Paradise Season 1 Ending Explained: How Does the Finale Set Up Season 2?

This article contains spoilers for the Paradise Season 1 finale.

After eight episodes of twists, turns, and a central post-apocalyptic murder mystery on Hulu’s Paradise, we finally know who killed Donut Lord. Sorry, we mean President Cal Bradford (James Marsden), who was found dead in the series premiere. And thanks to the Season 1 finale, “The Man Who Kept The Secrets,” we know not only who killed him and why, but also a whole lot more about where things are going to go in Season 2.

For those who have to think twice, and are wondering why this wasn’t just another day in Paradise, here’s what went down. Broad strokes, Paradise takes place in a world that has seemingly been destroyed by a climate apocalypse, leaving the world’s population dead except those in the town of Paradise, a manufactured community underneath a Colorado mountain. It’s controlled and maintained by billionaires who knew the climate collapse was coming, but did nothing to stop it other than create a safe bunker for themselves to live in.

Paradise Season 1 Ending Explained: Who Killed the President?

So that brings us to the finale. In flashback, we meet the guy in charge of the construction team (played by Ian Merrigan) who helped build Paradise, thus far only glimpsed in the background of scenes. He discovered that there was a toxic substance in the ground, brought it to his bosses, and was dismissed from his position. He then spent years trying to warn everyone that catastrophe was coming, ultimately deciding to assassinate President Bradford by posing as a reporter. We’ve seen this scene before, from Secret Service Agent Xavier Collins’s (Sterling K. Brown) perspective, as he was shot while protecting Cal.

Anyway, dude gets thrown in prison – in Colorado – and escapes when the world starts to be destroyed by an enormous tsunami. Taking one of the guards’ uniforms, he kills two people who are supposed to be going into the bunker and steals the identity of one of them: Trent the Librarian. He does this by shaving a bald spot on his head, cutting his beard, and wearing Trent’s surprisingly well-fitting clothes. He also stops long enough to give the identity of Trent’s wife, Maggie (Michelle Meredith) to a random lady crying in a gas station parking lot. Side note: this is while a 300-foot-tall tsunami is ravaging the Earth. But it’s cool, they have time. No rush!

To jump through the rest, “Trent” gets comfy in his librarian life until years later Cal comes to the library, and Trent remembers “Oh yeah, I wanted to kill this guy.” He dresses in an old construction uniform, takes a piece of construction equipment, and conks Cal on the head with it on the balcony. He then conks him on the head again inside his bedroom, killing him.

As he’s telling Xavier all of this, who he has tied up in the library, Nicole Robinson (Khrys Marshall) and Dr. Gabriela Torabi (Sarah Shahi) discover that Maggie isn’t who she says she is because she ate cashew cheese on her cheese fries, but the real Maggie was allergic to nuts.

To paraphrase the late, great Benoit Blanc: this makes no damn sense! Compels us, though.

Look, showrunner Dan Fogelman knows how to tell a yarn, but this is certainly one that stretches the limits of credulity. Could you have identified that Ian Merrigan was playing a blurry construction worker, an assassin, and Trent the Librarian in an absolutely ludicrous disguise? Sure, if you’re Ian Merrigan’s mother. Or a fan of character actors. But could you figure out literally any other part of this mystery without the copious flashbacks in this very episode? Absolutely not. And there’s zero way you could have figured out the Maggie thing – which, for the record, seems to play no purpose in the episode other than giving Robinson and Torabi a way to figure out what happened separately from Xavier.

There’s a gesture toward the overall thesis statement of the show here, which is plainly stated in a speech “Trent” gives moments before he throws himself to his death through the sky-imitating dome over the town of Paradise. He talks about how even here at the end of the world billionaires control everything… Nothing has changed, and his killing of Cal was a frustration that bubbled to the surface and could not be ignored. We the viewers know it’s tragic because Cal was trying to do the right thing in the end and make real change. But as we see in the final moments of the episode it’s Cal’s son Jeremy Bradford (Charlie Evans) who is telling the truth to the people, and rallying the youth. So something is coming there.

