Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Using a populist ignoramus who inherited everything from his daddy as a catspaw, the richest person alive takes over the federal government. Paradise is the show that dares to wonder what would happen if this far-out, science-fictional, dystopian scenario were ever to come to pass. Fortunately, It Can’t Happen Here, right?

The aforementioned (fictional) populist ignoramus legacy hire is Cal Bradford, of course, president of what remains of the United States. His father, Kane (Gerald McRaney), is an oilman who was tapped by Samantha “Sinatra” Redmond to help locate the ideal subterranean location for her underground city. As such, he enjoys tremendous power and privilege in Paradise, as do all of what his grandson, Jeremy, refers to as the “gazillionaires” who “stick their hand up [his father’s] ass to make his mouth move.” 

Kane, however, is suffering from senile dementia. He often mistakes his grandson for his son, and when he’s lucid enough to speak with Cal directly, he’s cruel and condescending. Flashbacks to 1997, when Cal announced he wanted to be a high school teacher like his mom only to be flatly denied and shoved into politics by Kane, show that this is an ongoing pattern.

But Kane’s dementia has ancillary benefits, sort of. For one thing, it gives the show an excuse to have Gerald McRaney recite Lord Byron at length. For another, the false moment of connection he and Jeremy forge late in the episode — Kane believing Jeremy to be Cal, Jeremy using Kane to say everything he wishes he could have said to Cal before his death — is very affecting, particularly the way McRaney leaves his hands clenched right where they were wrapped around Jeremy’s hand after Jeremy pulls away. 

Most importantly in plot terms, Kane keeps referring to Agent Billy Pace, Sinatra’s pet assassin, as “Sniper,” much to Cal’s confusion. He also says cryptic things about people falsely believing that an unspecified “they” were “lost at sea,” while another unspecified “they” pulled this off right under Cal’s nose. “Sniper”? “They”? The other “They”? “Lost at sea”? Pulled what off? These questions literally drive Cal to drink.

They also prompt him to go digging. After discovering that the files about the doomed surface expedition — the one Sinatra ordered Billy to take out — are classified at a level beyond even his reach, he thinks fast and uses his passed-out dad’s hand to biometrically unlock them instead of his own. Billionaires, taking control of sensitive government information? Well, now I’ve heard everything.

Anyway, Cal learns the whole sordid truth. He transcribes all the recordings and files he finds by hand, secreting them in a book in the city’s sprawling library while under the guise of using its music archives to make a mix CD for his son. (You can tell he’s young Gen X this way.) Presumably that’s the nature of the numeric code he writes on his cigarette prior to his death, but unless I missed something this is still not fully clear.

Much of what we see in this episode takes place on Cal’s final day, which was a miserable one. His son Jeremy tells him he wishes he was dead. His girlfriend Agent Robinson breaks up with him. He has a confrontation with Cal about the execution of the guards that ends in a standoff. He warns Dr. Torabi that Billy is dangerous while only Xavier Collins is trustworthy. Later, he’ll have that argument with Xavier we’ve already seen, and then someone murders him. 

Here’s where Kane’s moments of lucidity really come in handy, though no one picks up on it. While visiting Jeremy in a beautifully lit and tenderly romantic sequence, Presley Collins is violently confronted by Kane, who keeps ranting about how he saw her, she was there, et cetera. Since he’s constantly confusing Jeremy for Cal, you just assume he’s doing something similar here, and mistaking Presley for an older woman — her late mother perhaps. (Or is that “late” mother? The rescue team reported back that they found a female survivor on the surface…)

But no! Xavier, who’s spent the day dealing with the fallout from Billy’s “suicide” and has learned that Sinatra is interfering in the investigation into Cal’s killing comes home and tells Presley to pack her things and get ready to run. What he doesn’t know is that her things include…the top-secret tablet stolen from Cal’s safe! So Kane really did see Presley at the murder scene the night of. But what was she really doing there? How could she get into the safe to steal the tablet? Was it open already, and if so, who opened it? Did she kill him herself, or stumble across the scene after the fact? 

Too bad the only person we can trust is her dad. Paradise makes the point over and over that the 25,000 survivors live in a pretty incestuous community. Not literally — we’ve already heard they’re trying to prevent that outcome of accidental cousin marriages in the long-term — but still, the president was having an affair with a Secret Service agent, who’s the boss of two other Secret Service agents having an affair of their own. (Both of them were secretly doing wetwork for Sinatra, too.) Meanwhile, the president’s son and his lead agent’s daughter are now striking up a romance. The conspiracy itself was discovered when Cal found out his own father was involved. How can any of these people be trusted to do the right thing when they’re so close to it all, and to each other?

Xavier takes matters into his own hands. With the help of his neighbor Carl (Richard Robichaux), who works in the control center in the sky known as the Tower, Xavier broadcasts a simple message to the people of Paradise in the night sky:  THEY ARE LYING TO YOU. Now comes the biggest question of all: Do the people of post-apocalyptic America care about their billionaire overlords lying to them any more than the people of current America do?

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.