In a twist of cruel fate (and as a result of human error), the second season of Paradise ends just as the show began — with a community of individuals having to pick up the pieces of their lives, now torn asunder by the ruinous events that befell their homes. Whereas Season 1 traced the cataclysmic fallout that led a select number to hibernate in an underground Coloradan bunker, Season 2 eventually forces these privileged few back out into the light after a nuclear meltdown claims their artificial home.
On the heels of a nail-biting penultimate episode comes “Exodus,” a finale that (literally) blows the doors open on what Paradise has been and can be. The dystopian thriller, which has certainly always straddled the line between magical realism and of-the-moment political commentary, goes full sci-fi with its Season 2 ender, introducing a time-travel storyline sure to be explored in an already renewed third season.
With Paradise liable to implode, Dr. Gabriela Torabi (Sarah Shahi) steps up while Sinatra (Julianne Nicholson) is MIA, commanding the site’s engineers to open the doors of the bunker in hopes of relieving the pressure on the imminently reactive nuclear plants, even though this means Link’s (Thomas Doherty) group will invade. When the system’s cooling towers explode, killing Anders (Erik Svedberg-Zelman) and severely injuring Agent Nicole Robinson (Krys Marshall), Torabi calls to implement Exodus, a last-ditch failsafe measure evacuating the residents.
Sinatra returns from her journey in the tunnels visiting Alex (more on this below), and Torabi confesses to murdering Jane (or so she thinks)! The billionaire mastermind tells everyone to leave, and, in an unlikely team-up, joins forces with Xavier Collins (Sterling K. Brown) to rescue their respective daughters, who got stuck in the service elevators amid the chaos.
Meanwhile, Link’s team is trying to manually shut down the nuclear reactors to avoid disaster, but his mentor Geiger is killed after shrapnel hits his neck. After grieving the loss of their leader, Link and his friends come to help Xavier and Sinatra with the elevator rescue.
What happens next explains many of the season’s longstanding mysteries — but also contributes a host of further queries. Below, read a breakdown of the seven burning questions left unanswered by the Paradise Season 2 finale.
Who, or what, is Alex?
Julianne Nicholson in Paradise Season 2, Episode 8 — “Exodus” (Disney/Ser Baffo)
“Exodus” opens with a flashback set nine years earlier. Gifted CalTech quantum physics professor Henry Miller (Patrick Fischler), whom we saw in Episode 3, is teaching a course when he’s interrupted by a young student, Link. The two soon begin work on an AI-controlled quantum computer, named after Henry’s wife Alex, who has Huntington’s disease. (To jog your memory: Henry assisted in her death before being shot by Sinatra’s hired gun — Billy Pace, played by Jon Beavers — for refusing to give up the schematics for the project.)
In the finale flashback, Sinatra crosses paths with Henry for the first time, telling him he’s one of 10 quantum scientists she’s seeding to prevent certain climate catastrophe in the future. Once advances are made, Henry grows fearful of the computer, telling her they need to stop building it because it’s beginning to interfere with matters of time, creating serious anomalies and answering questions not yet asked by humans.
In the present day, Sinatra is handed a card meant for a specific “User X,” and the AI predicts she will be dead by the end of the day. Sinatra orders Alex, which is situated 100 miles from the bunker, to be closed off from the bunker’s power grid in case of emergency.
“I don’t know exactly where it’s going,” Nicholson tells Deadline of what will become of Alex. “I don’t know what’s happening in Season 3, but it is with that idea that just living in the bunker wouldn’t work. We wouldn’t survive.”
As audiences will recall, earlier this season a scientist outlined to Sinatra that the subzero temperatures immediately following the supervolcano megatsunami will pale in comparison to what will happen next over the course of several years. After sunshine returns to warm the planet, it will create a greenhouse effect whereby trapped oxygen will eventually crush Earth and its population. “Alex is designed to ultimately save us from that,” Nicholson says.
Is Dylan Sinatra’s late son?
