Paradise Season 2 Episode 5 Review: The Mailman

Gary is indeed a mailman on Paradise Season 2, Episode 5 “The Mailman.” He lives a simple life, but as we see Xavier interact with him, it gets a lot more complicated.

In the years before, Gary does his day job and plays video games with Ennis, who starts recruiting a small group of people with skills to survive. On The Day, the chaos brings Teri and a young boy who goes by “Bean” into their fold.

Seven people do the best they can in an old post office, even managing to celebrate Christmas, but Ennis, obsessed with conserving resources, becomes more controlling, eventually destroying a radio Gary builds for Teri.

Gary also falls in love with Teri, a fact he reluctantly admits to Xavier in the present. He claims Ennis betrayed everyone and that all the other survivors were taken by armed men. Xavier plans to come at them with a homemade bomb.

But the only people we see are a group on a train, already headed to Colorado. Just as Xavier agrees to trust Gary, a much more recent flashback shows Ennis telling his friend Teri will probably leave. Gary shoots him to death in response.

For all this time, we’ve only really known Teri through her husband’s memories. It’s powerful to see her not only living but thriving as much as someone in these circumstances can, even separated from all she knows and loves.

But then there’s Gary. Humble and deeply relatable for so much of this episode, he now seems to be yet more proof that we can’t fully take anyone for granted the way they first appear. Can there possibly be a good explanation to what he does?

It seems unlikely, given that Ennis is a little too busy being dead to have portrayed anyone. So where are Teri and the others? Gary still doesn’t seem like the kind of man who could attack them all alone, but we’d once have said the same of Jane.

I am enjoying the expanded landscape of the show in its second season, though I worry it’s going be difficult to keep track all these new characters. Then again, many of them seem to be getting killed off just as quickly.

 Yet in spite of all that goes against them, several of the scenes in the post office are some of the most lighthearted we’ve ever seen, especially Bean bonding with everyone and seeing two young women fall in love and get engaged.

We leave the hour where we started: desperate for confirmation that Teri is okay and that she and Xavier will be reunited. Yet soon after confirming his trust in others with Annie and those who help her, Xavier may come to regret this with Gary.

Finally, given where we left off there, it’s also ominous that we see almost nothing of what’s been going on back at the bunker this whole time. With so many people still headed there, it seems destined for a final showdown no one can predict.

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New episodes of Paradise drop Mondays on Hulu. 

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