‘Paradise’ Season 2 Episode 8 Recap: The Sky Is Falling
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You can’t say you didn’t see it coming. All throughout its second season, Paradise has been building to a science-fictional scenario that’s frankly preposterous even by Paradise standards. This episode confirms it. Yes, Dan Fogelman is really going there: He’s created a competent billionaire who wants to save the planet. And oh, right, there’s time travel or something.
If the second Trump administration has done anything for us, it has given us a glimpse of how billionaires operate when handed absolute power to go with their functionally unlimited money. The results — DOGE destroying USAID, attacks on the country’s health and education systems, both AI and ICE unleashed without regulation, the Iran War — speak for themselves.
7:17 YOU HAVE NO F*CKING IDEA WHAT WE’RE DEALING WITH HERE, CAPTIONED PLEASE
Meanwhile, when was the last time a billionaire made anything that contributed positively to your life, humanity, the planet? Self-driving cars that crash and explode, burning their occupants alive inside because their doors automatically lock. AI data centers that destroy the local environment while producing plagiarized writing and digital CSAM at scale. Broadcast television networks that deliberately destroy their own news divisions through malice and incompetence. More germane to the ostensible topic of this review, streaming services that keep raising their prices till you pay more than you did before you cut the cord.
In short, billionaires aren’t special. They are simply so rich, usually through some form of graft and without ever having created anything of their own, that they no longer have to worry about normal human concerns. They’re no smarter than anyone else, and in some cases they’re clearly less so. And they either see their children as property that functions as an extension of themselves, or don’t think of them at all.
So yes, the existence of A-L3X, an AI quantum supercomputer (or something to that effect) that has learned to think for itself and begun, somehow, altering the spacetime continuum — that strains credulity. But then there’s the existence of Samantha “Sinatra” Redmond. She’s a billionaire who cares about both the fate of the world and the life of her late son Dylan so much that she spends her fortune to save them both. She successfully builds not one but two secret bunkers, designed by mad scientists, with each one serving this grand purpose: One preserves life, the other reverses death.
Elon Musk would never.
40:57 XAVIER RUNNING FULL TILT AT THE CAMERA
As one of the two actors upon whom the weight of this crackerjack season finale falls, Julianne Nicholson’s performance as Sinatra involves a higher degree of difficulty than Sterling K. Brown’s as Xavier “X” Collins. Xavier’s main task is to be kind, heroic, and unstoppable, traits that the preposterously charismatic Brown could pull off in an Ambien-induced sleep.
Indeed, Xavier’s storyline this episode is 100% action hero stuff from start to finish. He runs towards a nuclear meltdown to reunite his wife with her children. He saves his daughter from being trapped in an elevator in danger of plummeting down its shaft, escaping just in the nick of time himself. He sprints full-tilt from the control center of the crumbling bunker — its sky is literally falling — through the massive Star Wars-ian bunker doors, escaping just in the nick of time again. He reunites Dylan/Link with his baby, one more of the numerous children he’s aided this season at great risk to himself simply because it’s the right thing to do. Finally, he’s A-L3X’s chosen one, whatever that means, and he’s been given a holy charge by Sinatra to visit the computer and become what his name already rhymes with: a savior.
This is no slight on Brown at all, who’s a fabulous actor doing terrific work in this role, really as good as a hero has ever been played on TV. But as Sinatra, Nicholson has to be, all at once, a stone-cold killer, a skilled politician, a bleeding heart, a supervillain, a genius, a prophet, a philanthropist, a dictator, a shitty friend, and a loving mother. I think the actor finds just the right register for this very unusual billionaire: Normally, she’s taut as a bowstring, but under the right conditions she can do beautiful things.
AWKWARD ELEVATOR RIDE CIRCA 26:40
In the case of this episode, that largely means teaming up with Xavier, of all people; given that they nearly killed each other the last time they spoke, this takes some adjusting for both of them. But Xavier needs to find his daughter, Presley, who’s trapped in that elevator, and Sinatra has the only electronic bracelet with access to that area. Plus, her own daughter, Hadley, is in there too, and it’s been established how much she sincerely does care about her kids.
