Apart from a brief flashback, this is it for Pardo’s appearances in Guilded Age. Flo deserves credit for the deep irony here, that Pardo was the one who instigated this “altruist conspiracy” and has now, like Robespierre, become its victim as it’s grown beyond him.

In a very broad sense, this will turn out to be mercy for Pardo. Because it means he won’t be in danger when the Hall of Houses and Gastonia itself collapse. Reader kammon asked what Pardo might be up to in a post-Gastonian society, and what I said then still seems right to me:

Pardo is, I think, still confused and disoriented. He doesn’t seem to have much of a hateful streak, but a lot has happened that he’d find deeply upsetting.

He, like many people on both sides of the conflict, assumed that the Rebel defeat of Gastonia would result in human genocide. And now it…didn’t? In the once-Gastonian streets, various races are mingling more or less peaceably. But there’s still enough low-key conflict that humans fear their purge may just arrive a little later.

Most of them take solace in Byron’s reassuring presence, but to Pardo, Byron is a man who spectacularly failed to protect his friends and family. He misses his old friends in the Heads of Houses–-but they were never really his friends, were they? And he narrowly missed imprisonment/execution specifically BECAUSE they weren’t his friends and ousted him before they lost the war.

I don’t know whether he’d get over all that, eventually. If he did, his congeniality would make him the sort Penk wanted looking after human affairs, so he may well have a place in the current government. But like Rana, if he did recover, it wouldn’t be in time for [the series] finale.