As you can tell, based on the title of this article, I am digging into spoilers for the most recent episode of the Hulu show Paradise. You will want to stop reading now if you are not caught up on the tense, riveting thriller.
When Paradise arrived on Hulu, the producers unveiled the first three episodes all at once, and then made audiences wait to see what would happen next. There was a lot to process in those early episodes, including the fact that humanity now lived in a city created inside a hollowed-out mountain range, following a devastating, mysterious event on the Earth’s surface. But the main reason that I heavily invested in the show right off the bat is that I cared deeply about the characters that were living through this unusual circumstance, and I wanted to find out how they played into the central mystery which involved the death of the U.S. President (James Marsden).
In Episode 4, titled “Agent Billy Pace,” we lost my favorite character – Billy Pace, played magnificently by Jon Beavers. I’m none too happy with it. And from what Beavers told me in an exclusive interview, I’m not alone.
People working on Paradise loved Billy Pace
This was a sharp left turn from where Paradise Episode 3 left us off. Because we are invested, as an audience, in Sterling K. Brown’s Secret Service agent Xavier Collins, we are suspicious of Billy (Beavers) and wary of the fact that he was camped outside of the Collins residence as Episode 3 ended. But because Paradise comes to us from writer/producer Dan Fogelman – the man behind This Is Us – we should learn to expect the unexpected when it comes to character development. And by the end of Paradise Episode 4, I was fully in the Billy camp, and mad that the show was killing him off.
As Jon Beavers told me in an exclusive interview, the cast and crew were mad, as well. He explained:
First of all, I think what Nicole Brydon Bloom does in this series is exceptional. I think she's a brilliant actor, and so much fun to work with. That (death) scene, you know, everybody going into it was so supportive and so sweet. And there was a lot of ‘Let Billy Live’ campaigning around the set. It was awesome, man. It was just such an incredible time. Everybody was so invested from the top down, and that's just the leadership of Dan Fogelman and Sterling K. Brown. This was not a ‘Let's go to work today’ kind of set. This was, ‘Come to play, and leave your heart on the court,’ you know?
Jon Beavers certainly won our hearts in Paradise Episode 4 by showing us completely new sides of Billy Pace. As has become the norm from Dan Fogelman, the episode jumped into the past to show us Billy’s journey – and the abuse that he suffered en route to becoming an agent in charge of protecting the U.S. President. We assumed that Billy was a bad person, but in the city of Paradise, he found real purpose, and a real home, for perhaps the first time. Xavier and his kids were family to Billy. As Beavers told CinemaBlend:
With this guy, with Billy Pace, I got to play a character who's coming into these extraordinary circumstances where everybody else is living their worst nightmare. They're trapped underground in a Truman Show-esque facade. But for Billy, this is a second chance at normalcy and redemption. It's such an interesting point of view. Because everybody else misses the real world. (But) the real world was hell for this guy. It was really hard on this dude. He's not altogether innocent. But he becomes, I think, really understandable, and relatable, even in a bizarre and heightened way.
Speaking of the “real world,” we learned that Billy Pace did something truly horrible on the surface. Let’s dig into that, and what it means for the character.
Billy now knows valuable secrets, but did they die with him?
One of the coolest things about Paradise is how the sharp writing is expanding the mythology of this world. We know that there was something terrible that happened to the Earth. But maybe there are survivors outside of Paradise? And maybe they need help? Billy Pace made sure that the truth about the survivors didn’t make it back to Paradise for the time being. He killed the scientists that could have delivered that truth.
He also took a lot of other secrets back home with him. The files that Xavier was going through with regard to Billy’s military history were heavily redacted. I wanted to know if Billy’s murder in Paradise Episode 4 really means the end of the character. After all, we have seen plenty of James Marsden, even though the show kicks off with his death in the pilot.
That’s the beauty of Dan Fogelman. Speaking with Scott Weinger, the writer of Paradise Episode 4, he gave me hope that Jon Beavers’ journey on this program might only be beginning. As Weinger told CinemaBlend:
One of the things I keep hearing about this show is that it has a sci-fi hook. But because it's (Dan) Fogelman, the characters are really the thing that pull you in. In a novelistic way, he wants them to have really big backstories. You can do a whole episode, like a movie, about a character's backstory, which is what we've been doing. With Billy, I mean, what was he doing all those years? It's funny. Somebody said that to me during production of my episode, ‘It's such a shame that we're killing Beavers, because he's such a wonderful actor.’ And I was like, ‘Have you seen This Is Us?’ (Laughs) Half the characters are dead for six seasons. People are winning Emmys playing dead people! Just because a character dies in a pilot episode of a Dan Fogelman show, that doesn't mean you're not gonna see them a lot.
We can only hope. If you haven’t caught up on Paradise yet, you need to get on board. I think it’s one of the best shows available on Hulu for now, so refresh your Hulu subscription and start watching before the rest of the season drops. I’ve been lucky enough to see it, and there are some truly special episodes on the way.
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