Summary
Paradise raises a couple of its biggest questions yet in “The Final Countdown”, just in time for what’s sure to be an intriguing finale.
Folks, we have some speculating to do. Paradise Season 2 is obviously building towards a big finale, and it’s doing it by raising some extremely interesting questions about what’s really going on. While there hasn’t been anything that has topped the very original “They’re in a bunker!” reveal, several of the possibilities raised in Episode 7, “The Final Countdown”, have huge implications, with similarly redefining potential outcomes. The biggest question right now is whether the fact that Season 3 has already been renewed will compel the showrunners to hold off on explaining too much, leaving more unresolved than is ideal.
But we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. In the meantime, we have other things to unpack, including Xavier and Teri’s overdue reunion, Link’s real identity, and what “Alex” might be. So, let’s get on with that, and if you think I might be way off base with anything — which, let’s be frank, is quite likely — give me a shout with your own theories in the comments.
Reunited and It Feels So Good
Finally, Xavier and Teri are back together. The previous episode ended with them finally catching a glimpse of one another, and “The Final Countdown” makes good on the promise of a reunion. As predicted, Teri was safe with the train group all along and was planning on travelling to Colorado with them. Gary’s plan was a vain attempt to lure Teri back to him by tricking Xavier into killing himself with a bomb.
In all the confusion, though, Gary does manage to get a note to Teri, explaining that he has Bean. Before she and Xavier can leave, they need to mount a rescue mission, not to mention stopping to pick up Annie’s baby. Xavier, understandably, wants to simply snipe Gary through the window, but Teri isn’t keen on the idea of murder and plans to go in alone and talk Gary down instead.
And she does. It’s a nice moment that manages to recapture some of the earnest sadness that made Gary compelling in the first place. He’s not a bad guy, really, just a dork who is hopelessly in love. He finally relents and allows Teri and Bean to leave, and Xavier doesn’t have to shoot him. He and Teri still have a lot to catch up on, though, and I’m going to hazard a guess that she’s going to need to become more comfortable with murder sooner rather than later.
Link Is Dylan, Sinatra’s Dead Son
Sinatra gets a lot of focus in “The Final Countdown”, which means that her tragic past with her son, Dylan, is also repeatedly reiterated. If you recall, Dylan died from some kind of unspecified terminal illness, and Sinatra never got over it. Her husband did, at least to some extent, which has led to increasing emotional distance between the two. Almost everything Sinatra has done — especially the deeply immoral stuff — has been justified, at least in her mind, by Dylan’s loss.
But Paradise Season 2, Episode 7 suggests Dylan might have never been lost at all. Here, Sinatra agrees to meet with Link in a conversation that takes place aboard Air Force One for the sake of drama. Link initially claims that he wants one of the bunker’s mini nuclear reactors, but Sinatra realises that’s a bluff since he knows he’d never get it. Eventually, he reveals that he’s really after “Alex”, a name that Gabi was also pressing Sinatra about earlier. She’s incredibly secretive and protective over the name, which is given a female pronoun at one point, but we don’t have any idea who — or indeed what — Alex is.
As Link’s leaving, though, one of his crew calls him by his real name — Dylan. Sinatra asks him his birthday, which is revealed to be May 16th, the same as her Dylan’s (and the password for all of her personal technology, which would give a cybersecurity expert fits). The ages check out. Link seems to be Sinatra’s “dead” son, Dylan, though how he was able to survive, let alone without her knowledge, remains a mystery.
Gabi Kills Jane
With Jane’s nutcase backstory having been firmly established, we know that she’s a proper loon. Luckily, Gabi can sense it too, and she isn’t being shy about it either. Jane is using her obvious wariness to constantly torment her — Gabi is even having nightmares about being assassinated by her — but that doesn’t dissuade Gabi from making sure that Jane isn’t part of Sinatra’s security detail during the meeting with Link, and later telling Sinatra that she thinks Jane is bonkers and needs a demotion.
Sinatra is pretty smug about Jane essentially being her pet, only acting on her orders, but Gabi isn’t so sure, and she’s proved right when it’s revealed that Jane is tracking her every move. Towards the very end of the episode, Jane breaks into Gabi’s house with the intention of killing her — unless I missed it, I don’t think this order came from Sinatra, but it may well have done — but ends up getting blindsided. Gabi stabs her in the back, and Jane seemingly bleeds out in the shower.
Is she dead? Maybe. But I wouldn’t be so sure.
It’s All Going Wrong At Once
There aren’t a great many flashbacks in this episode, but the ones we do see are pretty telling. Back in the day, Sinatra and Cal toured the bowels of the bunker so they could understand how all of the state-of-the-art technology worked. And while the whole thing was undeniably impressive, Cal couldn’t help but still feel skeptical about it. The fully automated control centre had been prepared for every realistic calamity, but the thing about calamities is that they’re rarely realistic. Cal asks the right questions — what happens in the event of a fire? Or a siege? Or oxygen running out? — and gets boilerplate answers. His ultimate question — what if all of these things happen at the same time? — is treated with derision, the same way as his earlier instructions to break down how things work simply enough that a caveman could understand.
But thanks to fate, Cal’s prediction comes about. Robinson and Jeremy damage the oxygen tanks in an effort to force the doors open at the exact same time that a full lockdown is implemented to protect against Link’s promised attack. The two contradictory failsafes cause fatal errors and send the bunker into a meltdown. Cal was right. The only thing uniting all great empires, projects, and initiatives is that, ultimately, they all end, often unexpectedly. The bunker is now on borrowed time.
Who the F*ck Is Alex?
At the end of Paradise Season 2, Episode 7, Sinatra takes a long and winding train down into the deepest guts of the bunker, and greets “Alex”. Or perhaps it’s “A.L.E.X.”. The likeliest theory is that Alex is Sinatra’s “special project”, an outgrowth of the quantum technology that Henry was working on. Sinatra sent Billy to kill Henry, whose wife had Huntington’s Disease, which he had tried and failed to cure. His wife’s name was Alex. So, it stands to reason that A.L.E.X. is the technology he developed for this purpose.
But what does it do? Folks on Reddit — who, if you filter through the nonsense, tend to be right about almost everything — think it might be some kind of quantum entanglement machine that strips people of their freedom of choice to essentially force them down predetermined routes. So, it isn’t time-travel, per se, but creates moments where one choice occurs where another might have been made in its place. And these moments seem to be symbolised by characters experiencing sudden nosebleeds at these hinge points. Billy had one when he killed Henry, which Henry seemed to predict, having handed him a handkerchief beforehand. We’ve seen Link have several, and he has another in this episode when he reveals his birthday to Sinatra. And Xavier had one just before his plane crashed.
What we know for certain is that in some way, Xavier, Link, Sinatra, and “Alex” are all connected. Luckily, we only have to wait one more episode to — hopefully! — find out how. I’ll see you there.
