Paradise's Sinatra plays into a damaging gender stereotype

Would living in an underground smart city really be that bad if it meant sunshine on tap?

But as we learned right off the bat, when Agent Xavier Collins discovered President Cal Bradford's body, life beneath the mountain is a far cry from idyllic, however delicious the (artificial) cheese fries may be.

Its citizens survived the world ending once, although its remnants aren't quite as decimated as they've been led to believe, and it seems they're about to relive that trauma, albeit in a different guise following Xavier initiating Operation Takedown Sinatra.

But her world fell apart long before then.

In another life, Samantha Redmond, as she was previously known, was happy. She was a successful tech entrepreneur who had sold her startup for an extortionate amount of money and had secured an exciting merger in the years that followed.

But before everything, it was her family, notably her two young children, who were the source of her joy – that is until her eldest, Dylan, fell ill. And despite securing the very best medical care for him, he died, breaking her heart beyond repair.

So, when the opportunity to spearhead the underground city presented herself, Sinatra channelled all of her grief into that. It became her baby, so to speak, in the wake of losing her own child, not only a distraction, but a chance to do what she felt she'd been unable to do with Dylan: keep its inhabitants alive.

And this time, she would not fail.

But her commanding role in preserving the subterranean community quickly morphed into something more authoritarian.

As her iron grip tightened, she became more powerful than the president, who was merely a puppet in her stage show. And anyone who dared cross her, such as Agent Billy Pace, would meet a grisly end – although Sinatra claims she was not responsible for Cal's death, and surprisingly, we believe her.

"She's not a monster, she's a mother," says her counsellor Dr Gabriela Torabi to Xavier, a particularly striking comment that mimics Wanda Maximoff's words in Marvel's Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Like Sinatra, she's a grief-stricken woman who has pure intentions, but ultimately abuses her power – with devastating consequences.

With Dr Torabi's guidance, she found a route back to reengaging with the world and her work. She helped Sinatra to navigate her all-encompassing, bone-deep grief and piece herself back together, albeit imperfectly, like a kintsugi vase.

But the more we learn about how she operates underground, such as her need for total control and her zero-tolerance policy for detractors, it becomes abundantly clear that Sinatra's emotional aguish has morphed into something dangerous.

Her intentions were initially noble – although some would argue that leaving the rest of the world to perish is anything but. She wasn't able to save her son, but she'd be damned if she let anything happen to the 25,000 people now her under her authority. But sanctioning murder and revoking democratic rights makes her an antagonist.

And while it's a more nuanced take than the death of her child sparking a descent into madness, it's yet another example of a female character who, in the throes of grief, particularly the grief of losing a child, exhibits extreme behaviour that teeters on the edge of madness, making her a threat to those around her.

It is undoubtedly Sinatra's underground city, and everyone's just living in it.

But as her control begins to weaken following recent destabilising events orchestrated by Xavier, her steely exterior is pierced and her emotions begin to bleed through.

There are several scenes when her mask slips ever so slightly, such as when the city's most influential people are gathered in a room, demanding answers, and she walks out, her breathing laboured.

It's in those instances that her pain, which she has desperately tried to keep submerged, bubbles to the surface.

But Sinatra's behaviour is most striking when you compare it to Xavier's.

He, too, has experienced a great loss. Despite promising to ensure that his wife Teri would make it safely underground with the rest of them, Cal did not honour his word. As far as Xavier was aware, the love of his life and the mother of their children had died in unfathomably frightening, brutal circumstances along with the rest of the world – although that may not have happened if Sinatra is to be believed, emphasis on the if.

But even before that, when he believes she's been erased from his life forever, Xavier remains cool, calm and collected. And most importantly, his moral code has remained firmly in tact.

He didn't manipulate his close relationship with the president for personal gain, or weaponise his own grief to justify the unacceptable. Xavier could never be accused of being mad or out of control in the aftermath of his own loss or, in Sinatra's case, being too wedded to being in control, which is also evidence of mental disquiet.

But with Sinatra, we have yet another example of a woman whose loss, which has become entwined with her need for absolute power, is something to be feared, further feeding into the notion that women are not capable of managing their pain without becoming a danger to themselves or other people.

Yes, there will always be a void in her life following the death of her child, for how could you ever truly recover? There will be no end to her grief, or a day that goes by when Dylan is not in her thoughts as she keeps a tally of the days, weeks, months and years since she last held him, before saying her final goodbye.

But to turn her into a psychopath or psychopath lite because of that loss not only does Sinatra a disservice, it's rooted in damaging falsehoods about women and their emotions – which seemingly, if not kept in check, have the capacity to spiral out of control.

We've seen it before and there's no doubt it'll rear its head again, but it really is about time we buried that long-standing stereotype deep underground.

Paradise airs on Disney Plus in the UK and Hulu in the US. New episodes arrive each Tuesday.

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