Someone had to be a bad guy in the end.
After four episodes of the most humane and kind post-apocalyptic survival adventure you’re ever likely to come across, where the only constant that binds people together is human kindness, a man named Gary comes to upend the apple cart in… heaven Season 2 Episode 5. He gives every appearance of being a gentle giant, with actor Cameron Britton bringing the same warm, lovable big-kid energy to the performance that you’ll find in John C. Reilly’s prime. So naturally our man Xavier has no reason to believe he is a lying murderer.
This episode is truly for Gary, just as the season premiere was for Shailene Woodley’s Annie. (The show is now two-for-two on Very Special Guest Star episodes this season, for those keeping track at home.) Through extensive flashbacks, we see the kind of life he lived before the event: that of a mild-mannered mailman, lonely but not bitter about it, going about his unspeakably pleasant business. He is gentle with children and a little afraid of dogs. He has such a nice southern accent that you can wrap fine china in it for storage. Games are his primary social outlet.
That’s how he strikes up an online friendship with a more fast-talking, sarcastic gamer named Ennis (Andy McQueen, unforgettably in another warm-hearted post-apocalyptic drama, Station eleven). Their idle talk about how to survive a zombie apocalypse like the one in their video game turns into serious prep talk when word of the impending disaster begins to spread around the edges of the Internet. This guy who is a giant volcano expert appearing on an atmospheric podcast called PREPS AND REPS might have the funniest scene on the show. (Ennis gets a Christmas T-shirt that says “Don’t yell at me, I’m going to cum” later in the episode, which is the second funniest scene in the show.)
When the day comes, the unlikely pair of heroes put their plan into action. With supplies already gathered, they assemble a motley crew of experts in various practical fields such as horticulture, carpentry, and medicine to live with them in the fallout shelter below the Gary Post Office. Along the way, Gary picks up two unexpected guests: Ben (Benjamin Mackey), a neglected child he sees on his way, and his future best friend Terry Rogers Collins, who feels good about him when he sees her taking care of the boy after he wanders off. Despite Ennis’s objections, the duo join their ad hoc society.
For a long time it seemed that the only problem on the horizon would come from the direction of Ennis. He takes his leadership position too easily, and is openly resentful of Teri (if not Bean). As the members of the small group begin to pair up and move on, they seem to get angry with him.
But this is Gary we had to pay attention to all along. The current storyline finds him earning Xavier’s (limited) trust as they prepare to strike a nearby group of armed survivors traveling by train, who Gary says kidnapped everyone after Ennis betrayed their location. But flashbacks slowly reveal that most of the group have left on their own by then, that Gary is in fact in love with Terry, and that he is so desperate to prevent her from joining the train group’s convoy to Colorado that he kills Ennis to keep him quiet. Only Bean sees what happened.
All of this is subtly hidden by Britton’s performance. He had never once given off creepy or violent stalking emotions in such an obvious way. He’s never submissive—early on he gives Teri a tough love about her need to lift weight—and backs down when asked. He’s also not a TV supervillain. His master plan is to, what, lure his lover Terry’s husband into doing his bidding and mount a suicidal “rescue” mission against people who haven’t kidnapped anyone, hoping that everyone between him and Terry will die in the process? Does Gary seem like that kind of guy to you?
This does not let him off the hook in any way. He killed his oldest friend, and seems willing to risk the lives of many innocent people. It’s simply to say that he’s just someone who cracked under the pressure of the post-apocalypse. He had pinned all his hopes on one person, even though he and she had admitted to each other that those hopes were in vain, and then he happened to have a gun in his hand when he knew that those hopes were about to be dashed and that he would lose them forever. Xavier, a trained Secret Service agent, falls into his lap in a similar way. He doesn’t plan, he reacts in the moment. He doesn’t move the chess pieces, he spins the boards as fast as he can.
That’s what makes him feel like he’s still part of the fabric of this story, rather than some sort of glitch in its matrix. If things had gone a little differently it would have been as legitimately beneficial to Xavier as Annie or the people in the last episode had that diner. There’s a world where Gary never pulled the trigger. It’s not just this one.
heavenThe second season of is a wonderful thing to watch. A radical departure from the structure of the original season as well as a dramatic expansion of its scope, it continues to introduce new characters not as cameos, but as narrative-carrying features and cast members. Even if Gary ends up lasting longer than Annie – in fact, especially If it doesn’t last longer than I did, it’s a testament to Dan Fogelman and company’s confidence in their abilities. (I don’t know about you, but it helps that I love Annie and Gary more than just whoever let them down down there in the basement. Woodley and Britton made sure of that.)
And now we have a real ramp on our hands. Unless something changes in a hurry, Xavier is about to attack innocents, only to bring his wife back with a man whose love she has already politely rejected. This would hinder their reunion – even though that is the case heavenso I fully expect it to be set against the blazing sun as you’re bathed in the most passionate synths you’ve ever heard in your life. Life’s full size, remember? You just have to hope you like the tune life is playing for you, otherwise there’s no telling what you might do, like Gary, to change the channel.
Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com On Bluesky and com. thesantcollins On Patreon ) has written about television for the New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is an author Pain Doesn’t Hurt: Reflections on the Road Home. He lives with his family on Long Island.