Everyone kept telling Cal that doing the right thing isn’t always the right thing to do. But Cal was not a politician at heart. He was an English major who knew that it isn’t death that breaks down the strongest of men, but the burden of their own actions. He didn’t listen to those high-ranking officials and decided to reveal the truth to the public, because he wanted to give them a chance to say goodbye to their loved ones. He wanted them to know that a massive disaster was coming for each and every one of them. And I can’t help but feel it was this truth that got Cal killed in the end. One could only wonder how things could have changed if Cal had acted differently. In such a case, no one would have blamed Cal for the catastrophe, as it would have appeared that he was as clueless as everyone else. Furthermore, what if Cal had chosen the red codes instead of the blue ones? No one on the surface would have survived the nuclear holocaust to sneak into Cal’s paradise and murder him. But you see, Cal wouldn’t have been able to face himself in the mirror if he hadn’t chosen to be honest. He only survived these 3 years because he always believed he did the right thing.
Spoiler Alert
An Outsider Killed Cal
In Paradise episode 7’s ending, Sinatra revealed that the DNA the evidence team picked up from Cal’s room didn’t belong to anyone in Paradise, implying that it was likely someone from the outside who’d murdered the president. In the previous episode, Presley Collins told Jeremy that she’d seen a person walking out of the president’s bungalow on the night of Cal’s murder. This mystery person was wearing a jacket with a flower symbol printed on the back. In the second episode, we saw the workers building the Colorado bunker wearing similar clothing, suggesting that Cal’s murderer could once have been a part of the project but wasn’t given entrance to Paradise, which likely drove him to swear vengeance on the man who left them and their families behind. Or maybe this person found out about the underground city through one of the workers and decided to exact his revenge on Cal for leaving them to their fate. Or maybe this outsider picked one of those uniforms up on his way into Paradise to avoid suspicion.
On the day of the disaster, some people heard the rumors about a billionaire’s safe haven in Colorado, which was the reason why all those who survived the tsunami were headed towards the shelter, hoping to get a chance to secure their future. But Sinatra wouldn’t let them take refuge in her paradise no matter what, and that’s what fanned the flames of the ongoing resentment towards the privileged individuals. Most people condemned Cal for siding with the rich and saving only the affluent instead of the citizens he had sworn to protect. In short, the reason for Cal’s murder seems pretty clear now; only the identity of his killer remains to be known.
Sinatra knows that this mysterious person is a threat to her legacy and to all those people living inside the bunker, which is why it’s quite important for her to catch the person before it is too late. She uses her leverage with Agent Xavier Collins to force him to find the killer if he wants to find his wife and see his daughter again. Well, Collins isn’t sure if Teri is alive or not, but he is indeed going to bend the knee for the safety of his child, and therefore in the finale we can expect to see Collins racing against time to catch the culprit responsible for Cal’s death.
Sinatra’s Nightmare Manifests Into Reality
In the second episode, when Sinatra attended Dr. Louge’s panel and heard him talk about the climate crisis, she imagined a large tsunami wave hitting her and her only surviving kid. It seemed that, years later, Sinatra’s dream finally manifested into a reality when a mega caldera or a super volcano erupted in Antarctica, instantly melting trillions of gallons of ice and triggering a tsunami that inundated everything less than 300 feet above sea level. This is exactly what Dr. Louge had predicted during the International Financial Summit, soon after which Sinatra started working on building a bunker in the Colorado mountains, a geographical location above the warning limit.
Cal’s tablet further established that there were around 91 volcanoes beneath the ice sheet in Antarctica, and the eruption of a super volcano would be as devastating as an asteroid strike. The thing is, all the scientists had expected a baby volcano to erupt first, which would have given them enough time to evacuate the citizens to a safer location, or at least handle the situation more strategically, but it seemed like nature was done giving warnings to the humans that they only ever ignored, and therefore sent an ultimatum from which they couldn’t run anymore. The eruption of the mega caldera escalated the situation, leading to a global crisis where nations started nuking each other to get hold of the land and resources that would help them survive the collapse of human civilization.
Cal Chooses Not To Be A Monster
The opening scene of Paradise episode 7 takes us back to the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, when the two superpowers of the world, the USSR and America, came closest to initiating a nuclear exchange due to a number of political conflicts. Colonel Jeffries gathered intelligence that the Soviets had sent a submarine equipped with nukes which had been issued an order to launch all missiles towards the United States of America, but the captain made the decision not to and turned around. Jeffries believed that the world would never be safe so long as nations had nuclear weapons in their arsenal, which was why he developed a switch to turn off every piece of tech in the world for good. A linked array of global EMPs would fry every electronic circuit on Earth, including every nuke, but no one was aware of the existence of such a powerful weapon except the President of the United States of America.
In Paradise episode 7’s ending, General Curtleigh told Cal that hostile nations, likely Russia, had launched nuclear devices targeting multiple American cities, including Denver, Colorado, where they had created their underground city to protect themselves from such an extinction-level event. General Curtleigh and the Joint Commission advised Cal to fire the entire American arsenal at all nuclear powers in the world before they triggered their nuclear weapons.
The eruption of the super volcano had led the world to a nuclear war, and the only way out of it was to level the playing field. Kill everyone on the surface so no one would survive to trigger any kind of nuclear device ever again. However, Cal had one more trick up his sleeve through which he could maintain the illusion of the safe world, much like the blue pill from The Matrix, even though it itself came with a cost. The blue code, likely developed by Colonel Jeffries, disabled all electronic devices in the world, even the nukes, before they could hit American cities or go off elsewhere. It gave humanity a chance to stand against nature’s wrath. Unfortunately, the blue code also shorted the electronic sensors Sinatra had placed outside the bunker to protect the underground city. These devices would have signaled when the world outside was safe for human resettlement, but with every electronic device destroyed, Sinatra and the others lived in constant fear of the survivors of the outside world, which explains their paranoia and lack of empathy for the non-residents of the Paradise. She didn’t want anyone to find or locate the underground city, as it would have jeopardized everything she had initially planned. There wasn’t enough room or resources for other survivors, and their arrival would have only created a whole new set of problems. The thing is, Sinatra, Kane, and the privileged lot had always been worried about their own flock. They never thought about the rest of the world, which evidently makes Cal a better person than the rest of them. Yes, Cal wasn’t perfect either, but he did everything in his power to give people a chance to survive against all odds, and that’s something he was proud of till the very end.
By the way, is it just me or does anyone else find it quite absurd that all the electronics in the world went down, yet Paradise’s whole cyber system was still functional? And that includes those electronic wristbands and the shelter’s artificial sky system. How was that still functional?
Teri Is Alive
In episode 7’s ending, Collins believed that the satellite phone disconnected because a nuclear missile hit Atlanta, but it was Cal’s EMP that cut off the call between Collins and his wife, Teri. For three years, Collins believed that Teri had died in a nuclear attack, but the truth was that the nuke never hit the ground, and Teri was very much alive. However, I am not quite sure if she’s still in Atlanta, as the capital of Georgia would have likely been hit by the natural catastrophe. Maybe in the end she boarded a government plane from Dobbins Air Reserve Base and reached an elevated location from where she went on looking for her husband and her kids. During the last conversation, Collins had told Teri that they were going somewhere in Colorado, and maybe she had been trying to make it there amidst the nuclear winter. Whatever the case might be, Sinatra wouldn’t let the family reunite with her until Agent Collins helped her find Cal’s murderer. So, with so many revelations, we are back to square one, trying to find the killer. And yes, it goes without saying: no… Teri didn’t kill the president.
