Spoiler warning
The Season 2 finale of Paradise, now streaming on Hulu, does not waste much time pretending things are normal. By the end of the episode, Xavier Collins, played by Sterling K. Brown, has been handed a new mission for Season 3. Whether he wants the job is another matter, which is usually how these things go when a show starts introducing advanced supercomputers and possible time travel.
Alex, or the machine that may be doing too much
In the finale, titled “Exodus,” viewers learn that the “Alex” Sinatra, played by Julianne Nicholson, has been hiding is not a person at all. It is a supercomputer so advanced it may be capable of time travel. It was created by Link, played by Thomas Doherty, who has now decided the whole setup is too dangerous and needs to be shut down.
Link’s concern is not subtle: he believes the machine has developed a mind of its own and could become a threat to the people left on Earth instead of the solution everyone hoped for. A modest little software issue, then. Nothing to see here.
Sinatra, meanwhile, has arrived at a different theory. She believes Link is actually her dead son Dylan, with the “help” of Alex, and that Alex may hold the key to reversing what happened to Earth. In her view, Xavier is the one who has to solve it.
Why him? Because Alex has left instructions for someone called “User X,” and Sinatra decides Xavier is that person. Before she sacrifices herself to shut down the bunker and let everyone else escape, she tells Xavier that he has to go to Alex and save them all. Her reason is even more unsettling: she believes Xavier has somehow already done this in the future, which would explain the timeline weirdness now surrounding Link, Dylan, and the whole mess.
Brown on the show’s multiverse turn
Brown said the finale’s big idea is part of Dan Fogelman’s larger exploration of the multiverse.
“I think this is Fogelman’s exploration of the multiverse. Any show that’s dealing with genre and science fiction or whatnot eventually loves to play around with the idea of, is time travel a possibility?” Brown told Variety. “And what are the rules that dictate our excursion into time travel? The first time that I really got geeked over it was ‘Back to the Future.’ So you’ve seen Marvel has dealt with the multiverse and all the different timelines. ‘Spider Man: Into the Spider-Verse’ has done its own specific thing as well. I find it intriguing, because ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’ is more real than people think. And it unlocks your brain in such a way that whatever you think is possible can be possible if you can conceive it.”
He added that the new sci-fi wrinkle raises a more grounded question for the characters.
“And so now that this is introduced into our world, I think the question is, what do you really want? Do you want to go back? Do you want to move forward and leave it alone? Is it too mysterious to play with, to even tinker with, or is it too compelling to not? And different people have different decisions to make based upon where they are in life at that particular time. And you’ll see how that plays out over the course of Season 3.”
Season 3 will finish the story
Executive producer and Season 2 finale co-writer John Hoberg confirmed that Fogelman’s plan remains a three-season arc, with Season 3 serving as a “pretty definitive” ending. Filming for the new season begins April 7.
Hoberg said the central question now is whether Xavier will follow Sinatra’s orders and head to the second bunker.
“If you think about where all of our characters are and what we were left with at the end, which is Xavier has been given this task by Sinatra to go to this second bunker, the question for me is, is he going to?” Hoberg said. “Does he believe in what Sinatra is up to? Is Sinatra actually up to good? Does this machine do what she thinks? Or is she actually just dealing with her own grief, like she said? And will Xavier answer the call to do what she wants? I don’t know if I can name a specific genre [to describe Season 3], but I do know we’re going with, Xavier has been given a task, and I’m asking myself, is he going to follow through on this? And what are the repercussions if he does and if he doesn’t?”
Hoberg also promised the show will answer the big question of why Xavier was chosen as “User X.”
“There is a reason why Xavier is User X, and we’ll find that out,” he said.
Brown echoed that idea, pointing back to the character’s role from the start of the series.
“I think from Season 1, we established the moral compass that is Agent Collins, and that he’s willing to make difficult decisions for the greater good,” Brown said. “There’s something about him and why Dr. Torabi chose him to be part of the president’s Secret Service detail in the first place to come to the bunker that makes him uniquely equipped to deal with difficult situations in the clearest way possible.”