The bracelet does bupkis in the end, it’s just an excuse to throw these two together, but I’m glad of it. They get involved in yet another unlikely team-up, joining forces with Link/Dylan and his guys at the elevator shaft, where they coincidentally run into each other and pitch in to rescue the girls. Xavier and Dylan share that weird woozy time-anomaly sensation. Sinatra shares her strange theory that this Dylan is somehow her son because A-L3X is already at work — precisely what Dylan came to the bunker to prevent. In the end, he’s forced to choose between saving the lives of everyone fleeing the meltdown and hunting down the supercomputer, and he chooses life, as people on this show almost universally do.
43:43 THE SKY IS FALLING AS SINATRA WALKS
In the end, Sinatra volunteers to go down with the ship, as A-L3X apparently predicted she would do. After handing Xavier some kind of access card created by A-L3X literally with his name on it (well, his nickname “X,” anyway), she shuts the bunker doors from the inside. This contains the nuclear meltdown’s radiation, though the explosion brings down the mountain under which the bunker was built. Sinatra dies imagining Dylan as the little boy she knew, holding her hand as they walk down the bunker’s uncanny fake suburban street, littered with the detritus of half a decade of fake life.
Most of the characters we care about survive. Torabi gives the order to evacuate when the meltdown begins, more or less because no one else has the guts to do so. The scientist who designed the place is killed as it starts blowing up and falling down. Agent Robinson is badly injured, but Jeremy Bradford returns for her with a couple of other guys to carry her to safety. Jane is apparently less dead than she looked, disappearing from Torabi’s shower floor shortly before the end of it all. The only significant casualty to speak of is Geiger, Dylan’s right-hand man, who is killed by shrapnel from a burst pipe.
Dylan, we learn, built a protoype of A-L3X as a teenage prodigy, which is how he connected with scientist Henry Miller (the Patrick Fischler character, appearing in another flashback), whose ailing wife became the computer’s namesake. We also learn that Miller pulled the plug on the project when he noticed it trying to mess with time all by itself, which is what caused Redmond to pull the plug on him and steal the tech. The glowing golden supercomputer in Bunker #2, 100 miles from Paradise and directly beneath Denver International Airport, is the result.
The season ends (to another slowed-down cover of “Another Day in Paradise,” of course) with Xavier contemplating the mysterious mission Sinatra tasked him with before her death. It’s certainly a lot to think about! After all, Paradise is fundamentally no longer Paradise, the show about the artificial post-apocalyptic bunker community of the same name, even less so now than it was all season long. When Xavier was out running around, the place still existed, and we spent about half the season in it. That’s all off the table now.
But this season proves that Fogelman and company can do The Odyssey as well as No Exit. Xavier’s adventures have been tense, thrilling, and rapturously epic in tone. They’ve allowed the show to spotlight two incredible guest stars in Shailene Woodley and Cameron Britton, something it could conceivably do again with other actors. They’ve also maintained the show’s core beliefs, in human decency and “life at full volume,” despite a survival-horror setting that would tempt many writer’s rooms into amoral kill-or-be-killed scenarios. Paradise made a goddamn point of not doing that, sparing even Britton’s traitorous character.
As to the “oh yeah, there’s a time warp now” aspect of it all: good! There’s no sense in complaining that this ludicrous sci-fi idea knocks the show off the rails, when it was all ludicrous sci-fi ideas, no rails to begin with. That’s just not holding up your end of the bargain Paradise is trying to make with you.
From its 1950s B-movie pseudoscience to its infamous needle drops, this show is saying “We are ridiculous, and it doesn’t matter, because we’re going to make you care anyway.” In many cases, the ridiculousness, the grandiosity of it all, is exactly how the show makes you care. It treats little moments and massive ones the same way, with the same soaring Siddhartha Khosla melody playing in the background. Inside the human heart, there are explosions happening all the time.
15:42 “EVERYTHING ENDS.” EXPLOSION GIF
