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Warning: This story contains spoilers for Paradise.
Paradise emerged in January as one of the more bonkers shows to grace television in recent years. Dan Fogelman’s followup to his hit network series This Is Us adopts that show’s maudlin personal drama and mixes it in a blender with a high-concept sci-fi series, a political thriller, and a murder mystery. March 4’s Season 1 finale offered an answer to the mystery that kicked off the entire series—who killed the President of the United States?—though it was easy to forget or care about that particular plot line once it was revealed that the show is set in a post-apocalyptic world in which the main characters have taken refuge in a billionaire’s silo. (Don’t tell Apple.)
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The twists have come fast and furious on this series: The president was sleeping with one of his secret service agents! There’s a hit man on the loose! No, two! The main character is leading a coup! Scratch that, the coup is abruptly canceled!
The character development has leaned heavily on tragic tropes—one character is psychologically damaged because she lost a child; another, his wife; another, his dog—and irritating quirks. POTUS is obsessed with bad ’80s music and every episode is punctuated by both the original version of a song set against a very obvious backdrop (“We Built This City” playing behind the billionaire literally building the city in a cave) and then a mournful version over some tragic event like a child dying. Meanwhile, a waitress’ singular trait is her love of cashew milk-cheese fries. That’s her entire personality. She eats them in every scene in which she appears—a fact that cracks open a mystery in the finale when the woman’s files reveal she supposedly has a tree nut allergy. Thus the cashew-milk-cheese-fry lover must be an imposter. Brilliant or absurd? You decide.
The show has been compared to Lost and Scandal, but specifically the later years when those series went off the rails. And yet it’s proving addictive. Star Sterling K. Brown brings enough gravitas to the silly show that it’s earned an impressive audience on Hulu. Here’s a recap of what’s happened on Paradise so far, an explanation of that last episode, and some ideas as to where the show is headed.
Read more: This Is Us Creator Outdoes Himself With New Thriller Paradise’s Big, Absurd Twist
What happened in the lead-up to the Paradise Season 1 finale
Brown plays Xavier, a Secret Service agent assigned to protect President Cal Bradford (James Marsden), a jocular nepo baby in the mode of a liberal George W. Bush. When Xavier finds his boss murdered, he tries to gather clues before calling in reinforcements. It turns out that the President was a puppet controlled by a billionaire, code-named Sinatra (Julianne Nicholson), who can be most efficiently described as a female Elon Musk. It is revealed at the end of the first episode that the apocalypse has occurred and about 25,000 people hand-picked by the billionaire have taken refuge inside her climate-controlled bunker. Xavier had a complicated relationship with the president—he once took a bullet for his boss, bonding them forever, but is furious that the politician was unable to save Xavier’s wife during the apocalypse. Xavier plays single father to his two kids, often leaving them in disturbingly precarious situations with violent criminals.
The penultimate episode of the season flashed back to the day the world (supposedly) ended, a fast-paced and harrowing episode that was admittedly gripping. Earth faces a climate disaster resulting in a series of tsunamis that take out coastal cities. Russia and China start a nuclear war, but luckily the president—in a typical eye-rolling twist for this show—has a button that temporarily turns off all power in the world, grounding the nukes, though also dooming anyone still alive to possibly starving to death until power is restored. Against the advice of Sinatra, Cal hits the button, insisting the people of America need a chance to survive.
And, apparently, many did. At the end of that episode, it’s revealed that about 55 million Americans survived the apocalypse outside the silo, including Xavier’s wife. Sinatra has been conspiring to hide this secret so no one will leave her bunker—she has major control issues.
Xavier leads a rebellion against Sinatra, who continues to control the government after Cal’s death, but Sinatra asks her personal hit woman Jane (Nicole Bryden Bloom) to take Xavier’s teenage daughter (Aliyah Mastin) hostage. She also reveals a recording to Xavier that proves his wife is alive in Atlanta.
The librarian tried to assassinate the President twice
Sinatra effectively ends Xavier’s coup by kidnapping his daughter…but then lets Xavier and his buddies go, even allowing several of them keep their guns, a truly bizarre decision by a paranoid leader. Rather than immediately rushing to find his daughter, Xavier makes his own strange decision to try to solve the president’s murder rather than checking on his family’s wellbeing. He returns to the president’s house to search again for crime scene clues and finds the CD that Cal burned for his son of—you guessed it—’80s rock. That CD leads Xavier to a book in the library where the President has hidden every secret about apocalypse, as well as instructions on how to leave the bunker.
The librarian (Ian Merrigan), who we have seen briefly in a few scenes over the course of the show, knocks Xavier out. When Xavier wakes up, the librarian reveals he is the man who once tried to kill the president—but he is fake bald now, so apparently nobody noticed the most notorious criminal in the country was sorting books in the self-help section.
He forces a tied-up Xavier to listen to his long, tragic tale that begins in the pre-apocalypse days with this librarian managing the construction of the silo. His workers dug up some rare chemical that would kill them but would dissipate by the time the silo residents moved in. (Convenient!). Sinatra decided to press on with the work, calculating that all the construction workers would die in the apocalypse she’s convinced is going to happen anyway, so it didn’t particularly matter if they suffered from illness in the interim. This construction manager-turned-librarian tried to alert the media to the existence of the silo and the working conditions that were killing his employees, but nobody will listen to him. To draw attention to his cause, he tries to shoot the president on the lawn of the White House.
