Episode 208 – Exodus
Worlds collide. Time is of the essence for Xavier. Link and his team spring into action. Sinatra puts it all on the line.
Friends, I watched the season 2 finale of Paradise the minute it dropped on Hulu last night at 9PM PT and could not sleep for a while afterwards because this episode made me so damn anxious. Let’s jump in!
We begin 9 years into the past in a physics classroom at CalTech where we see the beginning of Link’s relationship with the professor we were introduced to earlier this season, Henry Miller. Link has built some sort of AI-controlled quantum computing device. (Please forgive my lack of physics and technology knowledge as I’m discussing this episode; I’m keeping it at a high level here, folks). Link is introduced to Henry’s wife, named Alex. ALEX???
As they begin to develop their work, Sinatra and her science advisor Dr. Chase visit Henry to learn about what they’ve been working on, and they offer them unlimited resources to develop the world’s fastest computer capable of solving the climate crisis. He eventually must tell them that they need to shut the whole project down because the computer is trying to manipulate time. I KNEW THAT TIME TRAVEL THEORY HELD WATER. He warns her of the vast dangers of such a computer, but she seems unbothered by the potential consequences.
Flash forward to present day, and Sinatra pays a visit to Alex, the quantum computer she had to kill Henry to get the rights to earlier this season. She tells Dr. Chase that she thinks she saw her son Dylan, but he is skeptical. Dr. Chase informs Sinatra that Alex has been making predictions that have come true. It spit out a series of numbers for a “User X”. Unfortunately, Alex also predicted her death by the end of the day. UH OH.
As the train approaches the staging area for the bunker in Colorado, Xavier has some sort of dream/vision of him walking through tunnels with Link. Xavier and Teri decide to head into the bunker to get to the kids, and leave the baby and Bean with the group’s leader to keep them safe.
Down in the bunker, Gabriella is reeling from the fact that she killed Jane when the power begins to surge and she’s called to the tower immediately due to a crisis with the reactors. Sinatra is still riding the train car back to the bunker from where Alex is kept. Presley and Sinatra’s daughter are trapped in an elevator on the systems level but there’s not a strong enough signal for James to understand them on the phone.
The tanks approach the doors of the bunker and blow out the security cameras. Sinatra is missing and somehow Gabriella is calling the shots for the entire bunker. They suggest that the only options are to open the doors to the bunker, or call “Exodus” which is the evacuation protocol. She tells them not to go that far and just open the doors and takes any responsibility for the call with Sinatra.
As Link’s group approaches the bunker, the doors open and they’re able to just drive right in. Xavier and Teri, run in on foot to get to the kids as fast as possible. Anders is panicking trying to figure out what to do when a reactor explodes, killing him and injuring Robinson and Jeremy.
The explosion has taken down the cooling towers and Gabriella makes the impossible decision to call Exodus. Over the loudspeakers, the citizens are told to follow the mandatory evacuation protocol and follow the arrows to the nearest exit from the bunker. Meanwhile, James is walking the streets alone while the residents are running in complete chaos.
Sinatra finally makes it back to the tower and is informed of what happened while she’s been gone. Xavier and Teri fight through the crowds to try to find the kids. Robinson tries to help Jeremy but realizes that she is seriously wounded. Sinatra tells Gabriella that she made the right call but notices the blood on her clothes. She confesses to killing Jane before Jane could kill her first. Sinatra swiftly dismisses her and tells her to help people evacuate. She dismisses everyone working in the tower to remain there alone. She stares at the information Alex spit out. Dr. Chase calls to let her know they’re seeing power issues. Sinatra gets him up to speed and tells him to cut power usage from the bunker’s grid to protect Alex at all costs, which is apparently 100 miles away from the bunker.
Xavier and Teri somehow manage to find James, and reunion is bittersweet but short lived when they learn that Presley is trapped somewhere in an elevator. He sends Teri to escape with James while he goes to try to rescue Presley. Link and his crew are driving around on the streets of the bunker. Geiger tells them they need to forget about Alex and save everyone from the disaster of the bunker completely melting down.
