7. Getting the President out of the White House

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.