Seeing how Teri survived in Atlanta is enough to make you never trust a mailman ever again.
Photo: Gilles Mingasson/Disney
Paradise’s hot take: Never. Trust. The Mailman. Okay, fine, Paradise is talking about a specific mailman, but I don’t know — I’ll be side-eyeing anyone in a USPS uniform from now on. And that paranoia is all thanks to the latest addition to the Paradise universe: Gary. We trusted you, Gary! You had to go and do us dirty. In a perfect piece of casting, Cameron Britton plays that mix of sweet and pathetic so well that you don’t see that heel turn coming. You easily brush off some red flags. Gary could never. But you know who is suspicious of this guy from minute one? Xavier Collins. He’s packing a gun, a baby, and some new gruff facial hair, and he can immediately tell that not all is what it seems at the post office in Atlanta.
“The Mailman” toggles between Xavier figuring out what the hell is going on with his wife, who he has tracked to the aforementioned post office thanks to her radio messages, and following Gary’s story beginning five years before the apocalypse up to his present day. And as great as Britton is in this episode, it also must be said that in basically two episodes, Enuka Okuma has turned Teri into an indispensable character on this show — I don’t want Paradise without her! Don’t hurt Teri! So how do Gary and Teri cross paths? Well, first, you need to know about Gary’s life leading up to the volcanic eruption.
Gary is a lonely, unassuming postal worker who loves the Counting Crows. He has no friends. He hates dogs. There is one house on his route where he bumps into a quiet little kid, hiding outside while his parents have a screaming match in their living room — Gary worries about him. He goes home from his shift and plays video games all night. Gary makes us all sad. One day, he connects with another player on the video game; the guy’s handle is “Normus P*Ennis” so normally I’d say to block this idiot, but he, too, is a lonely soul, and he and Gary strike up a real friendship. I guess, don’t judge a Normus P*Ennis by its name.
As friendships between lonely men so often do, Gary and Ennis start to game out what their plans would be if there ever were a zombie apocalypse. Gary especially latches on to this scenario and starts to get deep into the doomsday-prepper world. Eventually, that world leads him to preppers talking about Dr. Louge and his super-volcano doomsday prediction. Gary and Ennis’s playful, hypothetical conversation topic starts to become very real. Gary has discovered that back in the 1960s, a bunch of post offices were designed with fallout shelters — including the one he works at. No one goes down there, and no one, it seems, notices him repeatedly going down there, but he begins to prep it with supplies. (“What else do I use my pension for?” he tells Ennis.) Meanwhile, Ennis tries to wrangle up a group of people with useful skills — they need a nurse (preferably hot), a carpenter, a mechanic, and a gardener of some sort. No one tied to a family. No kids. No pets. The only idea Gary completely nixes is Ennis’s belief that they need a military type, or at least someone with guns, for protection. Absolutely not, says Gary. “What if our guy with the gun turns on us?” Excellent point, my man!
Those plans become reality when the volcano erupts, and all hell breaks loose. Gary, in his mail truck, rushes over to pick Ennis up. He comes bolting out of his apartment complex wearing camo and carrying the guns he said he’d leave behind. I know there are many more important things going on, but we cannot skip over the fact that Ennis chooses to be called Ennis instead of his real name, Ravi. Ennis-rhymes-with-penis. What an absolutely wild choice. This is who is surviving the apocalypse?! The rest of the people Ennis has recruited will meet them at the post office. They have enough supplies for seven people. But on the way back, they drive past that little kid’s house and Gary spots him outside, just sitting around. He has to stop and check on him — and when he discovers the kid’s parents are high off their gourds and passed out on the couch, he asks if the kid, Bean (did he name himself?), wants to come with him to some place safe. Literally anywhere is safer than in that house, so Bean agrees. Ennis hates this — no kids, remember? But Gary doesn’t have the heart to sentence him to death.
They need to make one more stop before the fallout shelter — they’re picking up eggs that will hatch chicks. While Bean waits in the truck, there’s a big car accident out in the road, and when he goes to check it out, who is standing in the middle of it, crying on the phone? Dr. Teri Rogers-Collins. The phone call, which we’ve only seen the other end of, ends abruptly. On the plane, we know Xavier is watching that nuke get closer and closer to Atlanta. We also know that at that moment, President Cal Bradford is setting off that EMP failsafe. Back on the ground in Atlanta, transformers start to blow, a helicopter falls out of the sky, and the electrical grid is completely down. In all the chaos, Teri sees Bean standing alone and goes to help him. He immediately becomes attached to her and Teri to him. When Gary comes rushing out and explains he’s not Bean’s father but he’s taking him to a bunker, yeah, she is skeptical. But with no other options at the end of the world, Teri eventually agrees to join Bean and Gary. Ennis hates this even more.
