Paradise
The Final Countdown
Season 2
Episode 7
Editor’s Rating
The bunker has easily been the least interesting part of this season so far — but not today!
Photo: Ser Baffo/Disney
Let’s wrap up our Atlanta story line first, shall we? Because if we had spent all this time searching for Teri just for her to wind up dead at the hands of Gary the Mailman, I was going to flip a USPS truck, okay? This is not what happens, thankfully, but for a hot second Paradise is playing on those fears.
Xavier and Teri are finally reunited and thanks to Link’s train (would LOVE to know what questions the train people asked Xavier about the bunker), they have a ride back to Colorado. They can grab their new kids and go home. Sure Xavier is wanted for murder and coups there, but that is a problem for another day. Alas, it’s not that easy to get out of Atlanta. Gary sends a note to Teri, informing her that he has Bean and he would like her to come home now. I don’t care how many different versions we get of Xavier Collins saying, “Let’s go get [insert person he cares about],” he always says it with such confidence that I will follow this man into the depths of hell. For right now, though, it’s just the post office. And we’re gonna go get Teri’s boy.
Xavier has seen some shit since he was last with his wife, and he’d like to simply take out the threat and move on. Teri, of course, has a more complicated relationship with Gary and wants to talk to him. Xavier sits up in a sniper position just in case things go south. He’s not losing Teri again. Teri and Gary have an emotional conversation in which Gary does have a bit of a breakdown over how out of control all of this has gotten. He was desperate to keep Teri and Bean with him, and he made a mistake when he killed his friend. He was drowning. These were the worst years in history but the best of his life. It’s all very bleak and eventually he just wants Xavier to take him out. But Teri hugs him and tells him it’ll be okay, that he’ll get to start over, just don’t murder your best friend in cold blood this time, okay, buddy? She doesn’t actually say that last part, but it is implied. And good on Gary, he does let Teri and Bean go without any kind of fight. No last-minute standoff between Xavier and the Mailman needed. They pick up Annie’s baby, and those four hop on that train for the Colorado bunker.
The bunker has easily been the least interesting part of this season so far — but not today! Paradise season two has been more questions and vagueness than any type of satisfying answers, and while that doesn’t exactly change here in “The Final Countdown” (and yes, we get the most emo version of the Europe song you can imagine, Paradise is who it is!), it does feel like pieces are coming together for next week’s finale. This is because all hell is breaking loose in our underground home.
And no, I’m not talking about the batshit reveal that Samantha Redmond, tech-genius billionaire, holder of all the secrets and fate of the world, uses her dead son Dylan’s birthday — May 31 — for all of her passwords. I will believe a lot of things you throw at me, Paradise, but this crosses the line. (On a sidenote, we learn this fun fact when Hadley, apparently a proficient hacker, gives herself and Presley access to the lower prison levels on their wristbands and I’m genuinely loving this teen-girl team-up to get to the truth.)
Jokes aside, the chaos that descends upon the bunker by the end of this episode does have a lot to do with mistakes Samantha makes through a combination of her enormous hubris, her pile of secrets, and her unwavering-to-a-fault determination to solve this end-of-the-world problem. In case you weren’t picking that up on your own, we get an extended flashback to when Anders gave Samantha and Cal a tour of the inner workings of the bunker: the oxygen tanks, the four modular nuclear reactors, and the automated control center programmed to handle any emergency that may arise. If there’s a fire, it will suppress it. If there’s a lack of oxygen, the doors will automatically open (we know this from Jeremy’s current plan to bust out of this place). If there’s a siege from the outside, there’s a full lockdown protocol. As we saw last season, Cal Bradford comes off as a dummy, but he’s smarter than he lets on, and through a lengthy Lord of the Rings analogy, he has an important question: What if it all happens at once? Anders and Samantha brush him off. The chances of all those things happening at once are “infinitismal” and the bunker is programmed to react to “every reasonable scenario.” They are asking for trouble and Cal knows it. He reminds Samantha of every other empire in the history of the world. The Romans. The Greeks. The Aztecs. The British Empire. The Chicago Bulls. All of them seemed unstoppable, untouchable. They were all convinced they could do no wrong. All of them fell.
