'Paradise' Episode 7 recap: The (spoiler) that decimated life as they knew it
The penultimate episode of Hulu’s “Paradise” reveals what happened on that life-altering day that sent the president, his faithful secret service agent and a select few to an underground city.
In Tuesday’s seventh episode, “The Day” (largely a flashback), ABC News’ Bob Woodruff "reports" on a supervolcano that blew beneath the Antarctic ice sheet, decimating pieces of the ice shelf and prompting a tsunami. President Cal Bradford (James Marsden) and his team conclude this is Versailles, the disaster they’ve been preparing for. Agent Xavier Collins (Sterling K. Brown) and his children head for the bunker city in Colorado, but his wife, Teri (Enuka Okuma) is stranded in Atlanta where flights have been grounded.
Series creator Dan Fogelman (“This Is Us”) says “a tremendous amount of research” went into designing the earth-shattering catastrophe. He and his writing staff “spent weeks meeting with experts ‒ everything from architects to sociologists to environmentalists ‒ really gathering a lot of information and creating a scenario that was plausible and terrifying,” yet “out-there enough that … you could engage with the TV series,” he says.
Before evacuating the White House, Cal records an optimistic message for the country, vowing that “When the dust clears from the tragic day, we will go forward, as Americans, as a beacon of strength in a sometimes dark world.” But he soon decides he can’t stomach the split with reality. He decides to go live from the Oval Office with an honest message about the “imminent worldwide disaster.
“I’m telling you this so that you can make decisions based on where you want to be right now and who you want to be with,” Cal tells his fellow Americans. As Marsden sees it, his character is “very flawed,” but “at the end of the day, when it really matters, he's a man of good character and integrity who's going to try to do the right thing.”
Marsden predicts in that unthinkable situation he would mirror the president’s actions. “The Purgatory, the worst feeling, a personal prison that I could be in is one that's steeped in regret and knowing that you've made a selfish choice at the cost of others,” he says.
Facing his final hours, Marsden says he'd want to be with the loved ones who make up his world.
“The definition of my life is my family, my kids (Jack, 24; Mary, 19; and William, 12) and my friends, and there's not much that matters outside of that,” Marsden says. “Because at the end of it all, that is the most important thing to me and the relationships that you have fostered and been lucky enough to be a part of the memories that you accrue through life. I'd want to be with the people that I did all of that with.”
In the final minutes of the episode, Xavier comforted Teri in what he worries are her final moments when a missile heads for Atlanta. Little does he know that Cal activated a system to disarm such threats midair. Back in the present day, menacing tech genius Sinatra (Julianne Nicholson) plays Xavier a message from Teri, in which she says she’s looking for her husband and kids. Sinatra orders Xavier to restore Paradise to its former glory if he wants to see his wife and kidnapped daughter again.
Luckily for viewers, Fogelman says next week's finale should resolve any lingering mysteries.
“Now there's one question left, which is 'Who killed the president?' And that gets answered by the end of our season,” Fogelman says. “We wanted this to be a complete meal for people who sat and watched eight episodes of the show where if they had a question at the end of Episode 1, it gets answered by the end of the first season.
Fogelman says the series’ second season, that Hulu green-lit Thursday, will send the audience “on a little bit of a new journey.”