That she would literally cut his dick off and give it to her mentor so that he no longer had that particular advantage over her? That had not occurred to us, Dude.
This was the moment when the episode won me back over, after being the most draggy and conventionally plotted of the season so far. Too often, the script feels like it was plotted on easy mode. The moment Presley, Xavier’s daughter, says she wants answers about what the powers that be are doing down there, Sinatra’s daughter Hadley (Kate Godfrey) walks in the door. Hadley believes Presley’s warnings about her mother being secretly evil just as easily as the Circuit City guy believed spam emails were warnings from the future.
Along similarly “it’s scripted this way because we need it to happen” lines, Robinson — who I’ll remind you has been falsely accused of assassinating the President of the United States of America and is capable of naming the names of the people who really did it — is just dumped in the big high-ceilinged open-air underground gen-pop prison. It’s a place where kids who spray-painted the president’s posters are just mixed right in there with the son of the former president, the scientist who built the place, and the second Secret Service agent in a row to (allegedly) murder a president in what Sinatra and Jane are selling to the high council of billionaires as a slow-rolling coup attempt. (Sort of like how they put muggers in there with, like, the Joker and Solomon Grundy in Batman: Arkham City.) You bet your sweet bippy the three important characters escape together within like a day. It all strains credulity.
But you know what? As long as the episode also introduces severe genital mutilation and, apparently, time travel???, I’ll forgive some slipshod plotting. The highs are way higher than the lows are low.
Jane herself is a case in point. I’m not convinced a person like her has ever existed in the real world; the character is often an awkward fit in a show so focused on intensely expressed but relatable human emotion. That said, here’s a woman who’s working out her mommy issues by giving one surrogate mother a man’s severed penis as a present and serving as Sinatra’s hired gun — while also holding up her hair to pay herself compliments in Sinatra’s voice, in a long and smartly framed mirror shot that had me saying “Welp, they got me again, goddammit.”
In fact, Jane takes the gun part of hired gun very seriously. “I’m a killer. It’s what I’ve always been: a weapon,” she says. “People I respect aim me, and I execute for them. To serve my purpose, I need someone like you.” A living weapon that other people aim? Talk about self-objectification. This is what she meant when she told Sinatra “you’re no good to me dead” after she shooting her in the chest (to keep Xavier from shooting her in the head). At least that’s Jane’s convincing, and vaguely kinky, explanation. You could say she wants Sinatra’s finger to remain on her trigger. Ahem.
In other news, Terabi continues trying to find out about the mysterious Alex, but can only find one suspicious mention of the name in her recordings of Sinatra’s therapy sessions. It’s clearly the name of the big secret energy project that’s running parallel to the bunker project. God help me, but when you consider the season’s time paradoxes — the messages foretelling Jane’s birth and (presumably) the need to stop Sinatra, Xavier’s inexplicable visions of Link, Link’s assassinated partner predicting what would happen to Billy after the killing — I can think of one science-fictional technology that would probably require a lot of energy. 1.21 gigawatts, perhaps?
If Paradise is now about time travel — that’s a theory I admittedly wouldn’t have put together myself without stumbling across it online, which I generally try not to do where theories are concerned — it’s also still about the stuff it’s been about all season long. Xavier’s still attempting to get back home to Colorado with his wife Teri — and his late friend Annie’s baby — in tow, and Gary still has him convinced he’ll have to forcibly storm an enemy encampment to “rescue” her.
For a moment, it looks like Gary is developing cold feet about sending Xavier and other innocent people into danger for his own selfish reasons, but no — what he’s really doing his stealing his resolve. He’s not going to let Xavier blow up a bomb to create a diversion and reunite Teri. He’s going to kill Xavier by triggering the bomb from a distance while he’s still holding it, then reunite with Teri himself in the confusion. I assume. It’s not a very good plan when you’re not a trained killer.
But that’s probably what saves Xavier’s life. Gary’s words over their walkie-talkies — as well a groaningly convenient photo that somehow reveals to Xavier that Gary’s feelings for Teri were romantic in nature — tip Xavier off that he’s about to be betrayed, and he chucks the bomb far enough way to survive the explosion without killing anyone else. When looks up, he sees a phalanx of armed guards approaching him…as well as his wife. As he looks into the eyes of the woman he loves and believed was dead for years, Siddhartha Khosla’s score chimes out like the end of Mike Oldfield’s “Tubular Bells,” like the music of the spheres. Now that’s what I call Paradise!
Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.