All of the people Ennis recruited are there when they arrive. Everyone is terrified but grateful for this gift Ennis and Gary have given them. Teri, initially, can’t let go of her family. But before long, the disparate group becomes like a family. Eventually, it’s Teri who realizes they need to do more than survive; they need to build a real life. Meanwhile, Gary promises her that once it’s safe to go out into the world again, he will help her find her family. It is clear he has completely fallen in love with Teri. Even Ennis-rhymes-with-penis can see it. Actually, it greatly annoys Ennis-rhymes-with-penis. He felt like he was the leader of this group — and ran the place like army bootcamp — but slowly, as people have formed bonds with one another, yes, any power he thought he had is gone, but also he has repeatedly referred to Gary as his best friend and he’s losing him, too. He’s on the outside.
But life at the post office presses on over the course of three years. They put together a Christmas morning for Bean. Crystal, the home-health aide, and Jackie, the mechanic, fall in love and get engaged. Ruth, the gardener, gifts Ennis with a “don’t yell at me, I’ll cum” T-shirt. Ruth gets it. Gary makes good on his promise and builds a radio for Teri. He does try to kiss her when he gives it to her, but she shuts that down real quick. They are friends. They are partners. Gary seems okay with that. She starts broadcasting in an attempt to find Xavier and her kids. One day, though, Ennis smashes the radio — he doesn’t want to attract bad people to their location. He wants everything to stay like it is.
But people start to move on. The sun is back and the temperature has gone up. Teri is making plans to drive to Colorado with Bean. The woman is making her own biodiesel fuel from mold. Crystal and Jackie move over to a nearby high-school gym, where a group of people have set up a swap meet of sorts called the Funderdome. Everyone is leaving. And that’s when the train shows up.
Meanwhile, in the present day, Gary is showing Xavier around the post office. Xavier sees where his wife slept the past three years. He finds her in a mural of the post-office group painted on the wall. He sees Polaroids of her smiling — she was happy here. Gary explains that it was Ennis who betrayed them. Ennis led the train people to them. A bunch of people with guns came and took everyone. “They took our boy,” he tells Xavier and Xavier definitely clocks the phrasing. He does not trust this dude even a little bit — when Gary offers to hold the baby, Xavier tells him no one touches the baby. But later, when Gary takes Xavier to the Funderdome so that Xavier can get the supplies to build a bomb, which he plans on using as a distraction so he can go in and get Teri out, it takes Crystal and Jackie telling him one story about how Teri let the two of them read to Bean at night, for Xavier to ask them to watch the baby while he goes on his rescue mission. When Gary questions this, Xavier explains that Teri thought story time before bed was sacred and if she let them do it, she must have trusted them. He also explains that he knows Gary is hiding something from him and he should just get it over with and tell him.
We go back to two weeks prior to Xavier showing up — he missed Teri by 12 days! — and Gary and Ennis gear up with some guns and head out to get some intel on the train people. They wind up being … sort of lovely? And, if you can believe it, they’re headed to Colorado. This is the train Link and his people couldn’t wait on any longer. They’re a part of Link’s group. They tell Gary and Ennis that they’ll be out of their hair in two weeks. And anyone can join them if they want to head out west.
On the way back to the post office, Ennis goes on and on about how crazy it is that a train going to Colorado just pulled up in their backyard. Teri doesn’t have to make any more fuel; she and Bean can just get on the train. She can be on her way in two weeks. As that realization washes over him, Gary looks panic stricken and he shoots Ennis. He can’t let that information get back to Teri. He can’t lose her. So he kills his best friend. Bean, hiding nearby, sees the whole thing go down.
But this is not the secret Gary tells Xavier. Instead, Gary comes clean about being in love with Teri. He makes it clear that Teri never felt that way about him, but he loved her very much and he wants to honor what she meant to him by helping Xavier get to her. Xavier shakes Gary’s hand. They can be partners now, too. But let’s be for real: Xavier is a smart guy and as he’s told us, it’s his job to notice things — there’s no way he doesn’t see through Gary’s bullshit. He has to know he’s walking into some sort of trap. He has to … right?