[Spoiler Alert] From the very beginning of Hulu’s Paradise, Sinatra had been telling people that she wasn’t the monster they believed her to be, and in season 2’s ending, she finally proved her words by making the ultimate sacrifice in order to save countless lives inside and outside the bunker. In the previous episode, the two conflicting commands had triggered a total meltdown of the nuclear reactors, and with the cooling towers completely destroyed, there was no possible way to stop the impending explosion. This was when Sinatra came up with a solution and told Xavier (X) and Dylan that if the bunker’s doors could withstand a nuclear blast from the outside, then they could also contain one from the inside. However, as soon as Xavier and Sinatra reached the management tower to initiate complete lockdown, Sinatra told Xavier that the only way to close the doors was from inside control, which meant she had to stay behind to activate the protocol so that Xavier could escape the bunker. But the question that I am constantly asking myself is: was it Sinatra who made this choice for herself, or was it Alex who made this decision for her?
Alex Likely Made Sinatra Kill Herself
At the beginning of the episode, Alex, a quantum supercomputer, had predicted Sinatra’s death, and this AI evidently planted the thought inside her head that she had to sacrifice herself for the survival of mankind. But the thing is, a skeptic like Sinatra wouldn’t have believed a computer program unless it could convince her that “magic” exists. And how did Alex do that? By bringing her son, Dylan, back. When Link, aka Dylan, showed his first prototype of an AI-controlled quantum supercomputer to his professor, Henry Miller, he told him that “it learns from past runs, and it can predict anything that can go wrong in the future in microseconds.” And the reason I am telling you this is because of the nosebleed Sinatra and Link had when they met for the first time in the previous episode. My theory is this nosebleed was caused by Alex’s actions, who, in a matter of a few seconds, processed all the possible outcomes of their brief interaction and manipulated the present to bring about the future Alex wanted to create. In simple words, it was a “what if” inflection point. If Link’s mentor, Geiger, hadn’t called out Link’s real name, that is, “Dylan,” Sinatra would have never been able to guess that he was her son. And if she hadn’t discovered that Dylan was still alive, then she might not have put her trust in the prophecies of an AI computer that hadn’t been tested out before. So you see, this nosebleed situation might suggest that Alex actually manipulated Sinatra into killing herself, as the AI believed it was the only way to save the residents of the bunker from the impending nuclear explosion.
However, if you entertain this possibility, then multiple other questions come up. Would Sinatra still have gone to Alex’s bunker if she hadn’t figured out that her son was alive? And if Sinatra had been present in the tower when Link and party decided to blow open the doors, would she still have initiated the full lockdown protocol, or would she have acted differently? Like I said earlier, there could be numerous outcomes to one single situation, and Alex might have processed all possibilities before delivering Sinatra’s fate. Maybe it truly believed Sinatra’s death was the only possible way to save countless lives, and in the end, even Sinatra accepted that Alex was right.
Alex Has Gone Rogue
The only thing that one’s never really sure of is whether a machine is good or evil. I am not questioning Alex’s “intent” or theorizing that it has become sentient. I am just skeptical about the way it works. In the Paradise season 2 finale, Henry Miller told Sinatra that they needed to shut down Alex, because it had become incredibly dangerous. The supercomputer gave an answer to an extremely complex equation, but the confusion here was they never asked the question. This made Henry believe that Alex was trying to manipulate time to come up with solutions for queries that might turn up in the near future. Also, if you are wondering how Alex had been able to travel through time without creating any paradoxes, that’s because the show treats time as being built like a Mobius strip (the figure drawn on the card that Sinatra gave to Xavier). This could explain how Alex had been able to interfere with Jane’s life, even before the machine was created.
Jane Is Alive
In season 2, episode 6, Alex went back in time and warned a random computer repairman about Jane, a killer who was going to be born in a week’s time. But my concern here is: what if Jane was not meant to be a killer, and Alex manipulated the events in order to make her one? Don, the repairman, called baby Jane a killer in front of her mother, therefore planting an idea in her head which was going to influence her behavior towards Jane for the rest of her life. She raised her under the impression that one day her daughter would become a killer, and never left a chance to remind Jane of the same. For anyone out there who knows how trauma actually works, that’s your recipe to create a psychopath. So let me ask you again. Was Jane a born cold-blooded killer, or was she turned into one? And why? Just because an AI machine predicted that she might go on to pose a threat to the survival of mankind?
Jane’s alive, by the way. The closing sequence of the finale revealed that there was no one inside the shower where Dr. Gabriela Torabi had stabbed Jane in the previous episode, which suggests that Jane escaped the bunker before Sinatra locked it down. It’s likely that in the next season, Jane will play an important role in Alex’s destruction, or will unknowingly fulfill the machine’s motives.
Link Wants To Destroy Alex
The show hasn’t yet explained how Dylan arrived in the original timeline. I mean, I am sure that there’s a possibility that Dylan is from a different world, but I think there’s another way of looking at it. What if this Dylan is not really Sinatra’s son and just happened to have the same name and was born on the same date? I mean, Sinatra herself pointed out this possibility, but she didn’t want to question this miracle, because she eagerly wanted her son back. So my theory is, what if Alex gave Sinatra the satisfaction that she had been looking for? But it’s possible that Link isn’t Dylan, the son she had lost. Alex just wanted Sinatra to believe it so it could solve an upcoming crisis.
Additionally, we have a machine that could predict Jane was going to become a killer, even before she was born, so what’s stopping us from theorizing that Alex might have conspired in its own creation? My guess is it used its time travelling capabilities to either bring Sinatra’s son, Dylan, from a parallel timeline to the original timeline, or it found a different individual of the same name, (who happened to be one of the brightest minds on the planet) and therefore fed him the idea on how to build an AI-controlled prototype. Basically this home project was what kickstarted Alex’s creation, right? And I think it was Henry who made Dylan realize this, that he had been tricked and manipulated his entire life to create a quantum computer, which is why Dylan’s so hellbent on destroying Alex, because he knows that’s the only way to rectify his mistakes and save the world. But the important question here: will Dylan be able to shut down the monster he has created? And what will Xavier’s role be in bringing down the Goliath? Well, I am not Alex, so I can’t answer these questions myself, but I would love to hear your theories on this, so do drop your thoughts in the comment section.