When the apocalypse comes, this guy strolled out of prison during a riot, managed to disguise himself as an officer, murdered a librarian and his wife with credentials to get into the bunker, picked up the random cashew-cheese-fries-loving lady in a parking lot to pretend to be his wife, faked a panic attack to distract the person responsible for checking IDs as they entered the silo since his face didn’t match the photo, got used to living in paradise, and chilled for a while, before realizing that actually he should try to murder the president again as vengeance for dooming millions to climate catastrophe while the wealthy took refuge in a manufactured suburb. He accomplished the assassination with the efficiency of a trained assassin despite being just some schlubby guy. After revealing all of this to Xavier, the assassin-librarian kills himself.
It is a satisfying conclusion insofar as the murderer was (kind of) under the audience’s nose the whole time but there was, essentially, no way that anyone could guess this man was the same man who tried to assassinate the president outside the White House—in part because the series of events that lead him into the bunker are so absurd. He’s also a rather disposable character for a disposable mystery, one that got fans to initially tune into the show but soon fell by the wayside when the real twist of the series—that the world has ended—is revealed.
There’s a psychopath on the loose who really likes the Wii
While Xavier is off solving a murder mystery, Sinatra calls Jane to fret over the fact that Xavier’s daughter knows too much. The daughter is romantically entangled with the president’s son (Charlie Evans) and together they discovered information about survivors outside the silo in his dad’s house.
Jane, you may recall, is masquerading as a mild-mannered secret service agent who was dating her coworker Billy. The two were on duty the night the president was murdered and turned off the security cameras so they could play Wii tennis without getting caught, hence the lack of security footage of the assassin. Apparently they played video games together—and with Xavier’s daughter—almost every night. We got the sense that Jane was a cold-blooded murderer when she took out her supposed love interest Billy on Sinatra’s command earlier in the season after Billy refused to hurt Xavier or his family. But apparently Jane is not just a killer but a psychopath.
Jane tells Sinatra she will “take care of the situation” with Xavier’s daughter. In exchange she wants access to the Nintendo Wii (yes, seriously). Sinatra is distressed by the bizarre request and hesitates over whether she would actually order the murder of a child. Ultimately she scoffs at Jane’s desire to play the Wii and hangs up the phone without getting clarity on whether this woman plans to kill a teenager, which just feels like sloppy villain behavior. Later, we see a text exchange in which Sinatra urgently asks what’s going on with Xavier’s daughter and Jane assures her the situation is handled.
Eventually, Xavier does remember that he should check on his kids and heads back to Sinatra to tell her he solved the mystery and demand the release of his daughter. Sinatra says his daughter is dead, at which point Xavier threatens her with a gun. But Jane comes out of nowhere to shoot Sinatra first. Jane tells Xavier that his daughter is safe. Once Xavier runs out of the room, Jane tells Sinatra that she has saved her life: Xavier planned to kill Sinatra, but Jane merely injured her. Now, Jane plans to puppet the puppet master. “Probably should have just let me have the Wii,” she says.
The unhinged Wii plot begs a number of questions. Did the apocalypse take place in 2006? Because the Nintendo Wii is pretty old, and there are more advanced video game systems that have come out in the last two decades. The iPhone technology in the penultimate episode would suggest the show is set in the 2020s. So did the President like his video games, like his music, out-of-date?
Also, when Sinatra was choosing personal secret assassins to protect her in her silo, did she not have them take a psychological evaluation? She kept her personal therapist on retainer to write up a profile on every single person in this bizarre suburb, but didn’t run a few extra tests on the potential serial killers?
Xavier is headed out of the silo
Xavier was always going to leave the silo to try to find his wife, despite a brief tryst with Sinatra’s therapist, Dr. Gabriela Torabi (Sarah Shahi), that wound up being meaningless from both a plot and character perspective. Clues that Xavier’s wife was still alive were seeded throughout the season. A group of scientists left the bunker to much fanfare to find survivors, but Sinatra had those explorers killed, fearing that the revelation that a world existed outside her perfect community would lead to an invasion of the bunker. An entire flashback episode with Xavier’s father exists to establish that Xavier is obsessed with planes (his grandfather was a Tuskegee Airman, and his father flew commercial airliners) and has his pilot’s license. So, of course, Xavier will fly a plane out of the literal hole that he’s been living in. One of the first sites to try to make contact with the silo was Atlanta, where we know Xavier’s wife was working at the time of the cataclysm. And now we have proof of her voice.
Xavier will leave his daughter and son behind with fellow secret service agent Robinson (Krys Marshall), which is a concerning choice. Yes, she did solve the cheese fry lady mystery. And yes, she did recently help Xavier start a coup. But for much of the series, she and Xavier both suspected that the other murdered Cal. So it’s not the most stable alliance in the world. Plus she is presumably persona non grata among Sinatra and the other powerful people running the silo and thus a target for murder or imprisonment, which would leave Xavier’s kids in peril—again!
But off he goes! What will Xavier find in the real world? A burgeoning society or something more akin to The Last of Us? The universe of Paradise is about to rapidly expand in Season 2.
