Paradise The Day Season 1 Episode 7 Editor’s Rating 5 stars * * * * * « Previous Next « Previous Episode Next Episode » Photo: Brian Roedel/Disney
Okay, you KNOW Paradise is serious when they make it through an entire episode without playing even one emo cover of an ’80s banger. Today, this show is so serious. And that’s because we finally get a real look at what went down the day the world ended, and it is, to put it mildly, intense. I was sweating by the end. In the retelling of the End of the World, Paradise turns itself into a thrilling, relentless, deeply unsettling disaster movie perfectly paced for an hour-long episode of television. It’s easily the best of the season.
But “The Day” doesn’t kick things off on this titular day we’ve been anxiously awaiting the show to color in. Instead, it starts out on another day, many, many years before: October 28, 1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis has just come to its nail-biting conclusion, and a U.S. Air Force colonel attempts to calm his nerves with a drink at home. When his wife begs him to come to bed, he confesses to her just how close the world came to a nuclear holocaust. In fact, it came down to one guy on a Soviet submarine armed with a nuclear warhead refusing to give necessary consent to deploy it after the sub had lost contact with Moscow and believed they were under attack. One guy! His name is Vasily Arkhipov, and while Paradise simplifies what happened with submarine B-59, Arkhipov has been referred to as “the man who saved the world.” Our Air Force colonel knows how lucky we were and also how inevitable it is that the world will find itself on the brink of nuclear war again one day. “What if the wrong person’s at the control next time?” he asks. It’s a terrifying thought for him, for us. Before he heads off to bed, he flicks the light switch in his room on and off a few times. A metaphor for how easy it is to end the world? An idea brewing? Time, and the rest of this episode, will tell.
Suddenly, we are in the middle of another important day. Nope, not The Day yet. There are a lot of days to get through, okay?! We’re back in Samantha Redmond’s living room, and Xavier has a gun pulled on her. She’s just told him that his wife is alive out on the surface. Oh, buddy, does Xavier get angry. Sterling K. Brown does this mix of rage that Samantha would use Xavier’s dead wife like this, disbelief at the words he’s hearing, and hope that they might actually be true so well. She tells him about how she had to take out the scientists because they were going to bring back a survivor, and “it was going to open a whole can of worms” — in the same breath as casually admitting to atrocities she has committed, she again claims she’s not a monster — but they’ve been using the short-wave transmitters the scientists had set up and listening to survivors looking for the Colorado bunker. She thinks Teri is one of them. As much as he wants to believe, Xavier says it’s impossible. His wife was in Atlanta, and he knows for sure that the city took “an unsurvivable, direct hit” that day.
But Samantha has news for him: The president did something that day that nobody knows about. Something that might have made the impossible very, very possible.
Finally, the titular day. It is chaos in the White House. Three hours prior, a super volcano under the Antarctic ice sheet exploded, sending a massive amount of ash up into the atmosphere, shattering large portions of the ice shelf, and instantly melting trillions of gallons of water, which then triggered a tsunami with a wave as high as 300 feet. How fun! Something new and exciting for me to stress about at 3 a.m. Melbourne and Sydney are already underwater. South Africa is gone. The wave is two hours out from Key West and five from D.C. As if things aren’t bad enough — I truly cannot believe I had to write that phrase at this point — President Cal Bradford is in an intense Cabinet meeting in which he learns that governments are out there just popping off missiles to preemptively stake their claim over land and whatever resources they can before others do. Nuclear weapons are being prepped. This is … well, this is the end of the world. You can see how badly Cal Bradford wants to be told he’s getting ahead of himself, but he is as alarmed as he should be. He calls for the Versailles Protocol, and we’re off.
What makes this episode — written by John Hoberg and directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa — really sing is that it maintains its unrelenting forward propulsion while infusing such dynamics into the proceedings. For every loud, haunting moment when a TV reporter in Jakarta gets ripped off the air live by a wave so big it is basically built with nightmare fuel, we get a quiet human moment like Cal practically begging the janitor who’s worked at the White House for nine administrations to leave his post and be with his family. Even with these hills and valleys, the chaos just grows and grows. We know this because even cool, calm Xavier is starting to panic as he balances trying to get his wife on a plane out of Atlanta to Air Force One before it takes off for Colorado; a very nice but terrified secretary named Marcia who is slowly realizing that she and her son are going to be left behind to die (I feel for this woman, but now is not the time, Marcia!!), and, you know, making sure the president doesn’t get shot, which is becoming more difficult by the second.
The moment Xavier knows for sure that shit is about to go down in the West Wing is when Cal makes a move not accounted for in the Versailles Protocol. Unable to shake off the janitor nor the thought that the majority of U.S. citizens have no idea what they are in for, he decides to forgo his prerecorded address, which really skirts around the whole apocalyptic conditions the world is being hurled into in order to provide some hope and keep people calm for as long as possible, and instead be a human being with some heart and go live to convey the reality of the situation so people can decide what to do with their remaining time. The White House is buzzing with people just learning this truth for the first time, obviously aware that a plan is in place to keep the president safe, a plan that they are not included in.
