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“Imagine this: You’re able to craft a song right now that brings together a group of strangers, creating something so personal and groundbreaking that the entire world takes notice. Your life is transformed forever. But, let me be honest, the chances of this happening are slim.” This sentiment echoes the humor and skepticism found in the classic film, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.
Similarly, another quote comes to mind: “What if all these improbable events occur simultaneously? The air, the uruk, uh… ugly guys.” This line, from the show Paradise, adds a layer of absurdity to the conversation about unlikely scenarios. “The odds are infinitesimal,” the show insists, yet it assures viewers that every conceivable contingency has been planned for, as shown in a tense moment from Paradise, Season 2, Episode 7, “The Final Countdown.”
The audacity of Paradise is genuinely commendable. Where most shows would meticulously build up to a doomsday scenario over multiple episodes, dropping subtle hints along the way, Paradise takes a different approach. It embraces the unexpected with open arms, ready to confront chaos head-on. This approach becomes particularly evident when we consider the precarious flaw that threatens Samantha “Sinatra” Redmond’s bunker and her enigmatic “Alex” project. In true Paradise fashion, the show opts for an “all or nothing” attitude, diving straight into the action.
The series cleverly uses the character of Cal Bradford, a former president known more for his charm than intellect, to highlight this flaw. In a pre-apocalyptic flashback, Cal is given a tour of the bunker by Sinatra and the scientist responsible for its design, played by Tom Lommel. During this tour, Cal requests that the complex features be explained in the simplest terms possible. To everyone’s surprise, it’s Cal—often underestimated—who points out a glaring oversight: the bunker is equipped with both a lockdown mechanism that overrides other systems during an attack and an oxygen-saving feature that opens all doors in case of air supply issues. The pressing question becomes, what happens if these two systems are activated at the same time?
The show uses its himbo dead president Cal Bradford to do it, too. In a pre-apocalypse flashback in which he gets the grand tour of the bunker from Sinatra and the scientist (Tom Lommel) who designed the place for her, Cal asks that explanations of all the features be dumbed down to monosyllabic levels for his benefit. But this dumbell notes something the geniuses have failed to: The bunker has both a lockdown feature that overrides all other commands in the event of an attack, and an oxygen-saving feature that automatically opens all bunker doors if its air supply is compromised. What happens if they’re both triggered simultaneously?
Sinatra and the scientist blow off Cal’s concern. To paraphrase Walk Hard, they’re telling him right now, they don’t think it’s going to happen.
My friends, it happens in this episode! There’s a level of shamelessness here that I can’t help but find admirable. It may not be the most elegant screenwriting in the world, but it was fun to have a laugh at the expense of the billionaire and the brainiac, right? For me, that’s a tradeoff worth making.
The rest of the episode proceeds along fairly straightforward lines, as each storyline reaches its final countdown (the name of both the episode and its ludicrous ‘80s cover version of the week). In the most emotionally satisfying, Teri and Xavier are reunited at last, and team up to rescue her adoptive son, Bean, from her jilted suitor, Gary. Xavier’s ready to shoot first and ask questions never; Teri asserts, correctly, that she knows Gary well enough to know it’s safe for her to talk him down. After all, she hasn’t gotten this far by being stupid.
There are tense moments when it seems Gary’s rage at the situation is on the verge of exploding, or when he seeks to commit suicide-by-Xavier, saved only by Teri’s embrace. But in the end he’s the gentle giant he mostly presented as; his murder of his best friend, Ennis, was like the panic of a drowning man, he says. His regret and grief are clearly sincere, which is how you know Teri made the right call. She, Ben, and Xavier leave without a shot fired, and Gary will stay behind to start anew, or not.
In the bunker, Sinatra has her meeting with Link, each of them accompanied by unarmed guards (all of whom are revealed to be armed in a blackly funny moment later on). Link fronts as if he’s there to demand one of the site’s modular nuclear reactors, but she soon wheedles his real target out of him: Alex, whoever or whatever Alex is. Sinatra cuts off their meeting at that point, exiting the eerily lamplit cabin of Air Force One where the meeting is staged.
On their way out of the bunker, though, Sinatra hears Link’s friend Geiger (Michael McGrady) refer to him as “Dylan,” which is also the name of her own dead son. When she asks Link his birthdate before he departs, his answer — it’s Dylan’s, of course — gives them both anomalous nosebleeds. (Xavier keeps having them too.) Sinatra runs back to her mansion and jumps her estranged husband Tim’s bones, telling him cryptically that both she and “Dylan” are doing okay.
“I think it worked,” she says to Tim, without saying what “it” is. Given that the episode ends with her riding a train car to a distant sub-bunker where she greets a glowing something-or-other by saying “Hi, Alex,” I think we’re to surmise that “it” is…time travel? Wormhole generation? Spacetime-continuum manipulation? Quantum Dylanology? Whatever sci-fi mumbo-jumbo they wind up using, Sinatra clearly thinks Link is her late son, somehow revived, or never killed by his illness to begin with.
Whatever Sinatra thinks is going on with Link/Dylan, she feels it’s a big enough deal to spend the rest of the day blowing off bunker business by boning her husband and then taking a trip to see Alex. In the meantime, Link’s forces plan their attack, so the remaining members of the ruling council vote to initiate full lockdown despite Sinatra’s earlier warnings about how taxing this would be on their power grid.
Would you believe that at this very moment, Jeremy Bradford, Agent Robinson, and the still-unnamed scientist are all busy smashing the air tanks so that the doors will open and everyone down below can see the surface world is safe — the very thing the scientist and Sinatra assured Cal would never ever happen at the exact same instant as a lockdown initiation?
In the chaos that ensues, the entire facility is on the verge of nuclear meltdown. Sinatra’s daughter Hadley and Xavier’s daughter Presley are stuck in an elevator descending to the prison level, which they unearthed by digging around in Sinatra’s files and hoped to investigate themselves. Elsewhere, Jane attempts to assassinate Dr. Torabi, almost certainly on Sinatra’s orders, only to get outflanked and literally stabbed in the back by the doctor, who used the steam of her characteristically hot showers to conceal her location. Jane winds up bleeding on the floor of the shower like her quasi-namesake Janet Leigh.
This episode — like every episode of this show — takes big, bold swings at the risk of seeming silly. It assumes, correctly, that the reward is worth the risk. Satisfyingly ludicrous sci-fi twists walk arm in arm with Cameron Britton and Julianne Nicholson’s marvelous acting. Cal Bradford’s comic relief is offset by Xavier and Teri hugging in the sunlight, and Sinatra extending her hand into that same sunlight, for the first time in years, a continent away. Moments of real power and poetry — and politics, with Link laying into billionaires like Sinatra for destroying the planet they now purport to save, or Cal laying out the exact way America’s empire is currently collapsing from its own false sense of permanence — illuminating an entire moon of cheese. Every show should go this hard or go home.
Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.