In Paradise Season 2 episode 7, Xavier was finally reunited with Teri, and after freeing Bean from the clutches of Gary (he claimed that he wasn’t holding him hostage, but I don’t trust a word coming out of his mouth), they boarded Dakota’s train, which was headed to the bunker in Colorado. Meanwhile, several events were unfolding simultaneously in and around the bunker. For starters, Sinatra met with Link in the hangar of the bunker and rejected his demand to hand Alex over to him. While ushering Link out of the hangar, Sinatra heard Geiger saying his real name, which was Dylan. Given how both Link and Sinatra began bleeding from their noses, it brought the latter to the conclusion that Link was actually her son from a different timeline or an alternate universe. After being thrown out of the bunker, Link and his massive crew put their plan to infiltrate the facility into action. This sent the members of the leadership council into panic, and they activated a full lockdown, even though they knew that it would severely deplete the bunker’s power sources. Now, when the council initiated the lockdown, Anders, Jeremy, and Robinson damaged the bunker’s oxygen system so as to force open the facility’s blast doors and give the denizens the freedom they deserved. These two conflicting commands caused the bunker’s whole system to malfunction, thereby trapping everyone in there, ready to be eviscerated due to a nuclear meltdown. What happened next? Let’s find out.
Spoiler Alert
The Inception Of Alex And Its Final Form
Episode 8 opens nine years prior to the events happening presently, in a class that’s being hosted by Henry, where he’s talking about building a quantum computer. Link (I am calling him Link instead of Dylan to avoid confusion with the kid, Dylan, who is dead) wonders why they always talk about building such a device instead of actually building, and Henry says that it’s not feasible, and no one is ready to finance such a project. So, Link pulls out a very small-scale version of an AI-controlled quantum computer and puts it on Henry’s desk. It doesn’t take long for Henry to realize that he has struck gold; so, he dismisses the class and takes the computer and Alex home. Henry says that he is going to use Link’s work to get seed money, and he is going to be the face of the project, not Link, because financiers will feel confident if a professor is helming this “experiment” instead of a student who is essentially a nobody. Henry introduces Link to Alex, his wife, and says that she has Huntington’s disease, and Link says that he knows all about it. This can mean one of two things: if Link is actually a grown-up Dylan, maybe he has some memory of surviving a mystery disease as a child (which may or may not have been Huntington’s), or he’s simply intelligent enough to be aware of Huntington’s disease.
By the way, Huntington’s disease is something that can only be genetically inherited. Therefore, if you think that both versions of Dylan, the one that died and the one that’s an adult, are somehow connected to Henry and Alex by blood, well, keep that theory on the back burner for now, because there’s nothing to suggest that that’s even a possibility. Going back to the plot, after scaling up Link’s AI-controlled quantum computer and naming it Alex, Henry finally finds a financier in Sinatra and Dr. Chase, who hopes that this invention is going to help humanity solve the climate crisis. However, after getting it somewhat functional, Henry tells Sinatra and Chase that they need to shut Alex down because it has started to answer questions that Henry hasn’t even thought of asking yet. Which means that it’s seeing the future and maybe manipulating the present to get certain outcomes. Since this is uncharted territory, Henry’s panic is understandable. However, we all know what happened next. Sinatra assigned Billy to make Henry sign over ownership of the project to her and then had him killed, which is why, in the present day, she has the ultimate version of Alex stowed away in a bunker far away from Paradise. The computer is operated and maintained by Chase and a few other technicians, but that’s about it.
Xavier Reaches Colorado
Sinatra approaches Chase and tells her that she has met a fully grown-up version of her son, Dylan, which means that Alex is “working.” Meanwhile, Chase gives Sinatra a card that’s been printed by Alex, which has the letter X and a bunch of coordinates printed on it, and he tells her that Alex has predicted that this is the last time that Sinatra is going to set foot in the cave that houses the quantum computer. Chase keeps saying that Alex hasn’t been “activated,” and it’s waiting to be activated by this user named “X.” At the same time, he says that it’s making predictions, printing cards and, as per Sinatra, warping the fabric of reality to bring a healthy and grown-up version of a boy who died into this timeline. How’s that possible? Well, as far as I could decipher, there’s some iteration of Alex that exists in the future which has been activated (because activating Alex is inevitable) and it’s doing most of the heavy-lifting. Or it’s meddling with the flow of events to make sure that the people who are currently in charge of “deactivated” Alex have no choice but to activate it. Well, whatever the case may be, we aren’t learning anything else about it in this season of Paradise, because the finale of the show largely focuses on evacuating the denizens of the bunker as it’s about to blow.
