‘Paradise’ Season 2 Episode 7 Recap: Epic Failsafe

“If somehow you are able to sing a song now, bringing these boys together who you haven’t even met, and make something so personal, so new, that the whole world takes notice, and that your life is never the same again — but I’m telling you right now, I don’t think it’s going to happen.” —Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story

“What happens if all that happens at the same time? The air, the uruk, uh…ugly guys.”

“The odds of that are infinitesimal, but we’ve programmed the system to anticipate and react to every reasonable scenario.” —Paradise 2×07, “The Final Countdown”

I admire the bravado of Paradise. I really do! Most other shows that wanted to introduce an unlikely doomsday scenario might have done so gradually, over the course of a full season, planting breadcrumbs and easter eggs until the obvious catastrophe became an unavoidable one. Paradise appears perfectly capable of this, as we’ll soon discuss. But when it comes to the unique structural flaw that appears poised to fatally undermine Samantha “Sinatra” Redmond’s bunker, and quite possibly her mysterious “Alex” project too, Paradise just say “Fuck it, we’ll do it live.” 

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.