Sinatra (Julianne Nicholson) with Xavier (Sterling K. Brown) in the 'Paradise' season two finale. Hulu Logo text [This story contains MAJOR spoilers from the Paradise season two finale, “Exodus.”]
Paradise finally answered the biggest question it had been posing throughout season two: Who is Alex? It turns out that Alex is an AI. Will Alex save the world, or destroy it? That’s the big question the Paradise writers are now asking as the Hulu hit created by Dan Fogelman and starring Sterling K. Brown looks ahead to its already renewed third (and likely final) season.
In true Paradise fashion, the finale, titled, “Exodus,” answered that looming question, but raised many others. Here are some: How exactly does “Alex” work? Why is Sinatra (Julianne Nicholson) so convinced that Dylan (aka “Link,” played by Thomas Doherty) is the grown-up version of her deceased son? How will Xavier (Brown) save the world in season three? Is Jane (Nicole Brydon Bloom) really dead? And, did the writers know all along that Nicholson’s Sinatra would die at the end of season two?
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The Hollywood Reporter posed those questions, and more, to Paradise executive producer and writer John Hoberg, who co-wrote the finale, and, in the chat below, he answers what he’s allowed to answer. That does, thankfully, include a more simplified explanation about the Alex-AI of it all, including how they summed it up for the actors so their brains wouldn’t explode thinking about it (like ours are right now). The series hired a quantum physics consultant and the writers vetted their theories. “It’s legitimate in theory, and very debatable among quantum physicists,” says Hoberg, “There are camps who believe, in theory, [that the Alex storyline] is very real: If a quantum computer was trying to find a way to change the outcome of where we are right now.”
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I spoke with your actors Julianne Nicholson and Thomas Doherty, who play Sinatra and Dylan, respectively, and when we started digging into the quantum physics of it all, they said that when you start to think about it, your mind goes crazy. The more you dig in, the more what you think you understand dissipates. They said the writers sat them down and answered their questions so they could make sense of the Alex-Sinatra-Dylan relationship. What was the explanation you gave them?
We call it “Martini’s Law” in the writer’s room. There’s one version of the finale where Sinatra has invested all this money, hoping and being convinced that this thing, Alex, is going to mess with time somehow. She says in the episode, “I’m maybe just a woman who’s finally processing her grief. But I don’t think so.” Our Martini’s Law is that you should be able to decide for yourself whether you think Sinatra’s gone a little crazy. Is this her son or is it not? One thing that’s very important to us is that the show is trying to stay slightly agnostic about it, while also leading [you in] a direction.
I thought she was crazy, until Dylan’s reaction. When she said it, he seemed to believe her, too.
Yes. Dylan was with the professor — his AI that he created in the core of that computer. We find out in the finale that he was the one who first put together this quantum computer with this AI, and he was there when the scientists realized: “This thing is approaching a problem the way we would never consider it, and it’s attempting to manipulate time.” That’s the last he knows of what this computer did because the professor was killed and then he ran off.
In the finale, you see Dylan in that classroom talking to the professor. He stands up and is asking, “Why not make this thing?” He pulls out what he made at his house. The professor’s a little nervous because he thinks it’s very dangerous. He said, “You’re putting AI intelligence in charge of something this powerful. It could be dangerous, or it could change the world.” And then the two of them built this thing together. So Dylan has been with it from the beginning.
We know that Sinatra was funding [the project] with the professor, which we saw in that cold open, and we also know that Billy [Jon Beavers], in a previous episode, had talked to the professor and said, “Sell your company,” because Sinatra wanted to buy that company and he had told her it’s too dangerous. Sinatra basically sent Billy to kill him and take the company. So we don’t know what happened between when they were in that lab, and the professor was trying to say, “This is dangerous,” because the professor was killed shortly after that. We don’t know what happened between that and when we meet Alex in the finale.
Thomas Doherty as Dylan, aka “Link,” with Sinatra (Nicholson) in the season two finale. Hulu Ok, so… how could Dylan be Sinatra’s son?
Imagine this. So after that, Sinatra poured all of the funds she could into making what they were starting with, which is a germ of a computer. Iff you think about how fast technology is moving, that’s what she was doing: She had endless funds giving it more and more power.
We had a quantum consultant for the show. He’s one of the heads of Caltech Quantum Computing Labs. Seena [Haddad], who I wrote the episode with, and a few other people from the show went over and spent the afternoon going through their quantum labs. We showed up there with this idea: If a quantum computer was trying to find a way to change the outcome of where we are right now — we said, “It sounds crazy, but…” — is there any quantum language that makes sense with that?” And he said, “Actually, that’s a prevailing quantum theory, where it’s that time is viewed differently from a quantum point of view.”
Here’s how I explained it to the actors. If you think of time as a block of cheese, the way we process time is that we slice off a piece of cheese as we move through it. But in this quantum theory, time actually exists all at once. So it’s like a block of cheese that is all of time in a path of reality. But we’re in a constant state of making different decisions — like a choose-your-own-adventure book, were you get to a certain point and you can either go this or that way. In your reality, you have thousands of those choices every day. Each one of those, in this quantum theory, breaks off into another block of cheese. So you have this endless library of choose-your-own-adventure books where you could, in theory, take a page out of one of them and put it into a different one. There was actually a speech in the lab at the beginning where the scientist used that analogy.
