Yahoo Lifestyle 'Paradise': Every Game-Changing Twist in the New Sterling K. Brown Drama
Dan Fogelman has been a master of twists since his 2011 film Crazy, Stupid, Love, but he became world-famous for his talent with This Is Us, which had fans screaming over timeline shenanigans for six seasons. So when Hulu announced that Fogelman was teaming up with Sterling K. Brown for a political thriller, viewers expected some surprises. But this many? Once again, Fogelman outdid himself.
Paradise stars Brown as Xavier Collins, the lead secret service agent assigned to the President of the United States, Cal Bradford (James Marsden). Xavier reports for work in the first episode to discover that the president is dead and an important tablet is missing from the commander-in-chief's personal safe.
Xavier immediately goes into crisis mode and calls in personal reinforcements before officially reporting that Cal is dead. He already senses that there's a conspiracy afoot and everyone is a suspect, including Xavier's boss, Agent Robinson (Krys Marshall), who was having an affair with Cal.
The reveal of the affair would have been a big enough shocker for any normal political drama, but the final moments of the pilot reveal that the world Xavier inhabits is nothing like we thought it was. It was a sign that Fogelman is still on top of his twist game.
With that in mind, Parade is here to help you track all of Paradise's big twists. Keep reading for every jaw-dropping reveal the drama has delivered so far.
All the twists in 'Paradise' (so far)
Premiere: 'Wildcat Is Down'
The premiere twist of Paradise changes the entire premise of the show. It turns out that an "extinction-level event" has occurred on Earth and select people have been moved to an underground bunker in Colorado to continue the human race.
While the timeline implied that Cal was a retired president, the reveal that Xavier and everyone we've met so far is underground changes everything. Cal was still president and the tablet that was stolen contained all of the information about the world-ending event and how things run in the bunker. It opens up so many questions about what forced everyone underground, what happened to Xavier's wife and whether it was enough to convince Xavier to have anything to do with Cal's death.
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Episode 2: 'Sinatra'
The second episode of Paradise focuses on Sam (Julianne Nicholson), the tech entrepreneur who created the bunker everyone lives in. Sam lost her son to a mysterious illness in the years before the bunker was built and then started working on it after attending a tech conference where an environmentalist predicted that melting polar ice caps would end the world in the next decade. Sam started working on the bunker to save what remained of her family and modeled it after what her deceased son thought Heaven would be like.
While the episode worked to endear the audience to Sam—whose code name is Sinatra because she's the leader of the entire project—Xavier started having suspicions about the amount of power she yields. There was a six-digit code written on a cigarette that Xavier stole from Cal's pocket at the murder scene and his next task is to figure out what that code means. While Xavier pondered all of these puzzle pieces, his daughter started bonding with Cal's son. He led her to a secret part of the bunker where all of the planes that brought everyone to safety were still held. Each plane has a six-digit code on the tail, and Cal knew that Xavier spent his life obsessed with planes. The code on the cigarette was a direct clue meant for Xavier to find and decode.
Episode 3: 'The Architect of Social Well-Being'
In the third episode, we get to spend time with the bunker's resident grief therapist, Gabriela (Sarah Shahi). It turns out that she was in charge of picking everyone who made it into the bunker, which means she may have had something to do with Xavier's wife not making it to safety.
She and Xavier spent a lot of time together in the episode (and had a STEAMY shower scene) because he needed to question why she saved him during his interrogation in Episode 2. Gabriela had a message from Cal to deliver, which was that Xavier shouldn't trust his colleague Billy (Jon Beavers), who we also discovered was the one turning off security cameras so that he and Jane (Nicole Brydon Bloom) could hook up. The end scene of the episode implied that Billy was outside of Xavier's house with a real gun, potentially ready to threaten Xavier's children. However, this is a Fogelman show so we can't be 100 percent certain exactly where Billy arrived with that weapon. He has moved up to No. 1 on our suspect list, though.
Paradise will continue with new episodes every Tuesday on Hulu.
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