Episode 8 Ends in Chaos

Much as with every week on Paradise, we open to a prologue nine years prior. Dylan hasn’t adopted the alias Link yet, and there is no band of vigilante scientists around him. Here he’s just a pimple-faced student who is auditing classes at Caltech. We speed through Dylan’s origins until we meet up with Henry Miller (Patrick Fischler). Then the show quickly moves on to their work creating Alex, as well as Henry’s short time working for Sinatra. After all, Paradise needs to let those theories fester about Dylan’s connection to the bunker’s big boss. So it isn’t long before we learn that Henry had concerns about Alex’s creation. We don’t yet know what Alex does exactly, but Henry states that it’s far too sophisticated for anyone’s good. “It’s trying to do something dangerous,” he tells Sinatra in a pre-bunker flashback.

Sadly, the finale doesn’t give fans a straightforward answer about time travel either. The biggest hint yet is that Alex is key to the show’s manipulation of time, but Paradise is in the business of keeping all of its major secrets for next season.

Here’s what we do know: Apparently, during tests, Alex gave Henry and his team an “answer to an equation in less than ten seconds that would take a supercomputer longer than the age of the universe to solve.” When Sinatra asks what the hell the problem is, Henry eerily tells her, “We hadn’t asked the question yet.” According to the scientist, “You have no fucking idea what we’re dealing with here.” There’s also a key card labeled “Awaiting User X,” which Alex mysteriously printed for them without any instructions.

Okay, tinfoil hats on! Alex may not be a time machine, but it sounds like a machine that exists beyond the laws of time and space. It’s possible that Alex is so powerful that it exists in the past, present, and future all at once, so it would know things like the equation that the team had yet to ask it. The machine would also know when to cold-call a Circuit City employee to try to kill baby Jane, or even the perfect method needed to save baby Dylan. Paradise might not be a capital-T time-travel series, but it’s absolutely verging on a high-concept science-fiction premise. I just hope viewers will be able to grasp it once it’s fully explained.

Still unresolved is the matter of Xavier and Link’s mysterious visions. The finale confirms that they know about it and see each other, but they have yet to learn how and why.

Bunker Breakdown

Meanwhile, Anders (Erik Svedberg-Zelman), Nicole (Krys Marshall), and Jeremy (Charlie Evans) wrap up their little prison break. It was a disappointing mini subplot that wound up to be no more than a way to ignite the endgame scenario. But it ushers in Link (Thomas Doherty) and his group to mobilize inside the bunker and stop the potential nuclear catastrophe. Link is also insistent on finding Alex, even when Geiger (Michael McGrady) tries to keep him on their core mission. Was it worth it? Well, we lose both Anders and Geiger during the facility’s breakdown.

While the collapse of the bunker makes up the meat of the plot, it’s the resolution of several major story threads that make this episode feel truly climactic. Xavier has one last urgent mission to rescue his daughter, Presley (Aliyah Mastin), from an offline elevator. It’s a little too convenient that Presley has been on her own mission to save Jeremy with Sinatra’s daughter. Sinatra isn’t just a mustache-twirling villain here but a mother, and she certainly doesn’t stand in Xavier’s way to save them both.

Then Xavier’s words to Annie about placing faith in the goodness of people and strangers ring true once again when Link’s group offers a few helping hands. Link arrives with some men to hold the elevator doors open for Xavier and Sinatra to rescue their daughters. At the same time, Jeremy and Nicole resolve their differences, and the late president’s son carries the badly wounded agent out to safety. With that tension resolved, Paradise moves quickly into the confrontation we’ve all been waiting for: Xavier, Sinatra, and Link all in the same place. As Paradise has teased audiences all season, Link and Xavier’s visions trigger stronger than ever before. Their eventual meeting seemed unavoidable, even if neither man knows what these visions are even about. (Frankly, neither do I.)

Link then challenges Sinatra about Alex, to which Sinatra tells him, “Alex is already working.” She confirms her suspicions out loud and declares to Dylan that she believes he is her son. “You’re my son,” she says plainly, much like Darth Vader did to Luke in The Empire Strikes Back. “It’s complicated, but you are.”

Paradise doesn’t spend any time trying to prove that Sinatra is telling the irrefutable truth. Link simply takes Sinatra at her word, even if they’re words being spilled out at gunpoint. Anyway, Link is more focused on finding Alex. He’s just unaware that Alex is too far away from their current location. It’s accessible only by an underground monorail to the Denver airport, and Sinatra just shut it down.

Spoiler alert: Xavier (Sterling K. Brown) is User X.

Who Is “User X”?

Saved by the bell of their shared visions, Xavier gets Link to stand down and escape with them. But Sinatra has one last stop: the tower. The bunker is about to explode, and the doors are wide open. Someone needs to shut them again, or else it’ll explode outward and kill everyone. Sinatra and Xavier race against the clock to the tower, where Sinatra has a last-minute epiphany: “User X” is Xavier. So she silently acknowledges her fate. She decides to stay in the bunker long enough to ensure that the explosion doesn’t reach the outside and passes the “Awaiting User X” key card to Xavier. She will die, but he will live on to return the card to Alex.

It’s a silent but impactful farewell for Sinatra, whose grand dreams of preserving mankind through catastrophe literally fall apart around her. I’ll be honest: I got a little choked up seeing her spiritually reunite with Dylan in a flashback. Not the grown Dylan, who calls himself Link and now has a child of his own, but the little boy Dylan who loved ice cream. It’s a tasteful depiction of death and one that beautifully sends off a deeply complex antagonist. Sinatra wasn’t always the big, bad villain with killer mercenaries and endless wealth at her disposal. She was always a parent acting out of concern for her children’s future. She just happened to possess the means to do something about it.

In a way, Sinatra’s plan worked. She saved as much of humanity as she could. If her instincts and planning were correct, things were meant to happen this way. “What makes you think I’ll do any of this?” Xavier asks Sinatra when she hands him the key card. She calmly responds: “I believe you already have.”

So Alex is a machine that can basically predict the future, and it knows about Xavier. Somehow, he is the key to saving the world. Alex may not be a time machine, but based on what little we know, the world rests on Alex’s calculations—and Xavier’s ability to find the computer in time. That’s our season 3 story, folks. We’re on the road to Denver to fulfill a prophecy disguised as science.

At the same time, it’s possible that Link is also a time traveler. The bunker may not exist in some bubble that defies physics, and Xavier’s visions may not be windows into a parallel universe, but they could be! Much like any TV mystery, season 2 leaves us with more questions than answers. Thankfully, season 3 is a short year away. We’ll be right here when it’s time to get moving again, as long as Alex doesn’t warn us that it’s time to head into the bunker.