Xavier finds Sinatra alone in the tower and at gunpoint, demands that she find Presley. When she accesses the elevator’s security camera, she sees her own daughter is trapped with her. They race to the girls to try to get to them in time and I AM STRESSING OUT. Sinatra is still convinced that Link is Dylan, but also admits that she thinks Xavier is the only truly decent person down in the bunker. Robinson is wounded so seriously that she forces Jeremy at gunpoint to leave her down below in order to save himself. Is this the last we see of Robinson?!
Link, Geiger, and crew find Anders dead in the control center and see how serious the situation is with the bunker. Geiger heads out to shut some things down manually when something explodes, killing him almost instantly, leaving Link reeling. RIP GEIGER.
Sinatra and Xavier manage to find the elevator the girls are trapped in. They manage to get the concrete door pushed open but can’t pull the doors open enough before an explosion causes the elevator car to drop one story. FRIENDS, I CANNOT DESCRIBE THIS SCENE IN TOO MUCH DETAIL BECAUSE MY HEART WAS RACING THE ENTIRE TIME.
Jeremy manages to find help and rescues Robinson! Eventually Link and his crew find Sinatra and Xavier and help them to rescue the girls, but ALMOST lose Xavier in the process!!! They rush them to evacuate. But Link holds Sinatra at gunpoint with Xavier. She tells Link that Alex is already working and that she thinks he is her son. Xavier stops Link from shooting Sinatra and that same vision from earlier comes up again. Link and Xavier both have nosebleeds, but they don’t understand what is happening.
Xavier then tells him that he met Annie and she died giving birth to his daughter, who he brought with him. This snaps Link out of it and they rush to the cars with the rest of the group. He lets everyone know that when the explosion happens, it will spray radiation out the doors. Sinatra says that “the doors were built to withstand a nuclear blast from the outside, which means they should be able to contain one from the inside; they just need to be closed back up.” Sinatra tells them to take them to the tower where she and Xavier leave the group, and she says she’s going to make everything right and tells Dylan she will see him soon. Link asks Presley what her dad’s name is and she tells him that it’s Xavier, or people call him X. And Sinatra realizes, he must be User X!!! I AM STILL SO STRESSED, YA’LL.
Outside the bunker, the residents are being loaded onto buses and vehicles to get them as far from the bunker as possible. Sinatra tells Xavier that someone has to stay in the control room to close the doors and go down with the ship. She hands him the information from Alex and decides that she must be the one to stay with the bunker. Xavier runs through the streets of the bunker in a call back to the pilot episode when he was going on a run. Good thing he’s been training and running this whole time because I have no idea how long he has to try to escape the bunker. We get a quick cut to Gabriella’s shower and JANE’S BODY IS GONE. WHERE TF DID SHE GO?!?!?! Sinatra enters the codes to close the bunker doors, and I am panicking because we don’t see Xavier exit through the doors before they close.
Sinatra’s daughter Hadley finds her dad and lets him know that Sinatra is still in the bunker We cut to her walking the streets as pieces of the dome n the bunker begin to fall all around her, but she somehow looks peaceful. We see that Robinson and Jeremy managed to escape the bunker alive.
The bunker doors are shut, and we see the mountain start to crumble while everyone that managed to escape watches in horror. Sinatra has a vision of herself walking the streets of the bunker with young Dylan.
The bunker residents and the crew that arrived at the bunker have set up camp somewhere nearby. As Teri comforts James and Presley, we see Xavier approach, and even though I knew they probably wouldn’t kill him off, I was so worried.
Gabriella finds Xavier to chat, and he introduces her to Teri (AWKWARD!).
He then heads over to Link who is holding his baby. They talk about Annie and Link decides to name the baby after her.
Xavier flashes back to what we didn’t hear Sinatra tell him when she handed him the card from Alex. “About 100 miles from here, there is a second bunker. Deep underneath the Denver airport. It houses a quantum computer that can stop all this, in fact it already has stopped all of this. You just need to get there…Go save the world, Agent Collins.” And she believes he already has.
The camera zooms out and pans over the Denver airport and goes underground to show Alex. Xavier knows what he must do.
Thank goodness season 3 has already been written, because I NEED IT!! What did you think of season 2?!
