This article contains spoilers For “Paradise”.
Mystères boxes are notoriously difficult to remove. You must balance the great mystery while introducing new elements and questions at the same time as you provide answers, lest the public will be bored and stop looking. And yet, you do not want the whole story to be explicitly and particularly on the mysteries, because it makes it a good Wikipedia entry but not necessarily a good story. This is the difference between “lost” by continuing to captivate the public 20 years after his first and his “starting indemnity” slowed down to answer a stupid question that nobody asked.
Then we have “Paradise”, which is one of the best television shows of the year and an excellent example of the well -made mystery box. This is because the show does not treat them as mysteries of tradition but narrative mysteries. The only big question of this season is who kills President Bradford (James Marsden) in the first episode. This is a question that drives the whole story, the incitement incident that the secret service agent Xavier Collins (Sterling K. Brown) spends the whole season trying to answer. It is not the same thing as the question of what happened to the world, because it is more a substantive question that the characters are already aware, and the public knows that he will eventually discover. So anticipation becomes how “Paradise” will respond rather than the answer itself.
That is to say that when “Paradise” presented a small mystery in the form of figures written on a cigarette that Bradford had on him before his death, it was like a disposable thing that the public had to forget until it was finally brought back. When this happened, it bound everything together.
Cigarette numbers explained
In the very first episode, Xavier finds a cigarette next to Bradford’s body which has the number 812092, in a pack marked with a large and bloody “X.” Xavier, although smart enough to organize a coup in the post-apocalyptic bunker in which they live, is apparently not intelligent enough to investigate what the president did not only the hours before his death, but the days before. Although he questions several people about the number in vain, episode 5 shows Cal Bradford writing the number on the day of his death after learning the files in his tablet which were previously sealed – files revealing that the outside world is always habitable despite the apocalyptic events that led people to move to a bunker.
While we learn the actions of Bradford who led to his death, we see him going to the local library of the city to make a mixtape for his son – the first time he had gone there, apparently. A detail so important and memorable would be something that Xavier would have learned, you think, but apparently it is not so intelligent.
The final of the “Paradise” season, we learned who killed President Bradford and what the number means. It turns out that it was a number corresponding to the Dewey decimal system, and Bradford hid something in a library book. More specifically, he has hidden transcriptions revealing the truth about the outside world in a biography of Peter Lawford, the rat hanging. This is why you always check the library, friends.
The whole first season of “Paradise” is now streaming on Hulu in the United States and Disney + internationally. Season 2 has been informed.
