Paradise writer confirms the mysteries will be answered by season 1’s finale

Paradise is chock-full of mysteries: What forced a quarter of a million people into an underground bunker? What’s happening on the surface? And which post-apocalyptic survivor just killed the president? 

But for the writing team behind the propulsive Hulu sci-fi thriller, there was one goal: actually deliver the answers to those mysteries. Though this week’s episode 6 raises more questions with only two more hours left to go, writer Gina Lucita Monreal tells Polygon that it was always the intention of creator Dan Fogelman to reveal everything going on by the end of the season 1 finale. 

“From day one,” Monreal says, “[Dan] came in and said, ‘I want to play fair with the audience. I want to give them answers to their questions and not have them wait eight seasons to get those answers.’ And I think he did that in every single episode, and that’s part of what makes the show so compelling.”

Episode 6, “You Asked for Miracles,” finds Secret Service agent Xavier Collins (Sterling K. Brown) leading a revolt against the billionaire Sinatra (Julianne Nicholson). Though devoted to the law and his service, Xavier realizes that Sinatra quietly controls the sunny day-to-day in the bunker by deploying assassins to take out her enemies and suppressing all information from the outside — and he’s out of congenial options. After cracking into Sinatra’s secret cache of weapons, he leads his operatives in a terrifying operation to seize control of the bunker. But Sinatra has one more card to play, delivered in major cliffhanger style: Xavier’s wife, who up until episode 6 we assume didn’t make it into the bunker, is still alive… somewhere.

Episodes 7 and 8 will get to the bottom of it all (with next week’s episode specifically looking back at the events that drove humanity underground). Monreal says that rapid-pace commitment to delivering answers, which she knows well from time spent in the procedural trenches on NCIS, allowed the Paradise team to really dig deeper on the show’s character work — and they were pumped to introduce Xavier’s presumed-dead wife, Terri.

Between the extremely Die Hard-esque action (intentional; it’s one of Monreal’s favorite movies), episode 6’s flashbacks introduce us to Terri, played by Enuka Okuma. Her presence has been felt from the premiere, through Xavier’s grief and memories of the past, like reading James and the Giant Peach to the couple’s then-unborn son, but “You Asked for Miracles” fortifies the relationship with an instant burst of chemistry. Monreal attributes that to the casting of Brown and Okuma, as well as using every second of screen time to say something about the Collins family unit.

“There was much talk about what that first scene should be with her,” Monreal says. They landed on a scene with Terri and Xavier in which the two are called in by their kids’ prep school principal to address their daughter Presley’s “controversial” school project on food inequity, to stuff double the character work into a single moment. “We felt like we could also say something about Presley, even though Presley wasn’t in that scene, but what she did at school, how she is like her mother […] it was really serving us on a lot of different levels.”

The scene, which also involves a white couple calling Presley’s polarizing work “BS,” tugs at themes of class and race that crop up all over Paradise in its exploration of who wound up in the bunker and why. For Monreal, finding commentary in the nooks and crannies of the show’s plot was another reason to ditch as much mystery-box convention as possible — the staff really wanted the characters to matter.

“I think it’s really about people, at its core, and how we interact with each other,” Monreal says. “How class and wealth has to do with it, how privilege has to do with it. But for Xavier as a character, I think that it’s about somebody who is a rule follower, somebody who embraces establishment, and somebody who realizes that maybe it’s not always best to follow the rules. And you have to break outside of that for the betterment of yourself and humanity at certain points.

“So although it’s not a story about race, it’s part of who these characters are, which I really appreciate as a person of color. For me, being Latina, it’s part of who I am, but it’s not all that I am, and it’s not the focal point of every story of my life. And I think that’s what Dan is doing so well in this series.”