5 min read
In my recaps for Paradise this season, I’ve been glossing over (and sometimes outright ignoring) a recurring mystery: Xavier’s visions. Throughout the show, Xavier suffers brief nosebleeds and lapses of his senses, including indecipherable “visions.” We see him walking in an underground facility with Link, whom he’s never met before.
I’ve been ignoring these because I had faith Paradise would make it all make sense in due time—patience is a virtue, after all—and, frankly, the show itself hasn’t really remarked upon them. Instead, the show has spent most of its time reminding viewers of other major story threads. Like Sinatra’s secret project (codenamed “Alex”) and the true identity of Link. It’s also a testament to the show’s writing that I’ve cared more about the human drama than the bigger Lost-esque sandbox that Paradise has built. But the most recent episode, “The Final Countdown,” has made everything too difficult to ignore any further.
Spoiler alert: Following the still-not-confirmed-but-very-obvious hint that Link may be Sinatra’s grown son Dylan and that the big energy-sucking secret project below the bunker is “Alex,” the nature of Xavier’s visions has gone from opaque foreshadowing to glaring road signs for what’s coming. It’s also why Paradise fans are convinced that the sci-fi show is inching its way to another subgenre entirely: time travel.
Link, played by Thomas Doherty (right) was a student of brilliant Henry Miller (Patrick Fischler), whose creation “Alex” was named after his dying wife. This is how Link knows about Alex—but does Link know Sinatra may be his mother?
How Paradise May Be a Time-Travel Series
Not unlike the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Paradise started out as a relatively grounded sci-fi genre series. But it’s been planting the seeds for a much bigger premise all in plain sight.
The biggest hint of a time-travel twist yet dates back to episode 3 of season 2, when that episode’s flashbacks revealed Sinatra’s conversation with the paranoid Dr. Louge and her attempt to lock down what might be the key element to her master plan: “Alex.” At the hotel cocktail bar, Dr. Louge informed Sinatra that Earth’s atmosphere after “the Day” will be irrevocably effed up and that the warming temperatures afterward are just “the first act” for the hell to come. He then told Sinatra that money can’t buy anyone time.
“Billionaires are amazing. You think your money gives you superpowers. … There’s only one thing that can fix this. And it’s the one thing even you can’t buy. Time.” The look on Sinatra’s face plainly read then as “Challenge accepted.”
The rest of the episode’s flashbacks explored Sinatra hunting down another scientist, Henry Miller, who is on the verge of a breakthrough: “Advanced Wave Functions, Superposition, and Quantum Entanglement.” My initial impression was that Henry was involved in the energy the bunker needs in order to keep its lights on. But now in hindsight, it’s a lot clearer that Henry had the key to Alex, named after Henry’s dying wife. Adding to this all-but-confirmed theory is the fact that Henry’s protégé was Link, who would of course know about Alex because of his close relationship to Henry and the real Alex.
This isn’t the only instance of potential time travel. In the flashbacks to Jane’s origins in episode 6, someone knew about Jane’s future and urged a random Circuit City employee in 1997 to kill her as a newborn baby. In a vacuum, it’s a completely bizarre cold open. But if Paradise is actually setting up a huge time-travel reveal by the season’s end, then someone from the postapocalyptic present has found a way to send messages into the past. Might Henry’s advanced wave functions have something to do with it? Most definitely.
So how does this explain Xavier’s nosebleeds and his hazy “memories”? For weeks on Reddit, fans have been cooking up theories regarding how they tee up a time-travel twist. On r/ParadiseHulu, u/AlexO6 theorized that the nosebleeds are entanglements with Alex resulting in “probabilistic change” and not traditional time travel as we know it.
“It’s possible that it also entangles their memories, so they remember things that haven’t happened yet,” u/AlexO6 wrote. “Kind of like having a dream of an alternate you in an alternate reality. I know lots of science fiction stories these days like to throw the theory around that ‘dreams are us peeking into alternate realities or the future.’ ” This redditor may be referring to movies like Marvel’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which proposed that dreams are windows to our parallel lives across the multiverse.
Another user, u/allertonm, brought up Gregory Benford’s 1980 novel Timescape as well as The Peripheral and Agency, both by William Gibson. All the novels involve “people in the future communicating with the past, and some catastrophe,” u/allertonm said. “This communication creates new timelines but communication can continue between the new timeline and the original.”
They added, “What’s happening in Paradise seems like a mix of the Benford and Carpenter versions of this, where the nosebleeds and visions occur when some intervention from the future has occurred.”
Weeks ago, u/shiny_76 predicted the “Alex” reveal weeks ago, in which they anticipated that Alex was not a person but a machine “that is designed to suspend time inside the dome indefinitely.”
They remind fellow fans that Earth’s atmosphere will be unlivable in the years after the Day. Which means that Alex is not necessarily a “time machine” but a “time freezer” to keep humanity alive in the bunker.
YouTuber @JBuckMovies proposes that Sinatra’s interrogation scene in episode 3 are glaring hints that Sinatra has figured out how to create infinite timelines. Note her infinite reflections in the mirror.
Lastly but no less important, YouTuber @JBuckMovies summarized these existing theories while adding in their own angle to it, citing the show’s visual storytelling as proof of an alternate timeline at play. They cite Sinatra’s interrogation scene from episode 3, which has the motif of infinite Sinatras being reflected through mirrors, as symbolism alluding to Sinatra’s plans.
And Now a Theory of Our Own
All of these theories, and others like them, seem valid for a show with a specific flavor of intelligent, semi-hard science fiction. So allow me now to add my own theory to the mix: Paradise‘s heavy reliance on flashbacks is its own hint the show is about how the past influences the present, and vice versa. It’s been there plain as day all along—we just didn’t know it until now that Sinatra’s master plans are in motion. No one watching Paradise expects these characters to start doing doughnuts in a DeLorean. (Even though President Bradford would have a ball going 88 miles per hour.) But fans are anticipating something that explains every big question they’ve had for two seasons.
Why does Xavier get nosebleeds? How and why can he see Link when they’ve never met? And most importantly: What is Alex’s true purpose? As of now, fans are still in the dark regarding Alex’s functions and what Sinatra plans to do with it. The new reveal that Link may be Sinatra’s son might hint that Sinatra has been trying to buy more time with her son. Maybe she’s using time travel to cure her son in the past; that she’s now met Link/Dylan means Alex works as Sinatra hoped it would. (As she told her husband when he asked her if she’s okay: “I think so. I can’t explain it, but I think Dylan is too.”) But how Sinatra’s grief as a mother is connected to global climate catastrophe and humanity retreating into bunkers has yet to come to light. But eventually, hopefully, everything will.
