Paradise’s Latest Threat Is Not the One You Saw Coming — Who’s Dead by the End of Episode 4?

Remember how, as recently as the end of last week’s Paradise episodes, we all thought Billy Pace was actually a stone cold killer? Well he is. But this week’s episode makes it clear that he’s not the presidential assassin we were led to believe killed Cal Bradford. He’s just a regular assassin. Good thing that air got cleared, eh? Because by the end of the hour, he’s dead.

Just in case you thought this show was done throwing twists at us, it lobs a tiny-but-fatal one at viewers — and poor Billy — in the episode’s final moments. Read on for the highlights of “Agent Billy Pace.”

BILLY’S BACK STORY | We start off with a flashback to Billy’s teen years, when he lived with an uncle who liked to slap him around. When Billy’s dog barks during a hunting outing, spooking a deer Billy’s got in his gunsight, Uncle Jerkface hits the kid and tell him to “never hesitate.” Back at the house, as Billy is about to feed his pet, the uncle stops him. “When something’s no good, it has to go,” he says, indicating that the kid should kill his pup.

“We saw this coming, right?” I write in my notes. But I am about to be mini-Fogelman’d! Billy hesitates shooting the dog, and his uncle comes at him in anger. So Billy SHOOTS HIS UNCLE INSTEAD. This act lands him in juvie, where he instantly learns that only the violent survive. When he’s released at 18, a man is waiting outside the facility, calling himself Billy’s “second chance.”

Turns out, the man is the leader of a mercenary outfit, and he’s gathered his own little island of misfit toys to “travel the world, meet interesting people, and f—kin’ kill ‘em.” Charming! He challenges any of the noobs to fight Bull, a hulking beast of a man. Billy quickly steps forward as volunteer and, without waiting for “go!,” just starts whaling on the bigger man. There’s a lot of blood, none of it Billy’s.

WHAT IS BILLY UP TO? | In the present, Billy wakes from a dream of hunting in a frozen environment to find Jane nearly vibrating with excitement in the bed next to him: Paradise’s annual carnival is today! As she prattles on, he goes somewhere else in his head. Meanwhile, Xavier wakes up at Gabriela’s and has a mini freakout as he realizes James and Presley don’t know where he is. As he quickly dresses, he tells the therapist that what she told him about Billy “didn’t track for me,” but he promises to talk to him. They have a slightly awkward goodbye. “Maybe I’ll see you at the carnival,” she says.

At home, Presley chides her dad for not letting her know he was going to work late (his cover story), and then she heads out  to help Jeremy’s band set up for the carnival. Then we head into a few quick Billy-related flashbacks. The first time Xavier and Billy met was in the chaos of everyone arriving at Paradise. Later, after everyone was settled, the two agents secured the bar for the president to drink at; we learn the bartender’s wife is one of the preeminent atmospheric scientists in the world. In these snippets from the past, Billy seems less by-the-book than Xavier; Cal calls him “scary new guy.”

In the present, Xavier swings by Billy’s house and see him inside… though when he replies to Xavier’s text, he says he’s already at work. Hmm…

At the office, Xavier sneaks around and gets his hands on Billy’s file. A lot of the information there is redacted; what we can see is a mixed bag. His juvenile records include words like “meth,” “coke” and “guns.” Jane happens upon Xavier and seems to buy his story that he’s dealing with some paperwork — with a flashlight, in the dark? C’mon Jane! — and he wonders if she’s noticed Billy “seeming a little off?” Though she initially tries to play off their closeness, she eventually admits that he’s been a little distracted.   

FAMILY MATTERS | Another flashback: This time, we’re two months after the arrival at Paradise, and Xavier and Billy are back at the bar. Xavier muses about how the normalizing of life there is making him sad, because it allows him to momentarily forget everything he’s lost. Billy doesn’t feel the same, mentioning his crappy upbringing and alluding to how he’s done things that might make Xavier not want to be friends with him. He adds that he had no friends up there, which prompts Xavier to invite him over to meet the kids.

When Billy shows up at the house in a suit, with his hair combed like Bart Simpson on his way to church, Xavier mocks him for trying so hard. But Billy is undaunted, introducing himself to Presley and James as “Billy, your dad’s new best friend,” and the kids think he’s funny. Just like that, “Uncle Billy” becomes a regular fixture around the Collins household.

‘SHOOT YOUR SHOT’ | Time for the carnival! Agent Robinson finds Billy and Jane at the fairgrounds and lets him know that Xavier is on Sinatra’s radar. Later, as Billy has an emphatic conversation with Robinson and Sinatra OUT IN THE OPEN, Xavier sees them but can’t hear what’s going on. The first Collins family member to make contact with Billy turns out to be Presley, who is wondering how to proceed with her crush, Jeremy. “Never hesitate,” Billy tells her. “Shoot your shot” — which should be sweet, but considering the source, feels a little creepy.

