Paradise broke the seal on its post-apocalyptic bunker at the end of season one, sending former Secret Service agent Xavier Collins (Sterling K. Brown) out into the world to track down his wife, Teri (Enuka Okuma), who’d somehow survived the environmental catastrophe that took out most of the world’s population. Season two of the Hulu show, which just wrapped up last night, revealed that Sinatra (Julianne Nicholson), the billionaire who built the bunker, had another, far more mysterious scheme in play—something she hoped would save the world in an entirely different way.
The season two finale, “Exodus,” finally lifted the lid on Sinatra’s secret. It also set up Paradise‘s third and apparently final season with plenty of built-in excitement and intrigue. Did you guess the truth about “Alex”?
Last week’s “The Final Countdown” handled some key plot logistics: Xavier and Teri were finally reunited; Link (Thomas Doherty), the leader of the outside group trying to enter the bunker, had his meeting with Sinatra; and a series of not-so-coincidental events meant that the bunker’s operating system, confused by simultaneous orders to force open its doors and enact a total lockdown, triggered an imminent meltdown in its nuclear reactors. We know that “Exodus” is going to have to deal with the latter, and quickly, but the episode starts with a much-needed flashback.
At last, we’re taken back to the moment that Dr. Henry Miller (Patrick Fischler) connects with Link—then still going by his real name, Dylan—in a Caltech physics class where the student reveals he’s so tired of theories that he’s gone and built the world’s first AI-powered quantum computer. Vestige Quantum is born, and the two work on improving their invention in Miller’s house, where he’s caring for his ailing wife, Alex.
Alex becomes the namesake for their creation, which along the way picks up funding from Sinatra in the form of a literal blank check: she wants a super-fast computer “to solve the climate crisis before it becomes a catastrophe.” (Sinatra only deals with Miller, which explains why she’d never met Dylan before “The Final Countdown.”) The Alex project goes well—too well, in fact, which is why, as we saw in episode three, “Another Day in Paradise,” Miller refuses to turn it over to Sinatra, even though he realizes she’ll kill to get what she wants (and does).
In “Exodus” we learn the reason for his refusal. Alex is working, “but it’s also trying to do something dangerous,” Miller explains. “It’s trying to manipulate time.” Such actions could result in “anomalies, coincidences, repeating events, and physical disturbances”—including nosebleeds, perhaps?
As we know, Sinatra got what she wanted. In the present day, we learn, as was suggested in “The Final Countdown,” that Sinatra thinks she’s seen one of those anomalies in the form of Link, aka Dylan—who she believes is actually her late son Dylan, based on the name, the shared birthday, and a feeling she has. (A little later in the episode, we also learn that Alex is being kept 100 miles away from the bunker, which explains that long train ride Sinatra takes to get there.) Standing in front of Alex, Sinatra gets some intriguing updates from Dr. Chase (Simon Templeman), who’s been overseeing Alex this whole time.
“Alex hasn’t finished calculating. We haven’t activated her yet,” Dr. Chase says, skeptical of Sinatra’s Dylan theory. However, “We believe that Alex has started to communicate with us,” he tells Sinatra. Alex has been making predictions, which have all come true.
He has a card that Alex has crafted for Sinatra, or rather for “User: X” (obviously we all know who that is, though it takes Sinatra awhile to figure it out), with mysterious strings of numbers on it. Neither Dr. Chase nor Sinatra knows what they mean. Dr. Chase also tells Sinatra that Alex has predicted Sinatra’s death will happen today.
Most of “Exodus” follows the scramble within and outside the bunker, as Link and company enter just as Dr. Torabi (Sarah Shahi)—the de facto person in charge and still splattered with Jane’s (Nicole Brydon Bloom) blood—orders the Exodus protocol: a complete evacuation ahead of the imminent nuclear meltdown. Xavier and Teri try to find their kids, a quest that sees Xavier, Sinatra, and Dylan facing off after rescuing Xavier and Sinatra’s daughters from a stuck elevator. Dylan wants to know where Alex is.
“Alex is already working,” Sinatra tells him. But she also says Alex is closed off and not easily accessible.
A gun-waving Dylan panics after Sinatra tells him she believes he is her son, and then Xavier and Dylan both have one of those “memories of things that haven’t happened yet” episodes with matching nosebleeds. Xavier calms him down by telling him he knows Annie and that Annie died while giving birth to her and Dylan’s daughter.
They start hauling ass to safety, but it’s soon determined that the only way to prevent the entire area from becoming a nuclear blast zone is to close the bunker doors. Sinatra, who already knows her death has been predicted by the infalliable Alex, volunteers to “go down with the ship.” But not before she hands Xavier (clearly, “User: X”) the card from Alex with the mysterious numbers on it. Unlike season one, this is going to be more complicated than finding a library book.
Paradise waits to show us what Sinatra tells Xavier until the very last moments of the episode, after everyone but Sinatra is safe and the bunker has imploded inside the mountain.
“About a 100 miles from here there is a second bunker, deep underneath the Denver airport,” Sinatra says, setting off woo-woo detectors for anyone who’s kept up on the many conspiracy theories swirling around that airport (there’s even a shot of “Blucifer” for good measure). “It houses a quantum computer that can stop all of this. In fact it already has stopped all of this.”
Sinatra tells Xavier to go there and follow its instructions and “save the world.”
Xavier wonders why she thinks he’ll agree to do any of this, to which she says, “I believe you already have.”
Season three, therefore, will surely see Xavier embarking on another quest—maybe accompanied by Dylan, since we’ve yet to see those scenes between them glimpsed in their shared visions play out yet.
But will Dylan be in favor of making Alex fully operational, since he and Miller were so worried about its powers that they tried to keep Sinatra from getting her hands on it? Throughout season two, he’d talked about “killing Alex” but also “restarting the world.” Aren’t those two things in opposition to each other, given what we know now?
Also, how exactly is Alex manipulating time? What is the AI choosing to alter, and why? How is Dylan alive in this timeline if he died in Sinatra’s past? And what might a “restarted” world look like? Would we reverse years to a time when the world could actively work to prevent the climate crisis that caused the supervolcano to erupt in the first place? Or would Alex move forward on the timeline and fix the “Venus effect” that Sinatra was warned about?
There’s a lot to ponder, and thank goodness, a third season to dig into all these questions. Oh, and Dylan named his baby “Annie”—and it seems like Jane is really dead. (We’re still wondering why and how Alex sent those messages about her into the past, though.)
Seasons one and two of Paradise are now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+.
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