Ok, I think I’m following…
Another way is to say it is that a slice of cheese from one block of cheese could be sliding into a different block. The theory is that this happens all the time, and we just don’t know because we’re in our core reality. Things are sliding in and out, and we just wouldn’t know the difference because it seems like this is our reality. But if something tried to manipulate that, they could find how little tiny changes to the butterfly effect in this core reality would shift things in a direction where certain things happened or didn’t. That’s what [Alex] has tasked itself with doing.
It’s a very unusual way of thinking, and we were just astonished. All the boards in that finale [in the bunker control room] are parts of this type of quantum theory. Our consultant told us that if a quantum physicist looks at those boards [in the episode], they’ll know where we’re going by the end. We’re playing with almost a multiverse kind of idea. Maybe Sinatra is crazy, and Alex isn’t really doing this, but she sure feels like Dylan could be proof that this is actually working.
So does that put less pressure on Xavier to “save the world” for season three? Does the world really depend on him or is it just in this choose-your-own-adventure version? And is the ending already written? Sinatra is so confident when she dies that she’ll see Dylan again.
Right. Xavier says it at the end: “What makes you think I’m going to do this?” And Sinatra says, “If I’m right, then I think you already have. But you still have to do it.” So, is he going to follow through on this? What is he going to do? He’s being left in that last shot being told “go save the world, Xavier.” And he has no reason to. He’d be like, “Why am I doing this?” What is going to happen? is the big question we want to ask. Sinatra was certain enough that she was at peace when she was walking through her crumbling bunker city. There’s just a lot more to unpack about whether that’s the reality of all of that.
And we don’t know what Xavier has to do to save the world. We just know he has to get to Alex.
Yes. And we know its under the Denver airport. There’s another bunker, and that’s what he’s tasked with — going there. He’s got to figure everything out. All he knows is that it’s somewhere buried deep underneath the earth.
Alex, pictured here, is revealed to be a quantum computer in the season two finale. Hulu This now feels like a game of Zelda.
(Laughs.) The simplest way to think of it is as a choose-your-own-adventure book where you can make choices in your life. If you think of an infinite library of those books, a quantum computer might be trying to slide pages from a different book in to manipulate the end. Because every little choice every person makes in our lives affects everything else, it’s this butterfly effect. Is Alex looking for a way to manipulate things so that there’s an outcome it was tasked with solving?
Did you writers and creator Dan Fogelman always know that Sinatra would be a two-season character? And that she had to die to get to your third season?
No, I don’t think we knew she was the one who was going to sacrifice herself. We decided as we were trying to figure out, how do you close that door? We were kind of confined to the reality of the bunker we built and how it would work. And then we had this realization: What we wanted to do was redeem her to some degree. Whether or not you fully feel she’s redeemed or not, we wanted to get her to the point where you’re like, “I understand. She did some terrible things, but she thinks it’s all in the service of saving the world. Some of these small choices that are atrocious were for the larger good.”
You can argue whether that’s moral or not, but hopefully you understand her a little bit more now. And the fact that she’s now come to peace with it all means she truly believes she’s fulfilled her goal. And if we’re going to have her fulfill her complete goal, that’s kind of her arc [in the show].
Was it a big debate in the room about saying goodbye to Julianne Nicholson?
Yes. She’s one of the best actors any of us have ever worked with! She’s so compelling and so interesting. And again, it’s a Fogelman show, so you never know. You might see somebody from the past.
Is Jane (Nicole Brydon Bloom) really dead?
What do you think?
I think she’s dead.
She was stabbed and was bleeding and laying dead in a shower. There is a shot at the very end where there’s an empty shower, but she seems pretty dead to me. We intend her to be dead. [Writer’s note: Bloom confirmed Jane dies.]
Season one centered on climate change and made us think about how we’re treating the world will impact our survival. And this season raises questions about the possibilities or dangers of AI, and also about faith and what we believe…
Will AI save us or will it destroy us? Is it too dangerous? Is it playing around in things where we should never have turned on the switch? One of the big themes we’re exploring here is, as the professor says, do things happen for a reason, or is it a coincidence? When you boil that down, that is a little bit of faith. And, do you think things happen because they should be happening for a larger purpose? There’s also a little bit of, are people worth the second chance? Sometimes those things are part of the same question.
Xavier (Brown), here with Sinatra (Nicholson) before her death, is tasked with going to find Alex to save the world in season three. Hulu It seems like baby Annie will have an important role in season three. Is there anything you can tease about that storyline?
This is where it’s always scary to talk about this show [and not give away spoilers]. I think it’s a really interesting thing that there’s a baby born to a father who someone is claiming is stepping between two realities.
If you think about where season two ends, we have a mass of people in the middle of Colorado and Xavier is being given marching orders and told he can save the world. There’s going to be questions of leadership. There’s going to be questions of faith and, do you move forward? Where do you go? And questions of, is this dangerous? Is Sinatra dangerous? Or is she actually working in our best interests? Now they’re out in the world and all they know is there’s the bunker somewhere underneath Denver. But they don’t know if that’s safe and if they want to be there.
What else can you say about what this show is building towards with its third season, which you all have said is planned to be the end of the show?
At the end of season one, we answered all of the questions but then asked a couple more. I feel like season two is doing the same thing. We answered all the questions that were brought up, but we’re now posing an even bigger question. Season three is going to follow that same pattern.
Have you figured out how season three ends?
Yes. We feel really good about it. It’s something we’ve all been excited about for a very long time. We didn’t do necessarily exactly what you thought in season two, but it was what you hoped in some ways that would be dealt with and answered. I think season three will feel the exact same way. It may not go where you guess or what you think, but I think it’s going to be satisfying in where it takes you.
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Paradise is now streaming all episodes of seasons one and two on Hulu.
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