Hulu’s hit series Paradiseinitially fooled viewers with its premise and genre: the show was seemingly an espionage-thriller about a Secret Service agent named Xavier Collins (Sterling K. Brown), who is trying to protect President Cal Bradford (James Marsden) from a threat within his own administration. However, in one of the biggest premiere twists ever, we learned that Paradise was actually a dystopian sci-fi series, about a town built in an advanced bunker, designed to withstand the apocalyptic event that destroyed the world outside. However, the surviving society has many old snakes in the proverbial garden – including world-changing secrets that Xavier starts to uncover.
Paradise‘s Season 2 Finale Changed The Game… Again
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Over the course of Paradise Season 1, Xavier found out that the real power figure in the bunker, Samantha “Sinatra” Redmond (Julianne Nicholson), was controlling society, and that the world outside the bunker town was still active and inhabited – including the city of Atlanta, where he thought he lost his wife, Terry (Enuka Okuma). In Season 2, Xavier left the bunker and ventured into the outside world to investigate a radio message from his wife. Against all odds, Xavier found Terry and managed to get her and the tribe of people she’d been living with) back to the bunker. Unfortunately, events within the bunker (a cabal of rebels trying to overthrow Sinatra) caused a catastrophic meltdown event, which destroyed “paradise” for good, leaving all survivors stranded in the harshness of the outside world.
Paradise Season 2 got its fair share of criticism, and pacing was a big one. What should’ve been a direct quest focused on Xavier and the returning cast of characters was instead a meandering detour into new characters and storylines, including a bizarre subplot that few fans could explain. Well, the Paradise Season 2 finale revealed what that subplot was all about, and it turned out to be a game-changing turn for the entire series!
(MAJOR SPOILERS FOLLOW!) All throughout Paradise Season 2, Xavier kept experiencing a strange vision – one that seemed to be entangled with the visions of Link (Thomas Doherty), a brilliant engineer who was roaming the wasteland, trying to monitor, fix, or shut down all of the unmanned nuclear plants around America. Link and Xavier’s stories collided in several ways, culminating in the revelation that the wasteland engineer was actually Sinatra’s son, Dylan, who had died of a rare disease years ago. Dylan (or “Link”) somehow lived on to design an advanced AI computer codenamed “Alex,” and that system became part of the bunker after Sinatra stole it from Link’s mentor (whom she had killed).
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In a jarring left turn, the Season 2 finale reveals Alex, in a scene where Sinatra’s secret team of computer geeks brings the dire news that the AI has transcended all known measures of intelligence, and has started to develop 4D perception and predictive models – i.e., seeing beyond time, predicting futures, and affecting outcomes. Alex correctly predicts that Sinatra will die that day (shutting herself in the bunker to contain a nuclear meltdown), and that Xavier (or “X”) would survive and be designated as Alex’s new primary user. The mission Sinatra tasks Xavier with is to somehow, someway, get to Alex, follow the computer’s guidance to change the past, and create a world better than the current dystopian mess.
In other words: Paradise Season 3 will be dipping into time travel and multiverse sci-fi tropes – the second time the series has pulled a bait-and-switch on its fans.
Paradise Producer & Star Explain the Multiverse Twist, What It Means For Season 3
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Paradise star Sterling K. Brown (This Is Us) has done some post-season interviews, discussing the big twist and how (and why) Paradise is veering into multiverse sci-fi. After all, the sci-fi trope has come under a ton of scrutiny in the last five years, as major franchises like Marvel, DC, Star Trek, Oscar-winning films Everything Everywhere All At Once and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, or TV shows like Rick and Morty and Netflix’s international hit Dark have all played with different takes on how the multiverse works. If anything, it’s a trope that has arguably been exhausted, so Paradise jumping from dystopian drama to time travel/multiverse story, this late in the game, is a big (risky) leap. So why do it, and how will the show pull it off?
“I think this is Fogelman’s exploration of the multiverse. Any show that’s dealing with genre and science fiction or whatnot eventually loves to play around with the idea of, is time travel a possibility?” Sterling K. Brown told Variety. “And what are the rules that dictate our excursion into time travel? The first time that I really got geeked over it was ‘Back to the Future.’ So you’ve seen that Marvel has dealt with the multiverse and all the different timelines. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse has done its own specific thing as well. I find it intriguing, because Everything Everywhere All at Once is more real than people think. And it unlocks your brain in such a way that whatever you think is possible can be possible if you can conceive it.”
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Fogelman, being the mind behind This Is Us, should tell fans that Paradise’s use of multiverse theory will be far more grounded in the personal than the scientific. Because even though a different world, of different choices could be possible, that doesn’t mean every character will want the do-over.
“And so now that this is introduced into our world, I think the question is, what do you really want?” Brown continued. “Do you want to go back? Do you want to move forward and leave it alone? Is it too mysterious to play with, to even tinker with, or is it too compelling to not? And different people have different decisions to make based upon where they are in life at that particular time. And you’ll see how that plays out over the course of Season 3.”
Executive producer John Hoberg was equally cryptic, unwilling to even given a comparative example Paradise model its use of the multiverse after: “I don’t know if I can name a specific genre [to describe Season 3], but I do know we’re going with, Xavier has been given a task, and I’m asking myself, is he going to follow through on this? And what are the repercussions if he does and if he doesn’t? There is a reason why Xavier is User X, and we’ll find that out,”
ParadiseSeasons 1 & 2 are now streaming on Hulu. Season 3 is in development and will be the final one. Discuss the show with us on the ComicBook Forum!