While entering the train station in Colorado, Xavier sees another vision of him and Link walking through the corridor that leads to the room where Alex is kept. Again, he’s not able to make head or tail of that; he spots tanks moving towards the bunker and chalks up a plan to get in there and save the kids before things go sideways. Teri states that she is coming with him, and Xavier has no choice but to bring her along. As for Annie’s baby and Bean, Dakota assures them that she’ll keep the kids safe and far away from all the potential shelling. Inside the bunker, Gabriela, who is still recovering after “killing” Jane, gets a message from Morton, asking her to come to the tower immediately, because there’s a nuclear meltdown underway and Sinatra is nowhere to be found. Sinatra is on her way back to the bunker, and as she gets closer and closer to civilization, she senses that something has gone wrong. Presley, who is stuck with Hadley in an elevator that was headed to the underground prison, manages to contact James on his phone and tells him where she and Hadley are stuck before the line cuts off.
Gabriel Initiates the Exodus Protocol
Gabriela reaches the tower (in her blood-stained tee) and tells Morton to open the blast doors and hope that that’ll take some pressure off the reactors. Of course, that means that Link and his team will be able to enter the bunker, but that’s a risk that Gabriela is willing to take. Upon seeing the blast doors open, Link orders his bulldozer operators to go in first and clear a path so that their trucks and jeeps can get into the bunker. While that’s going on, Xavier and Teri head into the bunker on foot so that they can extract Presley and James before chaos ensues. Anders tries his best to contain the damage that he, Jeremy, and Robinson have done, but it’s too late, and the cooling towers explode. Anders dies on the spot, Robinson is severely injured, and Jeremy is alright; he tries to drag Robinson out of there, but since she’s slowing him down, she forces him to leave her and save himself. Initially, Jeremy does what Robinson asks him to do, but later on, he returns with some helping hands to save Robinson. The aforementioned explosion prompts Gabriela to give the greenlight to the Exodus protocol, which means that they’re going to start evacuating everyone.
Sinatra finally reaches the bunker and learns that since the Exodus protocol has been invoked, the security forces are already trying to get to her family members and bring them to safety. Sinatra gets to the tower, and Gabriela gives her the lowdown regarding everything that has happened while she was meeting Alex, including Jane’s death. Surprisingly enough, Sinatra is chill about it, and she tells everyone to get out of the bunker while she oversees things at the tower all by herself. She gets on a call with Chase and tells him to sever all ties between Alex and Paradise immediately so that the quantum computer isn’t affected by the nuclear meltdown that’s happening in the bunker; Chase gets on it without any hesitation. Xavier and Teri find James, who informs them that Presley is stuck in an elevator. Xavier tells Teri to take James and head out while he goes and rescues Presley. Link and his crew finally reach the town square in the bunker, and when Link says that he wants to go to the tower to see where Alex is located, Geiger shoots down that plan and urges him to focus on stopping the nuclear meltdown (because that’s what they are really good at). Link listens to reason and heads in the direction of the modular nuclear reactors.
Link Saves Presley and Hadley
Xavier reaches the tower and orders Sinatra to find out where the elevator going to the underground prison is. Since Xavier is pointing a gun at her, Sinatra obliges the request and is shocked to find out that Hadley is also stuck in the elevator that Xavier is looking for. So, after some hesitation, Xavier and Sinatra head to the spot where that elevator is. They take an elevator to that level, which is odd, because everything electrical in the bunker is malfunctioning. Well, it gives Sinatra the opportunity to theorize if Link is actually her son or just one of the many Dylans who has survived the apocalypse. She also accepts that, while she is skeptical about most of the people who have lived in the bunker, she is sure that Xavier is the only good-hearted person down there. Once their elevator ride comes to an end, they rush to the elevator where Presley and Hadley are stuck.
Link and his crew reach the reactor room, but another explosion occurs and kills Geiger. Link thinks there’s still a way to stop the nuclear explosion, but his team forces him to make for the exit door, because the bunker is beyond saving. On their way out, they come across Xavier and Sinatra and help them rescue Presley and Hadley. Once that’s done, he tells his crew to take Presley and Hadley and head out of the bunker, while he holds Sinatra and Xavier hostage and asks them to take him to Alex. Sinatra says that there’s no way to get to Alex, because the tunnel going from the bunker to that cave has been cut off. Then she proceeds to overwhelm Link by sharing her theory that he is actually her dead son, and the fact that he is standing in front of her is proof that Alex is working. FYI, we still don’t know how Alex works or what it actually does. All we know is that it accurately predicts the future and manipulates reality to get the results it wants. How does that suggest that Alex has protected Dylan from dying in one timeline and brought him to this timeline as Link? I don’t know for sure, and neither does Link.
