By Variety | Created at 2025-03-05 00:10:19 | Updated at 2025-03-05 04:24:56
5 hours ago
SPOILER ALERT: This article contains major spoilers from “The Man Who Kept The Secrets,” the Season 1 finale of “Paradise,” now streaming on Hulu.
The first season of “Paradise” officially came to an end on March 4, with the killer being revealed as none other than… Trent.
You may be asking who Trent is. That’s because his name was mentioned very little in the first season of the show, but he was best known as the librarian. In Episode 7, specifically, Trent (Ian Merrigan) had a conversation with Cal (James Marsden), telling him where he could go to make a mixtape.
It was revealed during the finale that before the world as they knew it ended, Trent worked as the project manager helping to build the bunker. After alerting Anders (Erik Svedberg-Zelman), the architect building Paradise, that there was iron arsenic sulfide — a deathly mineral — on the work site, he was fired from his job. Upon leaving, he threatened to go to the authorities and reveal that it was unsafe, but Anders told him that something catastrophic was coming. The cover up of the dangers, his firing and Anders’ lack of explanation all caused Trent to direct his anger toward leadership, specifically the president. That was why he was the boom mic operator who tried to assassinate Cal in the first episode, yelling, “Everyone deserves to know!” He went to prison in Colorado, then escaped as everyone tried to flee as the country was alerted of what was coming. First posing as an officer, Trent then found a man and woman, Eli and Margaret Davis, who said their names were on the list for Paradise. He killed the couple and, along with a random woman he met, pretended to be the couple and entered the bunker. (The woman he enlisted was the server as the diner!)
As he got comfortable in Paradise, Trent felt he deserved to survive… but then saw Cal come into the library and was reminded of what happened.
“We knew that who the killer was was going to be a big question on everyone’s minds. We wanted it to be satisfying, and we wanted it to be attached to the bigger picture of the bunker — how this thing was made, and the kind of upstairs and downstairs idea of who got chosen and who got left behind,” creator Dan Fogelman tells Variety of the reveal. “So we’d always kind of had in our mind’s eye that somebody has been lightly hiding there in plain sight the entire time. And the big breakthrough was when we decided not just that it would be the librarian, but that it was going to be the person who originally attempted to assassinate the president.”
And hiding in plain sight he was — the actor appeared in multiple episodes.
“In Episode 6, you see Cal’s son going to the library, and the librarian is saying, ‘Please, let me tell you more about how the bunker was built,’ and Jeremy’s not listening to him,” Fogelman says. “The biggest Easter egg is probably in Episode 4. You can see Xavier in a flashback with his children getting into the bunker for the first time, where they’re taking away his weapons and kind of deleting his wife from the system because she hasn’t made it. Amongst the many things that are chaotically going on is the librarian in the deep background having his meltdown, which is a big part of how he gets into the bunker in Episode 8. So it was definitely planned from the beginning.”
Ultimately, the librarian doesn’t survive the bunker. Once Trent tells Xavier (Sterling K. Brown) everything, he runs. Eventually, Xavier and Robinson (Krys Marshall) chase him up to what looks like the power grid, where he tells them Paradise is a “gravesite” and now will be his as well; he then jumps to his death. Later, Jane (Nicole Brydon Bloom), in a surprising twist, saves Xavier’s life after shooting — but not killing — Sinatra (Julianne Nicholson).
The episode ends with Xavier leaving Paradise, determined to find his wife — and a possible outside world.
Brown tells Variety he’s read the first three episodes of the second season, and that the tone will be “slightly different.” Previously, Brown has compared the show to “Lost” and to “The Wire,” the latter because it changes season to season — he says it’s still “an apt comparison” moving forward.
“Structurally, we’ll be introduced to people on the outside and then sort of flashback in their lives as well,” Brown says. “If ‘Lost’ and ‘The Wire’ had a baby, it would be ‘Paradise.'”
While a drama, “Paradise” really fit into a genre the way those other series did, though. “Potentially, we’re out in a world that has experienced trauma for the first time, so there are elements of that kind of Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road’ kind of storyline, but we also have a big science fiction-genre story to tell, and there’s more mystery about the bunker than what has been revealed in Season 1,” says Fogelman.
Although the second season will introduce more mysteries, mainly about whether Xavier’s wife is alive and what’s happening in the outside world, there’s also “a bigger story to the show,” Fogelman teases.
“Hopefully in a similar way to how the librarian had little Easter eggs that were hiding in plain sight, and he was ultimately the killer, this first season is very much the Easter eggs for a much bigger story that we’re planning on telling,” he says. “There’s a much larger, propulsive and hopefully satisfying story ahead of us when you look at the big three-season arc of the show.”
Fogelman confirms there will be new cast members joining in Season 2, as there is obviously some type of life outside of Paradise. However, the fan-favorites will still be back. Fogelman promises, “it’s definitely not going to be the last we’ve seen” of Marsden’s Cal — but wants to keep how he’ll appear a surprise.
“It’s very captivating to fall in love with an actor and then just try and break your story down to accommodate getting those people back in a show,” Fogelman says. “The story will dictate where characters like Cal or like Billy Pace can come back and play in our world. But there is a big picture story we’re telling here that will allow more stuff to happen.
“James has pitched me, ‘I have a secret twin, let’s do it!'” Fogelman continues. “And we’re not going to do that, but we do love the actor and the character. So when there’s opportunity that fits in the story, which it does at times, that will be the goal.”