Meanwhile, Xavier and James run into Gabriela in line for the ferris wheel. He is incredibly weird about their hookup, but she’s like, “Yeah, yeah, whatever: Have you talked to Billy?” Then she agrees to hang out with James while Xavier scans the crowd for his friend/maybe assassin.

Another flashback to three months post-apocalypse, and Cal is at the bar, wondering why everyone in town is so gloomy. (Seriously, dude?) Billy points out that the “not knowing” what became of everyone topside is brutal. Cal counters that they know everything is “gone. We have no communication. It’s all fried. Any gauge readings show limited signs of viable life, at best. Anything that’s left out there is fighting to survive, desperate and starving.” But the idea that there are any survivors, full-stop, that brings Xavier nearly to tears. “Could somebody’s somebody be OK up there?” he asks the president.

Three months later, Cal gives an address in which he tells the people of Paradise that he’s sending four explorers to the surface to survey the situation. Given that when we snap back to the present, there’s a monument to them in the center of town, I’m guessing the mission didn’t go very well.

WHAT REALLY HAPPENED TOPSIDE | When Billy and Xavier finally cross paths at the carnival, Billy warns him to back off; he knows Xavier was poking around in his files. “What the f—k did you do, Billy?” Xavier demands. “Did you kill him?” Billy denies it, so Xavier wonders why Cal was warning people to beware of him. “I know nothing about you,” he adds, which hits a nerve with Agent Pace. He grows increasingly upset as he says Xavier’s family is his whole world, and he’s been slinking around the fair, trying to keep them safe. Then he stalks off.

Xavier finds Gabriela and says he believes Billy, that he didn’t kill Cal. So now they’re both stymied: Why did the president single out Billy in his last therapy session?

Well, that might have something to do with what we learn when a hurt Billy leaves the carnival and heads to the bar. The bartender, who’s much more somber than he was in the initial flashback, recalls how he begged his wife not to go on a “suicide mission” to the surface. As the bartender talks, Billy thinks about how he was there, topside — we see now it’s the frozen environs that were in his dream earlier — and how the bartender’s wife/preeminent atmospheric scientist realized something crucial during the trip. “They need to know. It’s not what we thought,” she tells him. “The air — you can breathe!” Billy says nothing, but shoots her dead.

BILLY BITES BACK | And now for the part where we find out things are even more nefarious than they previously appeared. Billy beelines it to Sinatra’s office. “You sent me out there, sent me out there to kill those people, keep everybody scared so they give up hope of ever leaving,” he yells. She says what’s left on the surface is a “third-world planet,” and she doesn’t have time for his threat that “you’re going to leave Xavier Collins be, or we’re going to have a problem.”

In an incredibly unbothered way, she informs him that the only reason he was saved when the world ended was because “you’re a killer…that’s all you have to offer the world,” and he just needs to wait around until the next time she needs someone eliminated. Buck the system, she warns, and “I’ll take her away, Billy. And I’ll do it without blinking so much as an eye.” It becomes super clear that Billy had nothing to do with Cal’s death — though he thinks she did — and he instructs her once more not to mess with Xavier and the kids, because “that’s my family.”

Effective managers prepare for the unknown with redundancies, and Sinatra is one of the most effective, no? “You think you’re the only killer I brought down here, just in case?” she wonders. (And yes, from the look on Billy’s face, he very much thought he was the only one.) Still, he scoffs on his way out the door, “You’re going to send somebody for me? You better make sure it’s the biggest motherf—ker you got.”

‘I’M IT, BABY’ | At the end of the night, Billy finds Xavier playing basketball with his kids. He reasserts that he didn’t murder Cal — and Xavier believes him — but adds that there are some episodes from his past “that might have to do with what happened to our guy.” He notes that Sinatra is a “cold-blooded” killer, and that he’s done some things for her; he’ll tell Xavier everything when they see each other the next day. “If it’s OK with you, I just want to be Uncle Billy, just one more night,” he pleads. Xavier agrees.

So of COURSE he’s not making it to the next day, right? When he comes home, Jane is there; she’s eating a funnel cake and pouting a little bit about how they didn’t get to have the fun, couple-y carnival day she envisioned. He apologizes and asks to finish her beer; she agrees. Then, with a placid expression on her face, she delicately licks powdered sugar from her fingers while he starts to choke: The beer is poisoned, and Billy is not long for this world.

He falls off the chair and hits the ground. She dons latex gloves and dumps a bunch of prescription pills on the table, ostensibly to make his death look like an overdose. As he’s about to exit this world, she bends down next to him and calmly says, “You told her to send the biggest motherf—ker she had. I’m it, baby.”

Now it’s your turn. What did you think of the episode? Sound off in the comments!