‘Paradise’ is such a classic series, so honest in its references and intentions, that it’s even predictable when it tries to surprise you. It would be absurd, therefore, to say that the Season 2 finale has thrown us off balance, that it has turned everything upside down, that it has taken a creative detour we didn’t even know existed. Watching this week’s 50 minutes was like Xavier (Sterling K. Brown) experiencing a kind of déjà vu when faced with Dylan (Thomas Doherty). In some remote corner of our minds, we had already seen those scenes because they were plausible.
This should not be taken as a criticism. In this case, it’s a demonstration of how Dan Fogelman is so direct and clear as a screenwriter that nothing comes as a surprise. Fogelman, after all, placed all the pieces on the Paradise board in very visible positions so that we could imagine where the final installment was headed. We could even rule out any extraordinary narrative maneuvers: there was an avalanche of situations that needed to be resolved and characters that needed to be brought together, and it was time to see how the development of the situations would be justified.
The pieces were all in place: it was time to resolve a multitude of situations in 50 minutes and, of course, figure out who or what Alex is
Sinatra (Julianne Nicholson) was greeting Alex after getting off the subway. Presley (Aliyah Mastin) and Hadley (Kate Godfrey), the daughters of Xavier and Sinatra respectively, were trapped in the elevator. Jane (Nicole Brydon Bloom) was apparently dead in Dr. Torabi’s (Sarah Shahi) shower, in a state of shock. Xavier was with Teri (Enuka Okuma), arriving at the bunker to reunite with his children and, let’s not forget, hand over Annie’s (Shailene Woodley) son to Dylan, who was standing outside the doors planning an assault. As an unforeseen variable for everyone involved, Jeremy Bradford (Charlie Evans) and Nicole Robinson (Krys Marshall) were in the engine rooms tampering with the reactors and causing the entire system to fail.
As the episode begins, it doesn’t take long to solve the mystery of Alex: it is an artificial intelligence designed to prevent climate catastrophe and is uncontrollable. It solves seemingly unsolvable problems even when its controllers haven’t presented it with any hypothesis or question. Dylan began building the quantum device before he had even turned 21. It is named after the woman with Huntington’s disease, Henry Miller’s (Patrick Fischler) wife, whom Dylan turned to in order to carry out humanity’s most ambitious scientific endeavor.
Alex is a quantum device, an artificial intelligence designed to prevent climate catastrophe and capable of operating independently
Paradise has so little desire to surprise the viewer that the interaction between Sinatra and Alex serves to foreshadow her death: the machine predicts that she will die that very day. And how does she die? In an honorable way: someone has to close the bunker doors from the inside, so that nuclear radiation doesn’t affect the survivors when the reactors explode, and she offers to press the button from the tower.
And the fact is, on this final day of Sinatra’s life, everything happens. The sky (over the mountain) falls in pieces. Xavier reunites with his family. Jane mysteriously vanishes from the shower (meaning the villain is on the loose). Dylan reunites with his daughter, whom he calls Annie. And, in the most conceptually surprising twist, the bunker is completely destroyed after triggering the evacuation and saving the local population. Didn’t watching the Paradise pilot give the impression that practically all the action would take place inside the bunker? Well, after opening up to the outside world with this second season, it has now gone and blown up the shelter.
In the final minutes, Paradise even lays out the plot for the third season: the goal here isn’t to throw the viewer off balance, but to guide them through a well-structured story. And where is the story headed? 150 kilometers away, beneath Denver International Airport, there is a second bunker from which Alex operates. Sinatra asks Xavier to go there and resolve the current situation so that humanity can survive (or simply reset the last few years?). He tells him he trusts him because he believes he’s done it before.
As viewers, we have to believe her: we’ve been told that Alex works independently, without needing instructions, and the existence of Dylan—whom Sinatra sees as an anomaly—seems to be proof of that. There are also clues regarding the operations Alex has carried out to date: the messages during Jane’s birth warning that she would be a killer, Dylan’s existence, the prediction about Sinatra, or, well, the inexplicable reaction both Dylan and Xavier have upon meeting each other.
Xavier has a clear mission in the third season: to act as a leader and deal with Alex to ensure humanity survives
It’s ironic that, coming from a screenwriter as emotionally driven as Dan Fogelman—the man behind This Is Us—Paradise suffers from structural rigidity: the characters are engaging only when they’re in motion, but not necessarily because we can fully immerse ourselves in their dramatic conflicts. The 50 minutes are packed with supposedly emotional scenes that feel like mere formalities: Robinson’s near-sacrifice, all the Collins clan reunions, or seeing Dylan with Annie in his arms. But within the sci-fi thriller genre, the series remains unfailingly entertaining.