Thomas Doherty in Paradise Season 2, Episode 8 — “Exodus” (Disney/Ser Baffo)
In the previous episode, Sinatra rekindled her relationship with her husband after years of distance, spurred by her encounter with Link, whose real name is revealed to be Dylan. He happens to have the same birthday as her late son and would be roughly the same age as him should he have survived his illness. Ultimately, Sinatra believes he is among the anomalies produced by Alex’s time-warping capabilities. “You’re my son. It’s complicated, but you are,” she tells him, adding that Alex is already working.
Speaking to The View, Nicholson and Doherty indicated they often joke they are “actors, not quantum physicists” who have to “trust the writing” as presented. “I don’t know. I’m not sure, I can’t tell you,” Doherty told Sunny Hostin of what’s coming down the pike.
While it’s possible that this is just a coincidence, and Sinatra is mistaken — due to her lasting grief and overwhelming desire to be reunited with her son — the world of Paradise has established that chance is, more often than not, fate. Given that Alex is intended to reverse an incontrovertible climate disaster, it seems more than possible that it could also erase a fatal illness.
What happened to Jane?
Nicole Brydon Bloom in Paradise Season 2, Episode 6 — “Jane” (Disney/Ser Baffo)
At the end of Episode 7, Dr. Torabi — in an act of self-defense — stabs Jane (Nicole Brydon Bloom) before the latter is able to kill her. For much of Episode 8, it’s assumed that the conniving, sociopathic Secret Service agent is deceased — until a flash of a scene shows that she is no longer in the shower where Dr. Torabi left her body.
“Certainly, no longer seeing her in the shower signals that she got somewhere,” Bloom says, “whether it’s 10 feet from the shower or a hundred. But I think Jane is very skilled, very experienced. Part of my question, just as an actor in shooting Episode 7, and when I got the script, was: ‘OK, wait, how do I make this make sense?’ Because we’ve established Jane’s the biggest motherfucker in the bunker — she’s a highly, highly trained CIA operative; how does Gabriela get the jump on her? And I think part of that is Jane’s belief that she’s invincible and that she’s far more capable than everyone else around her. And so going in to kill Gabriela and then getting injured in a mortally wounding place, suddenly everything flips on its head. And so my hope is that Jane survives, and I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.”
Why does Sinatra sacrifice herself — and is she truly gone?
After rescuing her daughter, Sinatra parts with less-than-assuring words, as the episode sets up her sacrifice on behalf of the bunker community (and the world). When Dylan calls out for Xavier, or X, Sinatra puts two-and-two together that the message Alex spit out was intended for him. She locks herself inside the control room, as the remaining stragglers and Xavier get out of the bunker ahead of the blast.
She walks around Paradise as it crumbles around her, panels crashing down from the sky as the sun enters its last descent. She gazes at the coin-operated horse her son used to love and envisions him holding her hand. The mountain implodes.
“I think her grief and need for control are holding hands,” Nicholson says of the complex character. “I think it starts with the grief, but then the need for control to prevent anything like that happening again, to sort of shield herself and her family from any harm going forward, are her big motivators. And of course, when she’s shot at the end of Season 1, and we find her in Season 2, that belief that she was safe, she was untouchable, has been shattered. And so we find her in a vulnerable place, and you see a little bit more of her softer side. She still wants to maintain power, she’s still the big boss, but I feel like you can’t help but see moments of of her being shaken.”
The two-time Emmy-winning actress said she was briefed by creator Dan Fogelman on how Sinatra would go down with the ship, and finds her final resting place poetic.
“I was told that was coming early on in the season, and I love it as an ending. I feel like it’s a beautiful way for her to go, the ultimate sacrifice,” she explains. “And for all the dastardly deeds she’s done along the way, at her core and her heart of hearts, she’s not a monster. I found it very moving. I love when she’s walking through Paradise and stuff is falling apart around her, like that moment with her son, where they’re holding hands … Dan was so sweet when he was telling me about it, like he was really excited about this ending for her and how it will hopefully just give audiences pause for thought in terms of who they knew this woman to be and how they think of her now.”
Of her final interaction with Xavier, Nicholson says Fogelman described it as “passing on the baton to him, you’re asking him for the ultimate trust.” Now that she has left this earthly plane — or will Alex resurrect her, who knows? — Sinatra must now entrust Xavier with the task of saving the world and keeping her family safe.
