The Question on 'Paradise' Is Not WHO Is Alex, but WHAT Is Alex?

Paradise returned with the first three episodes of its second season this week, and while the first two episodes were straightforward enough that a recap of season one was hardly necessary, episode three quickly gets a little prickly with its mystery, particularly as it concerns Alex, who is less of a who and more of a what.

But let’s back up. The first episode centers largely on Annie (the newly introduced Shailene Woodley character), an aspiring med student who has a nervous breakdown and ultimately returns to her happy place: Graceland. Yes, the home of Elvis, where she worked as a tour guide when the end of the world arrived. She manages to survive nearly two years in the basement of Graceland before encountering a group of travelers that includes a character named Link (Thomas Doherty) among them.

There are two main things to take away from the opening episode: 1) we learn what happens to Earth in the first two years of the apocalypse. Basically, an ash cloud covers the planet, causing temperatures to rapidly cool. About two-thirds of the population dies, according to the travelers. And 2) Annie hooks up with Link before he leaves for the Colorado bunker, where he says he wants to “kill Alex.” Also, not for nothing, a pregnant Annie stays behind.

The second episode picks up where last season left off, with Xavier (Sterling K. Brown) catching a flight out of Colorado to go in search of his wife. We’re also treated to a very sweet meet-cute from their past, showing the two falling in love in a shared hospital room. In the present, after dealing with a potentially Deliverance-type situation in Arkansas, Xavier passes out and is picked up and nursed back to health across the border at Graceland. Once Xavier is healthy again, Annie demands that he take her to the Colorado bunker, presumably so that she can reconcile with Link (with whom she likely fell in love).

All of that is fairly straightforward. And then we hit episode three, which returns us to the bunker, where Samantha/Sinatra awakens from a month-long coma and the former VP, Baines, has taken command in the wake of Cal Bradford’s death. Sinatra is not a fan. It turns out that she has also been siphoning off energy from the bunker to work on a side project. That side project feels like the centerpiece of the season.

We learn, for instance, that in the old world, Sinatra paid Billy Pace (Jon Beavers) to kill a man named Henry so that she could take over his tech, which appears to be some sort of quantum/time-manipulation system. That tech is named Alex, after Henry’s wife, who had Huntington’s disease. Henry euthanizes Alex minutes before Billy kills him. Henry, however, makes Billy promise not to kill his protégé, who turns out to be … Link. The same man who hooked up with Annie and who now wants to kill “Alex.”

All of this matters because, pre-apocalypse, Sinatra learned from Dr. Louge about the Venus Syndrome. After Earth cools for a couple of years, there will be a period of stability before the planet rapidly warms and basically kills everyone in an apparently painful manner involving crushing atmospheric pressure. This is why Sinatra is siphoning off energy: She’s trying to save humanity from the second wave of the apocalypse. So, she’s evil. But also, a humanitarian?

To that end, Sinatra has Jane kill Baines (using the same code word she used with Billy, “breath mint”), and Jane ultimately frames Robinson (Krys Marshall) for Baines’ murder. Jane kills two birds with one stone: She neutralizes the threat Baines posed to the Alex technology and removes Robinson, who had begun to correctly suspect that Jane was up to no good.

Meanwhile, Cal Bradford’s son, Jeremy, continues Xavier’s work, essentially starting a movement warning that the bunker is being controlled by Big Brother-type forces. At the end of the episode, he gets himself arrested and thrown in jail so that he can conspire with the architect of the bunker to blow the doors off the place, both figuratively and literally, I assume. And those are the first three episodes in a nutshell.

tl;dr: Alex is the name of the technology that Sinatra plans to use to deal with the Venus Syndrome.