The 8 Sterling K. Brown Moments On Paradise That Made Him A Certified Badass

As a testament to how wildly the show’s character dynamics shifted by the end of the season, Agent Collins risking his life to protect the president from an assassin’s bullet in the first episode isn’t even a Top 5 most badass moment by the end of the season. While speaking to the press, Collins shields the president from a crazed boom operator who slides a gun out of his boom mic in an inventive but unsuccessful assassination attempt. In the moment, it was incredible watching Collins’ super-secret agent senses slow down time, allowing him to effectively react to the shot before it happens, and seeing him so focused on doing his job that he doesn’t realize he’s been shot until the President tells him. Unfortunately, revelations from later in the season knock this badass moment down a few pegs, and it also suffers from not being presented from the boom operator’s perspective, which would have placed it squarely in the top 3.

There was no sequence in Paradise, or arguably any other show so far this year, as nerve wracking and suffocatingly intense as the one in which everyone in the White House realizes the severity of the natural disaster they’ve been watching take out entire countries. The seventh episode is centered on the chaotic day when the president let’s everyone in America, including the shell-shocked politicians outside the Oval Office, know that he and a few others knew about the cataclysm they’ve been watching, essentially telling them that death is inevitable for most of them. A true badass can oscillate between emotions at the drop of a dime, and Brown exhibited some of his most emotionally visceral acting yet as he was frantically worrying about the safety of his wife in Atlanta while also being tasked with getting the president through the mob of his hostile colleagues ready to tear him apart for keeping them in the dark.

He runs back to grab the briefcase the president needs to launch a nuclear attack seconds after the last person holding it was shot in the back of the head, then scurries to the helicopter without a single blink, tear, or even dust from the propeller entering his eyes. That’s a stone cold badass who unfortunately did it in service of a plot he’d quickly learn may have cost him the love of his life.

Verbally reprimanding your boss in front of his subordinates could get you fired from McDonald’s. Doing that to the President of the United States, and as a result delaying his evacuation from an extinction-level disaster, could (and probably should) get you shot before your lips formed an exclamation point. None of that matters to tearfully enraged Agent Collins after he finally realizes the President knew Collins’ wife was doomed from the beginning of the day. As he and the leader of the free world exchange barbs over the reality of the situation, Collins looks him dead in his dreamy blue eyes and mocks the president’s performative bravery for telling the American people the world was already ending before they had a chance to prepare like he did. He then makes the impossible choice to accept his wife’s death in order to be there for his children, etching this in the Sterling K. Brown badass hall of fame.

Yes, Samantha “Sinatra” Redmon was a grieving mother who turned the grief of her son’s death into her life’s purpose to protect the ones she loved from a dying world, but she’s deserved a bullet in the head since the second episode. That quick shift from distraught to dangerous that I mentioned earlier was at its peak in the 10 seconds Collins went from a puddle of tears to a gun-toting killer after Sinatra implied that she’d accidentally had his daughter killed. This would’ve been a little higher on the list if he put the megalomaniac out of her misery. Unfortunately all he did was distract her long enough with a gun to her head for Sinatra’s own assassin, Jane Driscoll (Nicole Brydon Bloom), to put a bullet in her chest to disable her without killing her. I guess you shouldn’t come between a psycho and their Nintendo Wii.

There are certain things in life that are inherently badass simply because describing them sounds unbelievable. Once Collins was ready to finally come at Sinatra, he called in the craziest favor you can ever ask a neighbor: Leave digital messages in the sky for all to see. In episode six, Collins had the messages “THEY’RE LYING TO YOU,” “DO YOU WANT TO KNOW THE TRUTH?” and “WHO IS SINATRA?” displayed across the sky in crimson red. That alone was a badass move to destabilize Sinatra’s influence over the community. It became genius when the only way she could have it removed was by rebooting the sky. REBOOTING. THE. SKY. That alone accomplished everything he wanted, and she did it for him.

This Is Us fans are well aware that if you give Brown time to speak uninterrupted about death, he’s going to rip your heart out and wash it with your tears. In the middle of his silent uprising in the sixth episode, Collins cuts through Dr. Gabriela Torabi (Sarah Shahi) trying to talk him out of his dissention with her psychobabble bullshit by vividly comparing Sinatra bringing all of these people to this idyllic city inside a mountain to the way people corral cows into increasingly smaller spaces until the fight in them is diminished so much that they “line up single-file and march down a chute to their death.” His delivery is bone-chilling, the analogy is sobering, and the interspersed visuals of Agent Robinson (Krys Marshall) finding Sinatra’s hidden armory during his speech are devastating. Speaking the truth is usually the most badass thing you can do, especially when it’s a matter of life or death.

The #4 pick and #2 pick have some overlap, but they’re not quite the same. With the help of Agent Robinson and a bunch of disillusioned Secret Service colleagues, Collins organizes a multifaceted coup of the powers that be. He and his cohorts surreptitiously steal all of the guns the government said didn’t exist, and hack the sky to tell the people being governed that they’ve been lied to, leading Sinatra to initiate the shelter protocol that had all senior officials and their families corralled in a secure location like the cattle he mentioned earlier. While his ultimate plan of imprisoning Sinatra with the rest of the corrupt officials doesn’t succeed, bringing a government to its knees is A-1 badassery.

Guns, blood, and government destabilization require bravery, but nothing is more badass than flying a plane out of a mountain into potentially poisonous air to find your wife who may or may not be alive. After 8 episodes of Collins doing everything from organizing a coup to berating the President of the United States after taking a bullet for him, Collins commandeered a plane and took off to find his wife based on the secret coordinates the late president left. Season 2 will undoubtedly have him venturing into the unknown while his kids and everyone else he cares for back at Paradise deal with the aftermath of his uprising. No matter where he is, you can count on Collins to be the biggest badass in the vicinity.