‘Paradise’ Writer Breaks Down Teri’s Survival Story and Gary’s Twist in ‘The Mailman’

Paradise‘s latest episode finally uncovered what happened to Xavier Collins’s (Sterling K. Brown) wife, Teri (Enuka Okuma), as Season 2’s “The Mailman” explored her experience of the catastrophic weather event through the eyes of Gary (Cameron Britton), a mailman and prepper who grew close to her in the intervening years. Warning: Spoilers for Paradise Season 2 Episode 5 ahead!

While the episode may explain that Teri ended up in a post office bunker with a group of strangers led by Gary and his pal Ennis (Andy McQueen), it was her consistent efforts to contact Xavier over the radio that proved to viewers she was just as determined to reunite with her husband as he was to reunite with her. But upon meeting in the present day, Xavier is made to believe that Teri has been kidnapped, forcing him to team up with Gary with a plan to free her.

The catch? Gary’s story wasn’t entirely truthful, as audiences learn he had romantic feelings for Teri, and despite not crossing the line after she set a boundary, when Ennis warned that she’d eventually leave, Gary shot and killed his best friend. The moment of desperation was witnessed by a young boy whom Gary had taken into the bunker, revealing him as a potential danger. Now, as Gary and Xavier attempt to approach Teri in the next episode, fans are left to wonder, what’s going to happen next? Below, episode writer Katie French pulls the curtain back on the impactful episode.

Disney / Gilles Mingasson

How was it fleshing out Gary as a character and tracking this evolution of a man whose life gets better amid tragedy and ultimately leads him to do bad things? 

Katie French: Dan wanted this character, who was a huge nerd, and I’m a big nerd myself, and I have close friends that I’ve met online years before we ever met in real life, which horrified Dan, but it was something that I related to personally and not do a caricature of. Gary, in so many ways, gives us a big theme for our show, which is, how far would you go to protect the people you love or protect your family?

When we meet Gary, he does not have a family, and it’s only through this very intimate friendship that he creates and builds with Ennis that he starts to have this family of two, [and] it opens his whole world up, right? He builds his own bunker with people who, honestly, were a little inspired by some of our crew members. People who have hobbies, they’re not the world’s top neurosurgeon or an expert in any particular field in their day job, but day to day, they make soap; people have these hobbies that can be incredible skills in this kind of situation. Those things that we often overlook or devalue are the exact things that this guy, who has been overlooked and devalued his whole life, is recognizing and saying, this is what we should have in here.

And then I think through the course of the episode, feeling a connection with Teri, feeling a connection with this kid, wanting to do the right thing so much and save these people’s lives, starts to create that tension of, how far will you go, and which family is now more important to you, or can they be the same family? Eventually, that gets Gary to show us the dark side of that, that he’ll go so far to protect his family of now Teri, him, and Bean, that he, in this impulsive emotional moment, kills the very first person that ever connected with him to try and keep her for a little bit longer, even though it doesn’t make sense.

Disney / Gilles Mingasson

Why doesn’t Gary hurt Xavier when he meets him?

We talked about a lot of versions of what this could be, obviously, and it really solidified when we cast the incredible Cameron to be Gary. He is a sweet guy. You don’t look at this portrayal of this character and go, this guy is a genius. He’s not a master manipulator. He’s smart enough to know I’m not going to overpower  Xavier Collins.

The moment Xavier shows up, he is both thinking this is the worst possible thing that could happen and this could possibly be the only thing that could reconnect me with Teri. He tells us that he’s tried to get Teri back, and he was sent away. The majority of his story is true, except that Teri was not kidnapped, she was not taken at gunpoint; she chose to go with them. He tried to get her back, and they said, don’t ever come back here again. He’s tried everything he can think of, and maybe the only way he could get Teri to come to him is by teaming up with Xavier. I think he only has an inkling of what he might do, to eventually enact this kind of fly by the seat of his pants plan.

How is Teri coping with Gary’s failed kiss? 

We’ve all had that misreading. I think Teri is an incredibly perceptive person, and I think if she felt physically threatened, I believe she could handle herself either in leaving or getting Gary kicked out of this situation. So I think she sees that he is such a scared person. He’s not going to do anything scary until he does. Bean becomes this real anchor for her, this kind of project, this really broken kid that she doesn’t even know how sad his upbringing was. But I think she recognizes it, and he becomes somebody that she can pour that focus and attention to while she’s also putting the tally marks on [the wall]. She does throw herself into making this a community and bringing people together, and part of that is resolving the interpersonal issues with Gary and being really clear about that relationship and about her intentions to leave.

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Teri tries connecting with Xavier many times through the radio until it is smashed to bits by Ennis. How important was it to show that struggle as a means for building tension? 

There’s pettiness, and I ended up really loving Ennis’s character just because he ends up not being a bad guy; he’s just an a**hole, and sometimes people are a**holes. They do some s**tty things like that where it’s like, you don’t have to be a little cactus person and be so prickly. He feels threatened by Teri. [She] is like the third wheel in his best friendship. He’s kind of lashing out, and Teri is left with that personal devastation that I think only strengthens her resolve to find her way out of here.

Gary repeatedly pushes against having guns in the bunker, and ultimately, it’s the weapon he uses to kill Ennis. Was that full-circle moment intentional? Was it the original gun Ennis brought to the bunker?

It is the gun he originally brought with him for hunting. Part of it was wanting to play against a kind of proper mindset of, these are not guys that are living in a basement full of half cans, half ammo. They’re trying to find their people. They should have gone to Comic-Con, you know? What they’re trying to do ends up being the right thing to do. They sort of luck into the world ending in an insane way. So I think the guns thing is both an externalization of a kind of fear Gary feels about himself. He’s a tall guy, a big guy. I think he has grown up feeling like he’s physically scary, and he’s always trying to minimize himself physically, emotionally, and take up less space in a lot of ways. And so I think that that’s part of it, is that guns raise the stakes on everything. Everything is more dangerous, more unpredictable in Gary’s mind.

Paradise, Season 2, Mondays, Hulu