Will Xavier save the world?
Enuka Okuma in Paradise Season 2, Episode 8 — “Exodus” (Disney/Anne Marie Fox)
In a needle drop to end all needle drops, the finale closes with a haunting cover of Phil Collins’ “Another Day in Paradise,” soundtracking Sinatra’s charge to Xavier. She tells him Alex’s whereabouts and that the quantum computer can “stop all of this. In fact, it already has stopped all of this.” When he questions why she is so certain he will listen to her, Sinatra replies, “I believe you already have.”
Brown says of Xavier’s burden: “Now we’re left to wonder, like, is it all predestined? Where does choice come into things? Does Xavier wind up going to Alex, and what does he do with Alex when he gets there? I love this journey, because I think the true Hero’s Journey is usually thrust upon people who never asked for it in the first place, but when the mantle is put down, they wind up taking action and doing what needs to be done. So I think we’ll see that continue.”
Enuka Okuma, who plays Teri, adds of her character’s potential involvement in the storyline next season: “I have no idea what’s going to happen, but just the idea that he would involve her is something I hope for just because I feel it has been evidenced as a couple that they are a unit. So going forward, it would be exciting to see that unit together, and also someone who grounds Xavier as well. I think they balance each other out so, so he might need a little bit of her level-headedness.”
Nicholson says of the trust Sinatra bestows upon Xavier: “It’s a relationship they have, even though we don’t see them together until the very end of the season this year. I think that she’s rooting for him. I think that she hopes he’s going to be OK. She hopes he’s gonna find his wife. She hopes he’ll come back and they’ll be a family reunited. I think she really feels that way, and I think that there’s a real admiration and respect and care, at least, as you say, from her for him.”
What’s up with all the bloody noses?
Since the beginning of the season, Xavier and Link have been connected in some inexplicable way. Last episode, Sinatra joined the ranks — and all of them had bloody noses. Xavier recognizes Link from his visions and in this episode, it’s Xavier’s nose that’s bleeding.
In previous interviews, both Doherty and Brown alluded to a tenuous connection between their characters and Sinatra. Now that we know who, or rather what, Alex is, it’s possible that the headaches, visions and bloody noses are all hinting at the physical cost of messing with time. In effect, we can guess that they are unintended consequences of the anomalies, but thus far, the cast has kept mum on that theory.
Is it just me, or was there definitely some awkward tension between Teri and Torabi?
Sarah Shahi in Paradise Season 2, Episode 8 — “Exodus” (Disney/Ser Baffo)
Despite Paradise‘s entry into the fantastical realm, one of the closing moments of the season infuses a rare moment of painfully real levity. With the bunker community now outside and everyone (mostly) safe, Xavier introduces Teri to Dr. Torabi — as his therapist, that is — conveniently leaving out that they hooked up last season. There’s some latent awkwardness and tension, and Xavier immediately bounces from the conversation when he spots Dylan.
“I mean, Teri gets up and walks over there,” Okuma says with a laugh. “Nothing is said; it’s just the very fact that — I mean, it was written: ‘She gets up and walks over,’ and for me, it’s like when your spidey senses start tingling and you know you’re mad, and even though they haven’t seen each other in so long, it’s just something about this woman with a lot of hair, it’s making me feel like I should introduce myself.”
She adds, “Honestly, that was one of my favorite moments of the whole season, and you should see the outtakes. Sarah and I had so much fun ad-libbing. None of it made it in, but we were having a blast.”
Some bonus questions:
Why are there two Arby’s in the bunker? Teri is stunned to discover there’s a sun and a lake … and two Arby’s and a Ferris Wheel, her husband supplies. On what planet, or in what bunker, does a community of 25,000 need not one, but two places where they can “have the meats”?
Is that the Gilmore Girls Stars Hollow set? Yes! Eagle-eyed viewers will notice the iconic gazebo center-stage on Warner Bros.’ Midwest Street, where Rory and Lorelai Gilmore have had countless walk-and-talks, coffee in hand. In Paradise, the area also serves as the town square and the locale where much of the evacuation chaos takes place during the finale.
