In Paradise, the world ends not with a bang, but with many loosely related bangs all happening at once. A supervolcano, a megatsunami, nuclear war — the show even throws an earthquake in there for good measure.
‘Paradise’s big twist is exactly why you need to watch it: Review
The more is more approach is par for the course for Paradise, a series whose first episode opens with the murder of U.S. President Cal Bradford (James Marsden) and ends with the bonkers reveal that the show is set in an underground city built to withstand the apocalypse. (And that’s just the start of Paradise‘s many plot twists.)
Paradise keeps the exact nature of that apocalypse under wraps until its seventh episode, only hinting at it in flashbacks or in small drips of information. In episode 2, Xavier Collins (Sterling K. Brown) witnesses a bright flash of light while on the plane to Colorado, implying a nuclear blast. A trip outside the bunker in episode 4 suggests nuclear winter as well, with shots of snowy landscapes and a destroyed city. Yet a shot of the submerged Washington Monument in episode 5 positions climate change as the culprit. In the same episode, Cal reads about a potential volcanic disaster on his tablet, and in the very next episode, Xavier’s daughter Presley (Aliyah Mastin) uses that same tablet to learn that nukes were detonated in Atlanta. So what is the truth? Did nuclear war destroy the world, or is a climate change-based natural disaster to blame?
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