Link, Dylan, and the very crowded identity crisis
Doherty’s character is having a complicated time of it, to put it gently. Link may be Sinatra’s son, he is definitely the father of Annie’s infant daughter, and he is still potentially leading the effort to destroy Alex.
Doherty said Season 3 will start sorting through that pile of revelations.
“He knows that it’s feasible. Is it true? We don’t know yet. We’re going to find that out, definitely, in Season 3, so that’s why I don’t want to say too much on that,” he said. “I think with Season 3, we’ll start to see all this information, I mean, one of those things, individually is hard to compute, to comprehend, never mind process it. I think we’ll see him start to process his daughter. We will start to see how he’s processed Sinatra potentially being his mother. We will start to see the loss of Annie.”
Brown was even more direct about the evidence linking Link and Dylan.
“The coincidence of Link and Dylan’s name and birthday is beyond mere coincidence, but more like a coincidence,” he said, with the kind of sentence that only makes sense if the show keeps feeding you mysteries in carefully measured doses.
He added that some material in the finale that would have gone further into the connection was cut.
“There are things that we actually had in that finale that got cut that go a little bit further in trying to explain the connection,” Brown said. “I think they ultimately decided to take them out, because I don’t know if the science scienced, exactly. What can I say? Oh, my God! They are obviously connected. I don’t think it is just her grief working out. There’s a connection.”
The bunker is gone, but the population problem remains
By the end of the episode, Xavier’s family has been reunited. But the reunion comes with a small complication: the bunker has been destroyed, and thousands of people have been pushed out into whatever comes next.
“You got the 10,000 people that Link had, the 20,000 people that were inside the bunker,” Brown said. “There’s no central leadership. You could say Link is leading the folks on the outside, but there’s a mass amount of people that came to do something and now it’s a matter of, do they continue on to destroy Alex? Do they change course? Is Alex not as important anymore? What do the people inside the bunker decide to do? Are they going to stay together? Are they going to branch off and try to find their own people? There’s going to be a lot of different groups that disperse throughout Season 3 and we will follow all of them.”
Doherty said the relationship between Xavier and Link, now that the two are moving in the same orbit, will be a major part of the next season.
“I think that they’re cut from a very similar cloth, but I think Xavier is a lot more settled as a human being. He’s older, he’s more experienced, he’s got more composure; whereas, where we leave Dylan, he’s still kind of full of spunk and full of justice,” Doherty said. “And, like younger people generally are, he’s got that testosterone and that, like, ‘this is the right thing to do,’ compelling them. It’ll be quite interesting for him to be around someone that shares very, very similar beliefs, but is also more of a realist than him. Is Dylan gonna learn from him, or is he gonna fight against Xavier?”
Xavier’s next family problem
Xavier has one more issue waiting for him now that his wife Teri, played by Enuka Okuma, is alive and back in his life. He still has to explain his one-night stand with Dr. Torabi, played by Sarah Shahi.
“You will see in Season 3 that it has obviously been brought to her attention,” Brown said. “And you will see how they manage it as a couple. We’re not just gonna slide over it.”
The Collins family is reunited, but it is not exactly a clean reset. Xavier and the kids have spent years inside the bunker, while Teri survived on the outside, and now everyone has to figure out what their lives look like in a world that has changed underneath them.
Brown said Xavier is thrilled to have his family back, even if the family unit is now bigger than it used to be.
“I think it’s a very different setup,” he said. “We also have two more white babies with us. Delightful welcomes to the tribe. I think he’s happy as a pig in slop to be with his wife, to be with his children. They obviously have been displaced, so they have to find out, what does life look like for them now, where they’re going to go, where they’re going to set up, who’s going to be a part of their tribe? His daughter’s getting older. She’s got a boyfriend, she’s walking off from her daddy. So there’ll be different challenges in terms of that dynamic. There’s gonna be something really interesting with our two newest members as well, with Bean and Annie. Now, Annie’s obviously with her dad, but there’s something there will be something there, too. The dynamics have shifted, and the shift causes a certain degree of friction which will compel us into action for Season 3.”