The problem is that this very, very, very, very timely idea of billionaires driving regular people to murder gets lost in a lot of “Wait, who is that?” and “Did he shave his bald spot multiple times a day to keep the stubble hidden?” After eight episodes we’re supposed to care about a character we’ve technically never met before and watch him go through a series of increasingly coincidental circumstances (getting registered as a boom operator for press on the White House lawn, getting sentenced to prison in Colorado near the bunker, getting into the bunker, forgetting to kill the President, the list goes on).

The worst part of it, though, is that it makes Xavier’s whole investigation entirely unnecessary because the reason he’s in Trent’s library at all has nothing to do with the murder mystery.

How Does The Paradise Season Finale Set Up Season 2?

In terms of things the audience could probably figure out, we have spent a lot of time this season in the library. We know Cal made a mix tape for his son there, and we also know that he left a cigarette with numbers on it next to his dead body, which Xavier found but couldn’t decipher what it was code for. It was abundantly obvious that the number was a Dewey Decimal number, something Xavier finally figured out only when he was already in the library looking at books. The camera lingers on the numbers, just in case you haven’t been in the library in a while, too. (Support your local libraries, folks! They’re great!) Anyway, it’s there Xavier finds all the massive secrets Cal knew, including how to escape the bunker and where there are survivors in the outside world.

Trent doesn’t know anything about that. And his murder plot also has nothing to do with it – other than him taking the notebook it’s written on from Xavier when he ties him up, and then giving it back to Xavier before he jumps to his death. Instead, this sets up Xavier being able to find the one plane still stocked with fuel and electricity, as well as the codes to open the door to the bunker, so he can leave and go find his still-alive wife. In terms of Xavier’s plot in Season 2, it’s almost definitely exploring what’s left of the outside world after the climate disaster, and making his way to Atlanta to rescue his wife and bring her home. Basically The Last Of Us, but without the fun zombies.

How about the other big plot of the season, which was the billionaire codenamed Sinatra (Julianne Nicholson) who seemed to be pulling the strings behind the scenes? How was she tied to the murder? Again: she was not. At all. In fact, after denying her psychopath lackey Jane (Nicole Brydon Bloom) possession of the President’s Wii, Jane tells Sinatra that she killed Xavier’s daughter (Aliyah Mastin). And then Sinatra tells Xavier, and apologizes, to which he kills her two guards and is about to kill Sinatra… Until Jane shoots Sinatra in the chest, leaving her in a coma. Also if you were wondering, Jane gets the Wii. Reminder: none of this has to do with the murder mystery the show was about.

Because Sinatra is on life-support, that leaves a power vacuum in Paradise, with befuddled former Vice President Henry Baines (Matt Malloy) finally stepping up and getting control of the billionaire ruling council. So going into Season 2, we’ll likely see Sinatra waking from the coma in a world where she doesn’t pull all the strings, and Bumblin’ Baines in charge, whatever that means. Jane also has control over her… As Jane explains, she sort of saved her life by only wounding her, instead of letting Xavier kill her. So going from being in charge of everything to having a psychopath with leverage over her is a big change for the billionaire.

As for other plotlines? The corollary to Cal’s Jeremy stepping up as a leader in the community is that we see a statue commemorating fallen explorers now has “murdered” spray-painted on it. So everyone in Paradise knows that there’s life outside the walls of the city. Likely, everything Sinatra predicted earlier in the season will come true: that either bringing people in from the outside or letting people inside know there are people alive will destabilize the precarious nature of the reality she’s created. Whether that is good or bad is TBD, but it’s likely the divide between the billionaires at the top and the workers at the bottom will grow wider, all while Cal is outside searching for other survivors.

(If you want to reference how that will all likely work, please see Season 2 of Silo for the exact same plot, with some slight variations.)

In any case, there are plenty more questions going into Season 2. Will there be another murder mystery at the heart? Will Xavier be gone all season long? And most importantly: can anyone beat Jane at Wii Sports? We’ll see you back in the bunker when Season 2 premieres, hopefully sooner rather than later. And maybe next time they won’t have a mystery that hinges on coincidence and cashew cheese.