The final episode of Paradise season 1 has major mysteries left to resolve — a presidential assassin is still out there, somewhere — but after episode 7, at least one big question has been answered: What disaster drove 250,000 Americans into an enormous underground bunker?
The answer always had to be devastating, and yet, “The Day” still shook me to my core. Written by John Hoberg and directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (who also directed the pilot for Paradise), “The Day” brings multiple nightmares to life, bottles up catastrophe into suffocating quarters, and sheds much of the pulpy quality of the preceding six episodes; it’s certainly one of the most troubling hours of TV I’ve ever witnessed. According to Hoberg, Ficarra, and Requa… yeah, that was the hope.
[Ed. note: This story contains spoilers for Paradise episode 7, “The Day.]
“The Day” picks up where episode 6’s cliffhanger left off, with Xavier (Sterling K. Brown) holding diabolical billionaire Sinatra (Julianne Nicholson) at gunpoint. But Sinatra has the upper hand: She swears that Xavier’s wife, presumed dead after whatever terrible thing happened on the surface, is alive. Expeditions to the surface found Earth livable, and using shortwave transmitters, Sinatra has confirmed life around the country, including in Atlanta, which Xavier believes to have been nuked. “You don’t know everything that happened,” Sinatra tells Xavier.
Hard to blame Xavier for thinking he did. “The Day” flashes back to the fateful morning when a super volcano exploded from under the Antarctic ice sheet, expelling millions of tons of ash into the atmosphere and melting large chunks of the ice shelf into the ocean. The influx of millions of gallons of water created a 300-foot-high tsunami that immediately obliterated Australia, reached Florida in two hours, and wiped out D.C. in five.
Writer John Hoberg, who came on board early to develop the series after creator Dan Fogelman wrote the pilot, says the team did tons of research before landing on the specific incident that lit the fuse for Paradise. The Antarctic caldera ultimately hit a sweet spot: It was environmental, but debatably climate-related. The seismic activity was predictable, allowing Sinatra and a fleet of engineers to construct their bunker in time for an incident, but not so calculable (like a meteor) that the event couldn’t catch even the president’s in-house “nerds” off guard. And the gradual nature of the tsunami opened up the possibilities of protracted, severe reactions.
“The big thing that we kept finding out is that disasters are often this cascading effect — how humans react to it is the real disaster,” Hoberg says. “In this case, we wanted something that was natural, but that ultimately it’s — human beings and governments trying to secure resources for the future would lead to war, and that’s just going to make it worse as the world is kind of in this damaged state.”
As we see in “The Day,” the volcanic eruption immediately saw power-hungry nations launching nukes in a bid to assert dominance. As the top American officials scrambled to fly to “Versailles,” the underground bunker, President Bradford (James Marsden) was faced with the decision to launch the U.S. arsenal in response, while Xavier stewed like every other American who never knew what was coming. But unlike most people, both men had the luxury of being on board Air Force One.
Hoberg cites Tony Scott’s 1995 film Crimson Tide as a source of inspiration for “The Day.” The submarine thriller finds Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman as naval officers at odds over whether to proceed with a nuclear strike, in a conflict closely mirroring the Cuban Missile Crisis, which Hoberg invokes in the cold open of “The Day.” That ambition for maximum tension led Hoberg and Fogelman to land on their central conceit: While the world outside might be experiencing the makings of a Roland Emmerich-level disaster movie, “The Day” would take place almost entirely in the closest thing Paradise had to a nuclear submarine: the White House.
“We knew we wanted something real-time, so we could have the actual experience of what all these people went through and what their trauma was,” Hoberg says. “And we made a real effort to never leave from being inside. You want to be inside the game the whole time.”
Image: Disney
Directors John Requa and Glenn Ficarra are best known for character-focused comedies like Crazy Stupid Love and Focus, but the script for “The Day” demanded a swerve in tone. “We both talked to each other and were like: ‘Paul Greengrass,’” Requa recalls. “‘We have to Paul Greengrass the shit out of this thing.’”
Summoning the spirit of The Bourne Supremacy and United 93 meant bucking conventional shooting styles of a series like Paradise. Requa and Ficarra wound up staging the action in the White House like a play, shooting 10-page chunks or longer to create spontaneity and immediacy. And to capture more of the commotion, Ficarra notes that they even changed up the aspect ratio of the series, expanding from a slim ultrawide to a boxier 16:9 frame.
“You don’t have to direct your actors when the set is filled with tension,” Requa says. “You’re running around with the camera, you’re picking up actors here, you’re picking them up there, and you’re running over with the camera to get a little piece of this.”
Since much of Earth’s destruction plays out over TV broadcasts, even the episode’s faux-news clips were filmed in advance and played live in the room in order for the cast to react. Requa points to memories of watching the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center play out on TV, and it was a feeling he wanted to conjure in the episode. “We couldn’t get any information or even the truth of what’s happening. Even the president of the United States doesn’t know what’s going on. There are conflicting ideas [about what’s going on]. It’s in the script and we wanted to visualize that.”
Hoberg says all the calculations, in the script and from Requa and Ficarra, were all in service of wondering how an event like this might really go down — when even politics and science fall away to expose the raw nerve of human reaction. But at the end of the day, Paradise still has a political statement to make: Not everyone is going to Versailles. As admirable as it is to see Marsden’s President Cal Bradford defy his staff and take to the airwaves to get real with the U.S. population, many of his longtime staff, hoping to hitch a ride to safety, are shot in the hallways of the White House as he’s whisked off to Sinatra’s bunker.
“It’s so complicated,” Hoberg says of the episode’s implicit political nature. “At the core of this whole thing is who’s going to go, who is special enough to be chosen. When you’re seeing those who are not special enough and then those who are special enough, it’s hard to say everybody’s equal. That’s part of what we are as a country, but it’s like… no. There’s this group of billionaires that are funding something, they’re buying their way in, and we’ve got the president and the people surrounding him, they’re chosen, they’re special.”
Paradise is streaming now on Hulu, with the finale set for March 4.
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