This feels like the fall, doesn’t it? Samantha goes to her meeting with Link. Tensions are high, but he gets his apple pie and his request to have their one-on-one on Air Force One. There’s some light comparisons to Luke Skywalker (Link) and Darth Vader (Samantha), invoking another empire that falls, but other than that it doesn’t take long for Link to inform Samantha that he knows about Alex and that’s why he’s here. “Where is Alex?” She plays dumb, but Link knows she’s lying. “We’ve reached an impasse,” she says as she shows him the exit door. Link grabs a presidential pen on the way out.
But their conversation isn’t over. At the bunker doors, Samantha reiterates that Link’s mission here, regardless of the fact that he has 10,000 people in his group, is futile. He will never get in. But he assures her, his team will get in. “I will find Alex and I will end this.” And then he goes off on her for claiming to have built all of this when in actuality, she stole and bribed and killed. It was her and her friends who “squeezed every last drop out of this planet.” Link’s friend Geiger is trying to pull him out of this situation before it reaches a breaking point. He calls for him repeatedly, finally using his real name, Dylan.
Well, this just sets Samantha off. Not only is his name Dylan, but she knows he’s 26 — her son Dylan would’ve been 26 this year, too. Guns are drawn, and Link’s friends are pulling him out, but she starts questioning him; she needs to know when his birthday was. There’s absolutely zero reason for Link to actually answer this woman he has shown nothing but contempt for except to advance the plot, but he tells her it’s May 31. Aren’t you so glad we got that little tidbit about Samantha’s Dylan from Hadley earlier? Link’s nose is bleeding as his friends pull him out and the bunker doors close. And then we see Samantha’s nose is bleeding, too.
Samantha goes home newly energized and tells her husband, “It worked. I think it worked.” She doesn’t explain what any of that means, but we can assume her use for whatever quantum-entanglement situation she has going on in that bunker is, sure, somewhat about saving the world but is maybe also about saving her son Dylan? Was Link actually dead on with that little Star Wars comparison he made? She tells her husband that she can’t explain it, but she thinks Dylan is okay somehow and then they have sex as is tradition for billionaires who believe they’ve conquered space and time. Following her afternoon delight, Samantha heads over to the secret-secret bunker by way of some lengthy tram system she has going, where she walks into a super-secret room and smiling, greets whatever is in front of her with a, “Hi, Alex.”
We still have no idea what’s going on at the big-picture level of Paradise, but we certainly know more about what’s happening at a granular level than Samantha does. After the Dylan encounter, she once again is so hyperfocused over whatever her secret plan is that she completely forgets about the world around her. And currently, that world is, well, melting down. This is because while she’s been dealing with Link and making what seems like a five-day long journey to visit Alex, multiple things are going wrong.
It seems Samantha Redmond did not plan for angsty teenage sons taking up their dead father’s mantle by freeing the bunker people, but here we are. Jeremy, Anders, and now Robinson have made their way to the automated control room, where Anders sends his two cohorts down to the oxygen tanks to smash them to shit so that the system will react to the drop and open all bunker doors. There’s also time for tension between Jeremy and Robinson in which he basically calls her a slut who meant nothing to his dad, and she tells him his father was ten times the man he is, which, like, I love Cal but he was kind of a dipshit, so this is deeply insulting. Does anyone care about this family drama? Surely it’s meant to lead up to some point when Jeremy and Robinson either have to trust each other in some near-death scenario or someone is sacrificing themselves for the other but honestly, let’s hope this situation gets quantum entangled out of our memory. Regardless, they do get the job done and smash those oxygen tanks to shit. In the control room, Anders can see the low-oxygen protocol beginning.
Unfortunately, it happens at the exact same time the cabal of billionaires, who have heard nothing from Samantha since her meeting, decide to put the bunker on lockdown. They have cameras outside and can see Link and his team making detailed plans to infiltrate the place, they have no additional information from their supposed leader, and so they decide not to risk it. The lockdown protocol begins … but the two protocols contradict one another and Anders watches as the computers start to go berserk. It’s a command conflict and the system can’t adjust or fix it. The system is failing. A meltdown is imminent.
All of this means that we’re heading into the finale with a meltdown crisis, a group of outsiders trying to break into the bunker, Xavier on his way back to Colorado getting nosebleeds again, Gabi may have just killed Jane (yet another Paradise story beat I refuse to believe is remotely possible), and Samantha messing with space and/or time. Hmmm, seems like maybe Cal was right to worry.
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