‘Paradise’: 7 Burning Season 2 Finale Questions Answered by Writer John Hoberg
Spoiler Alert
Paradise‘s finale delivered some long-awaited answers, like who Alex really is, and whether or not the titular bunker would collapse, but the Season 2 ending also raised plenty of key questions about the future of Xavier Collins (Sterling K. Brown), his wife Teri (Enuka Okuma), Sinatra (Julianne Nicholson), Dylan (Thomas Doherty), and so many more. Fair warning: There are spoilers for Paradise Season 2 Episode 8 ahead!
As viewers saw in the episode “Exodus,” Xavier returned to the bunker with Teri in tow as they worked to find their kids and evacuate amid a meltdown. At the same time, Dylan and his crew were attempting to break into the bunker to access its power source, but no one’s goals go as planned. Ultimately, the episode uncovers that Alex is a supercomputer funded and maintained by Sinatra in a bunker hundreds of miles away, and its predictive nature declares that Sinatra won’t make it out of the day alive.
When Sinatra realizes that a nuclear explosion could harm people above ground following their evacuation, she decides to stay behind amid meltdown and sacrifice herself to lock the bunker up to prevent a catastrophic event. She’s especially driven to do so as she embraces the idea that Dylan is some version of her son, who had died years prior.
Even Xavier can talk Dylan out of trying to kill the AI quantum computer known as Alex, when he reveals his connection to Annie (Shailene Woodley), informing the man he has a daughter. Meanwhile, it seems like everyone besides Sinatra may have gotten out of the bunker, including Jane (Nicole Brydon Bloom), who had appeared to be dead after a scuffle with Gabriel (Sarah Shahi). So, what’s next after that bonkers finale? Below, episode writer and executive producer John Hoberg offers some answers to the season’s biggest burning questions.
Paradise, Season 3 Premiere, TBA, Hulu
Is Dylan the Dylan that Sinatra thinks he is?
John Hoberg: So what’s interesting to me is, there’s a moment when Billy, right before he kills the professor, the professor says, “Do you believe things happen for a reason or is everything just a coincidence?” And that’s a theme throughout. There are a lot of things that could be coincidences. When Sinatra is in the elevator with Xavier, it’s one of my favorite scenes in the finale, where she’s like, “I think I saw my son today.” But she also says, “I could just be dealing with my grief.” And so, I think there’s a little bit of asking yourself, what do you think? Sinatra believes this without a doubt; she’s a very smart person, but she has a reason to believe this.
The nosebleeds are addressed when Xavier and Dylan finally cross paths. What does that have to do with the visions Xavier has seen? Is that something that's going to happen?
We kind of pride ourselves on answering questions, and all these questions will definitely be answered in Season 3. If you notice where nosebleeds happen, they seem to happen in big moments, at inflection points, but maybe they’re not; it could also be a coincidence.
What inspired the inclusion of this supercomputer, Alex, in the season, especially amid ongoing fears surrounding AI? Is Alex good or bad?
Sinatra clearly doubled down once she got their hands on that computer and threw unlimited funds into it. One of the things that really drew us to it is this idea that Doctor Louge (Geoffrey Arend) says, “The one thing billionaires can’t buy is time.” And in our mind, Sinatra seeded a bunch of tech people that were trying to be on the cutting edge of the fastest computing possible, not [to alter time, but] to solve this so fast that we beat this impending problem to the finish line. Then, because this dangerous move of putting machine learning in charge of the most powerful computer, it started to think of things in ways that we wouldn’t, and that got us really intrigued because someone’s gonna do that at some point in our reality.
Jane's body wasn't in the shower when the people were evacuating Paradise. Did she escape, or is she really dead?
She looked really dead to me, is how I would say it. We’re not dealing in the Terminator world or anything like that at all. Everybody’s a real human being, and they’re going through real human things. She’s an incredibly well-trained super agent, but Torabi got a knife in there… and [Jane] was also lying there for quite a while.”
The Collins family is finally reunited. Will they be sticking together as we look ahead to Season 3, or is there more separation on the horizon?
I think they’ve been apart long enough. All Xavier has wanted is to have this family together, and so now he’s got that, and now they’re in this challenging world. So it’s exciting to explore that. It’s exciting to explore Teri [and Xavier], who are working together, but they’ve changed. You always continue to grow, and so that’s gonna be interesting because they may want different things.
Will we see Sinatra onscreen again despite her sacrificing herself?
You’ll see her again in flashbacks for sure. What we really want to do, because we’ve known this as a three-season arc, is we’ve had a lot of time to think about how to end this and for it to be a really satisfying ending. I think you’ll be satisfied. The people you want to see, you’ll get a glimpse of again. I mean, she’s such an incredible actor, it was hard to make the decision that she had to die and it, and there were versions we were trying so hard to make it work where she came running out at the end, and it just felt fake somehow.
Sinatra gives Xavier a disc with coordinates and instructions, telling him that he's going to be the only man who can save the world with Alex. At the same time, she reveals there's another bunker. Is it exactly the same as Paradise or different?
I don’t wanna give any hints on it, [but] you will see that bunker. I want the show to reveal what it is.
Sterling K. Brown
James Marsden
Julianne Nicholson
Sarah Shahi
Nicole Brydon Bloom
Krys Marshall
Charlie Evans
Rafael Cabrera
Richard Robichaux
Darin Toonder
Eddie Diaz
Jon Beavers
Laith Wallschleger
Cassidy Freeman
Scott Lawrence
Michelle Meredith
Michael Hogan
Angela Lin
Jonathan Tanigaki
Kate Godfrey
Miguel Najera
Patrick Cavanaugh
Ian Merrigan
Aliyah Mastin
Percy Daggs
Tuc Watkins
Gerald McRaney
Danielle Hoetmer
Christopher Sanders
David Aaron Baker
Karina Noelle Castillo
Joe Holt
Chet Grissom
Liz Benoit
Alexandra Fatovich
Mike Ostroski
Matt Kaminsky
Walter Belenky
Alvin Cowan
Betsy Zajko
Annie Karstens
Paul Syre
Andrew Miller
Michael Petrone
Katharine Lee McEwan
Christine Heneise
Reasha Honaker
Brigid Marshall
Esther Pidal
Ali Hanson
Beau McConnell
Andrew Miller
Maria Arroyo
Kayla Njeri
Arlo Sarinas
John Beavers
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