The desperation sets in. Xavier has armed his agents with lots and lots of guns to perform their duty at all costs, even if that means shooting fellow staffers. As they pile into the elevator and the doors close, there are shots heard in the hallway. Citizens and agents are being shot out on the South Lawn as people scream for help, and Xavier tries to get Cal on Marine One. When a newbie Secret Service agent who is not on the Versailles list holds Xavier at gunpoint to get a seat on the helicopter, Agent Robinson shoots the guy point-blank in the head and tells Xavier to do his fucking job. Not only can I not believe Cal Bradford wasn’t spending every single day in the bunker in his Sad Boy bathrobe with the amount of blood on his hands, but I can’t believe no one else was either. The amount of trauma is staggering!!
The vibe at the airplane hangar as flights for Colorado begin to take off isn’t any less chaotic. We get an excellent scene between Xavier and Cal in which Xavier realizes Cal knew all along that they’d never be able to get Teri out of Atlanta in time, and he rips into him for not warning people any sooner — for not warning him any sooner. They’re screaming at each other until finally Cal reminds Xavier that his two kids are on this plane and they just lost their mother. James Marsden and Brown are great throughout this entire episode, but this is the scene I keep going back to.
So now everyone is on the planes and headed to Colorado and everything is calm and cool once again. Just kidding! It’s still a nightmare and everything is terrible. Xavier is reunited with his kids but can’t bring himself to explain where their mother is. Cal is so heartbroken by, well, everything, but especially his betrayal of Xavier, and so he hands him a satellite phone to try and reach Teri. Xavier does, knowing it will be the last time he speaks to her and there are a lot of tears and “I love you”s and it is, you know, not exactly a great time, if we’re being honest.
Meanwhile, two of the other planes, one carrying most of Congress and one carrying the joint chiefs of staff, won’t make it to Colorado after the massive sound wave that precedes the tsunami takes them out. As the joint chiefs relay this news, they also inform Cal that a whole bunch of nukes have been deployed all over the globe, and one is believed to be targeting the Colorado bunker. They have no intel as to who deployed them, and their only advice is to just deploy every nuke the U.S. has in its arsenal at this point. It’s the only way to save the bunker.
Cal heads into his office to be alone with the nuclear football and the biggest decision he’ll ever have to make in his life. Samantha follows him in, reminding him that he needs to do this for them to have any chance of survival. And then he lets her in on a little secret. A colonel in the Air Force during the Cuban Missile Crisis — yep, it’s all coming together now — built what is basically a failsafe switch to execute a linked array of EMPs all over the world that will “fry every electronic circuit on earth.” It will render useless everything from microwaves to, yes, nuclear warheads. It will also “take the planet back 500 years,” but Cal knows it would give people a better shot at survival than a nuclear holocaust. Samantha argues against it — so Samantha, am I right? — because the bunker needs outside censors to keep track of the surface and this would leave them all vulnerable. Cal doesn’t care. He’s made his decision and if she doesn’t leave his office, he’ll have her shot. It’s a great scene in that (1) Cal now becomes “the man who saved the world,” and (2) it really paints that other scene before Cal’s death in which he tells Samantha he’s going to spill her secrets and she tells him he doesn’t have the balls to do it in a new light. Samantha’s already seen Cal make good on his promise to try and help the most amount of people he can at his own expense. She’s seen him stand up as a leader and make and stick to hard choices. In that confrontation before Cal’s murder, she was degrading him in a last-ditch effort to stop him, knowing full well he would go through with it, depressing bathrobe or not. She knows that because she watched him go through with entering the code for the EMP switch on that plane.
It may not take out every nuke, but it will stop a lot of them. The last thing Xavier sees on the map is a nuclear weapon reaching Atlanta before the satellite phone goes out. He assumes, as anyone would, that the missile hit its target and his wife is dead. But now he knows what Cal did. So back in Samantha’s living room, when she plays more transmissions from the surface and one is Teri Rogers-Collins looking for her husband Xavier and her kids Presley and James, he knows it’s real. But it’s not like Samantha is going to make this easy for him. In fact, she’s going to make it as brutal as possible. It’s here that she informs him that she has his daughter. She’s also learned that the DNA found at Cal’s murder does not match anyone from the bunker; whoever killed Cal came from the outside. If Xavier wants his wife and daughter, he’ll have to figure out who killed Cal and undo all the chaos he caused within the bunker. The little “maybe I am a monster,” Samantha drops as she leaves the room is chilling. Rightly so, the only reaction to the shitshow Xavier has found himself in is, in fact, a Sterling K. Brown single tear, and that’s exactly what we get.
Bunker Notes
• Since episode one, I’ve been thinking about how there’s no shot the U.S. is the only country to come up with an evacuation plan for the end of the world, and I’ve been waiting for someone to bring up other pods across the globe. My theories were all but confirmed when we got a quick glimpse of a news report about a possible bunker in the French Alps. Will the newly announced season two open up the Paradise world a bit? Please say oui.
• Okay, I’ll admit it, that “best fucking hamburgers I ever had” line did make me tear up. My defenses were down, okay? This was all very stressful!!