‘Paradise’s apocalypse episode is absolutely unforgettable

In Paradise, the world ends not with a bang, but with many loosely related bangs all happening at once. A supervolcano, a megatsunami, nuclear war — the show even throws an earthquake in there for good measure.

The more is more approach is par for the course for Paradise, a series whose first episode opens with the murder of U.S. President Cal Bradford (James Marsden) and ends with the bonkers reveal that the show is set in an underground city built to withstand the apocalypse. (And that’s just the start of Paradise‘s many plot twists.)

Paradise keeps the exact nature of that apocalypse under wraps until its seventh episode, only hinting at it in flashbacks or in small drips of information. In episode 2, Xavier Collins (Sterling K. Brown) witnesses a bright flash of light while on the plane to Colorado, implying a nuclear blast. A trip outside the bunker in episode 4 suggests nuclear winter as well, with shots of snowy landscapes and a destroyed city. Yet a shot of the submerged Washington Monument in episode 5 positions climate change as the culprit. In the same episode, Cal reads about a potential volcanic disaster on his tablet, and in the very next episode, Xavier’s daughter Presley (Aliyah Mastin) uses that same tablet to learn that nukes were detonated in Atlanta. So what is the truth? Did nuclear war destroy the world, or is a climate change-based natural disaster to blame?

The answer, it turns out, is all of the above. And Paradise‘s maximalist approach to the apocalypse proves deeply fun and deeply stressful to watch.

Paradise delivers a wildly excessive apocalypse.

As revealed in Paradise‘s seventh episode, “The Day,” the end of the world kicks off with the eruption of a megavolcano underneath the Antarctic ice sheet. The force of the explosion knocks much of the ice shelf into the ocean, adding trillions of gallons of water to the already-rising seas. The eruption also triggers a gargantuan tsunami that moves north at speeds of 600 miles per hour, wiping out Melbourne, Sydney, and everything else in its path.

The reveal may sound borderline ridiculous, but Paradise prepared us for this calamity way back in episode 2, when Sam “Sinatra” Redmond (Julianne Nicholson) attended a talk by Dr. Louge (Geoffrey Arend) about the consequences of a hypothetical Antarctic volcanic eruption. “It’s going to happen,” Dr. Louge told Sinatra. And lo and behold, it does!

Still, despite this nearly one-to-one foreshadowing, nothing could have prepared me for Paradise going full 2012 in its vision of the apocalypse. Especially not when it adds a nuclear conflict with Russia to the fold, or a random Los Angeles earthquake that gets all of two seconds of screen time before vanishing from memory. Sure, why not!

Paradise does its best to highlight the interconnected nature of these events. Dr. Louge pops up on TV during the crisis to remind audiences that higher temperatures due to man-made climate change caused Antarctic ice to melt, therefore freeing up the volcanoes below and priming them for eruption — all of which is based in fact. As for the nuclear war of it all, Cal’s advisors point out that nuclear strikes are nations’ efforts to destroy competition for whatever few resources will be left post-tsunami. (Still no word on the earthquake, though.)

All the same, Paradise‘s stacked calamities are a hat on a hat, taking current, very valid worries about climate change and nuclear war and dialing them up to 100. The addition of each new disaster kept me laughing in awe that Paradise was just committing whole hog to its apocalypse. I truly haven’t been able to stop thinking about it, and on every rewatch, I’ve wondered, “Would I rather get swept up in a megatsunami or straight-up nuked?” Jury’s still out.

Paradise keeps its crazy apocalypse grounded.

Yet even with all the new apocalyptic twists and turns Paradise throws at us — including Cal being able to stop the nukes thanks to a failsafe switch from the ’60s — the show manages to keep “The Day” somewhat grounded by focusing on the very human drama of people struggling to navigate the end of the world.

Xavier is the focus here, as he tries to get his family to safety. His children are at school with Cal’s son, so it’s easy to make sure they stay together and make it to the planes out of DC in time. But his wife, Dr. Teri-Roger Collins (Enuka Okuma), is stranded in Atlanta, and disrupted cell service makes it nearly impossible to reach her and guide her to possible evacuation. Each missed phone call or failed text is another nail in her proverbial coffin (even if we do find out she survives).

Of course, Xavier and his family are lucky to be in a position where they know they have a way out. Paradise gives us glimpses of the grim reality everyone else faces, like White House staffer Marsha (Amy Pietz) realizing that she and her son won’t get any help from Xavier or Cal. It’s yet another reminder of the massive privilege the (mostly billionaire) residents of Paradise have, while almost the entire rest of the world is left to suffer in the dark. Not familiar at all, right?

That’s all fittingly somber subject matter, and it makes “The Day” an emotional rollercoaster from start to finish. From disbelief at the volcano-tsunami-nuclear-war-earthquake combo to growing horror at the waves of death across the globe, “The Day” and the apocalypse at its heart are absolutely unforgettable.

Paradise is now streaming on Hulu, with the Season 1 finale airing March 4.