Sinatra Parts Ways With Link
Seeing how Link is getting agitated after learning that he can’t get to Alex and is seemingly about to shoot Sinatra in the head, Xavier intervenes and tells him that he should reunite with his daughter and make sure she gets the love and care that Annie wanted her to get instead of hanging around this bunker and fretting about Alex. This is when both Xavier and Link suffer nosebleeds, and both of them see that vision of them walking together to Alex’s room. That confuses both of them, but instead of staying in the bunker to figure it out, all three of them rush to Link’s team’s car and prepare to head out. That’s when Link points out that if they can’t close the blast doors after escaping the bunker, the radiation from the nuclear explosion will spread everywhere like wildfire and kill the people out there, because there’s no way for them to put a lot of distance between them and the bunker. So, before heading out, they go back to the tower, and Sinatra and Xavier go to the control room to initiate the procedure to shut down the blast doors.
Sinatra bids Link goodbye, calling him “Dylan” and touching her face, as if she’s trying to make sure she remembers his face before she dies. Here’s an interesting thing: neither of them suffers a nosebleed. In the previous week’s episode, when Sinatra touched Link, they both got nosebleeds. Why doesn’t that happen now? I don’t know. Previously, I had come up with a few theories. There’s the one about people from different timelines interacting with one another, which causes the nosebleeds. There’s another one about how one’s choices create branching timelines, and every time a new timeline is formed, the nosebleeds happen. And there’s one more about one’s physiology not being able to adjust to this alternate reality and causing nosebleeds. However, this interaction between Sinatra and Link essentially rubbishes all of these theories, and I guess we’ll have to wait till the next season to get the answers to our questions about the nosebleeds.
Sinatra Is Dead
Before this episode comes to a close, we do get the answer to one question: Who’s this User X that Alex was referring to via that printed card? As Sinatra and Xavier are heading up to the tower, Link asks Presley what his father’s name is so that he can holler at him. Presley says that he is called Xavier or X (it’s a nickname that his colleagues usually use). When Xavier goes to have a chat with Link, supposedly about where Annie’s baby is, Sinatra realizes that “User X” is actually Xavier, and Alex clearly wants him to get to the cave where the quantum computer is. To do what? I’ll come back to that in a bit; hold on to your horses. Sinatra and Xavier head to the tower; Sinatra gives that card to Xavier, and then she locks herself in the control room because she’s going to make sure that the blast doors are properly closed before the nuclear explosion happens.
Xavier makes a run for the exit. This is when we get an ominous shot of the bathroom in Gabriela’s house; yeah, Jane is gone. That can only mean one thing: the killer is alive. She is wounded, and she has probably mingled with the evacuees. Or maybe she is in the tunnel leading to Alex’s chambers. We’ll know more about her in the next season. As for the rest of the denizens of Paradise, yeah, everyone (including Xavier) safely makes it out of the bunker. Meanwhile, Sinatra takes a gander through the underground city as it crumbles. When she gets to the shop that has the mechanical horse reminiscent of the one that Dylan was riding before he tragically passed away, she imagines Dylan (the childhood version, not Link) holding her hand and taking her into the afterlife. The nuclear reactor finally explodes, destroying the bunker and collapsing the mountain over it. The survivors watch from afar and then head to the camp that’s been set up by Link and his crew.
It Is a Mobius Strip!
At night, everyone seems to be chilling at Link’s camp, remembering the dead, and just taking a breather before readying themselves for the next phase of their lives. Link names his daughter Annie. It’s all pretty relaxing. And then, in the ending of episode 8, Xavier triggers a flashback to show us what he and Sinatra actually talked about. Well, it’s pretty low on details; Sinatra just told Xavier to get to the facility underneath Denver Airport and do whatever Alex tells him to do, because that’s the only way to save the world from imploding in the upcoming few years, months, or weeks. Given how Link and Xavier are together now, the visions that they kept seeing make sense now. In Season 3 (which has already been greenlit), Link and Sinatra will go together to meet Alex. Which brings us back to the question: To do what? Well, after racking my brain for the last few hours, I finally noticed the Mobius strip (I have to credit Avengers: Endgame for teaching me about that) on the card that Alex has printed.
If I am right, then those coordinates point to the various locations on this timeline that Xavier and Link need to go in order to stop the apocalypse. Yes, it’s a time loop, and altering certain things in the past will apparently fix things in the present. I suppose Alex will help Link and Xavier enter all those coordinates on this Mobius strip, and then extract them once the job is done. There are a total of 6 spots that are marked on that Mobius strip, which might mean that each episode of Season 3 is going to be centered around fixing the issue on that particular spot in the timeline. That’s not all, though. Much like in Endgame, changing something in the past is going to create a different, branching timeline, and the more timelines are formed, the more unstable this reality becomes, and it’ll eventually collapse. In Endgame, restoring the Infinity Stones to their original place maintained the timeline and closed off the branches. What’s Paradise’s version of those Infinity Stones? That’s something that only and only Alex can answer. However, this much I can say for sure is that we are in for a wild, mind-bending, time-and-space-distorting ride. Are you excited for it? Let me know in the comments section below.
