‘Paradise’ Season 2 Episode 5 Recap: Mail Loneliness Epidemic

Someone had to be a bad guy eventually. 

After four episodes of the most humane and genteel post-apocalyptic survival adventure you’re likely to come across, in which the one constant that binds people together is human kindness, along comes a guy named Gary to upset the applecart in Paradise Season 2 Episode 5. He gives every appearance of being a gentle giant, with actor Cameron Britton bringing the same warm, endearing oversized-child energy to the performance you’ll find in prime John C. Reilly. So naturally, our man Xavier has no reason to believe he’s a lying murderer.

This episode is really Gary’s, just as the season premiere belonged to Shailene Woodley’s Annie. (The show is now two-for-two in Very Special Guest Star episodes this season, for those keeping track at home.) Through extensive flashbacks, we see the kind of life he lead before the Event: that of a mild-mannered mailman, lonely but not bitter about it, going about his pleasantly nondescript business. He is kind to children and slightly afraid of dogs. He has a Southern accent so gentle you could wrap the good china in it for storage. Gaming is his primary social outlet.

That’s how he strikes up an online friendship with a more fast-talking, sarcastic gamer named Ennis (Andy McQueen, memorable in another warm-hearted post-apocalyptic drama, Station Eleven). Their idle talk about how to survive a zombie apocalypse like the one in their video game turns to serious prepper talk when word of the impending disaster starts spreading around the Internet fringes. That supervolcano expert guy appearing on a manosphere podcast called “PREPS AND REPS” might be the show’s single funniest sight gag. (Ennis gets a t-shirt for Christmas reading “DON’T YELL AT ME, I’LL CUM” later in the episode, which is the show’s second funniest sight gag.)

When the day comes, the unlikely pair of heroes sets their plan in motion. With their supplies already gathered, they’re rounding up a motley crew of experts in various practical fields like gardening, carpentry, and medicine to live with them in the fallout shelter beneath Gary’s post office. Along the way, Gary picks up two unexpected guests: Bean (Benjamin Mackey), a neglected child he’s seen on his route, and his future best friend Teri Rogers-Collins, whom he just gets a good feeling about when he sees her taking care of the boy after he wanders off. Over Ennis’s objections, the pair join their ad hoc community.

For a long time it looks like the only trouble on the horizon will come from Ennis’s direction. He takes to his position of command a little too readily, and he’s openly resentful of Teri (if not Bean). When members of tiny group start pairing off and moving on, it appears to chafe at him. 

But it’s Gary we’ve had to watch out for all along. The present-day storyline shows him earning Xavier’s (limited) trust as they prepare to strike a nearby group of armed survivors traveling by train, who Gary says kidnapped everyone after Ennis betrayed their location. But the flashbacks slowly reveal that most of the group has departed on their own by then, that Gary is in fact in love with Teri, and that he’s so desperate to stop her from joining the train group’s convoy to Colorado that he murders Ennis to keep him quiet. Only Bean sees what happened.

All of this is artfully concealed by Britton’s performance. Never once does he give off creepy incel or violent stalker vibes in an obvious way. He’s never obsequious — early on he gives Teri tough love about needing to pull her weight — and he backs off when asked. Nor is he a calculating TV supervillain. His master plan is, what, to lure the husband of his beloved Teri into doing his bidding and mount a suicidal “rescue” mission against people who didn’t even kidnap anyone, in hopes that everyone between himself and Teri will die in the process? Does Gary seem like that kind of guy to you?

This is not to let him off the hook by any stretch of the imagination. He killed his oldest friend, and he appears poised to risk the lives of many more innocent people. It’s simply to say he’s just some guy who cracked under the pressure of the post-apocalypse. He hung all his hopes on one person, even though both he and she acknowledged to one another that these hopes were in vain, then happened to have a gun in his hand when he learned those hopes were about to be dashed and he’d lose her for good. Xavier, a trained Secret Service agent, falls into his lap in a similar manner. He’s not planning, he’s reacting in the moment. He’s not moving chess pieces, he’s spinning plates as fast as he can. 

That’s what makes him feel like he’s still part of the fabric of this story, rather than some kind of glitch in its matrix. If things had gone slightly differently he’d have been as legitimately helpful to Xavier as Annie, or the people in that diner last episode. There’s a world where Gary never pulled that trigger. It’s just not this one. 

Paradise’s second season is a fascinating thing to observe. A radical departure from the original season’s structure as well as a dramatic expansion of its scope, it keeps introducing new characters not as cameos, but as load-bearing features of the narrative and members of the cast. Even if Gary winds up lasting no longer than Annie — actually, especially if he lasts no longer than she did — it’s an illustration of Dan Fogelman and company’s confidence in their own abilities. (I dunno about you, but it helps that I like Annie and Gary more than just about anyone let down there in the bunker. Woodley and Britton made sure of that.)

And now we have a real cliffhanger on our hands. Unless something changes in a hurry, Xavier is about to attack innocent people, just to put his wife back together with a man whose love she’s already politely rejected. That will put a damper on their reunion — although this is Paradise, so I fully expect it to be set against the blazing sun as the most rapturous synthesizers you’ve ever heard in your life wash over you. Life at full volume, remember? You just have to hope you like the tune life is playing you, or else there’s no telling what you, like Gary, might do to change the channel.

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.