Paradise Season 1 Episode 7 Review: The Day

Paradise Season 1 Episode 6, “The Day,” is a borderline traumatic hour of television. In a series whose plotline has often been disjointed, we now go for almost sixty straight minutes on the dynamics of the end of the world.

Following a flashback to the Cuban missile crisis and a general defying orders to hold back an arsenal, we see the start of the apocalypse: a super volcano that melts the ice caps into an all-consuming tsunami. Most of the world is completely unprepared.

Terri is doomed the moment she can’t get a flight out of Atlanta, though Xavier won’t learn this until much later in the day. Across the world and the country, chaos unfolds. At the White House, citizen and staff alike are killed to control it.

Cal gives a speech for the (end of) ages, saying what little he can to millions about to die. As he and the other chosen are moved toward Colorado, Xavier is reunited with his kids and, through a presidential line, allowed a wrenching goodbye to his wife.

The planes carrying them take off above growing nuclear war. Advised to launch every such weapon the country has, Cal emulates the storied general from before, wiping out all the planet’s electricity instead but giving people a chance to survive.

Finally, we return to the present and Sinatra talking down Xavier with a host of bombshells. Terri is indeed alive, having been recorded speaking on the surface. Someone from the surface may have killed Cal. Oh, and his daughter’s also been kidnapped. Oof.

Even for a show as tense and gritty as this one, this episode is flat-out difficult to watch. The decisions people are forced to make, the acts they perform in desperation—all of it is brilliantly and chillingly displayed.

Of course, what’s even more disturbing are the questions that go beyond the plot. While extreme, the environmental calamities triggered here don’t seem completely outside the realm of reality in a world affected by climate change.

Could such an event be possible in our own lives? Would we be allowed to know about it ahead of time? How would we react to finding out about the end, whether we learned months or minutes before events started to unfold?

We might like to think that we’d either fight with all we had or accept the end and find peace with our loved ones. The cruelty and agony that take place here instead are a unflinching suggestion that these ideas might be very optimistic.

With all those pleasant thoughts in mind, lets give kudos to basically everyone involved in the writing, acting, and cinematography of this episode for pulling it off so well. Even though it’s all hard to watch, it’s just as hard to turn away.

Sterling K Brown has been stellar in every episode, but this may be his best showing yet, especially in that (supposedly) last phone call with his wife. The same goes for James Marsden and Cal’s beautifully human apocalypse speech.

Paradise has been renewed, so the final episode is now likely to leave us with still more existential questions to consider. Hopefully, it also solves our biggest mysteries: that of who killed Cal and what happened to everyone left behind.

 

What did you think of this episode of Paradise? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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Paradise first streams Tuesdays on Hulu.

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