Is Paradise Season 2 A Time Travel Story? All The Clues Explained

Heavy spoilers ahead for "Paradise" through season 2, episode 6, "Jane."

"Paradise" started with one of the best twists of 2025. It was a step up from the already quite good twist of both of Dan Fogelman's previous TV shows, "This Is Us" and "Pitch."

Indeed, from the start, "Paradise" showed itself to be more than just a thriller about an assassinated U.S. President. It's also a post-apocalyptic sci-fi show set after a super volcano triggered a giant tsunami that flooded the world.

Season 2 is facing a difficult challenge. Now that the two biggest mysteries of season 1 — who killed the President, and how the world ended — are solved, the show is lacking a big and compelling genre hook. There are no big mysteries left to solve. Or at least, that's how it appears on the surface.

But in reality, there are many hints throughout the first six episodes of season 2 that seem to indicate there are some serious sci-fi shenanigans going on in "Paradise." How do you top the reveal that the show is set after the end of the world? Well, you introduce time travel, of course!

Yes, time travel. Specifically, season 2 of "Paradise" seems to be taking some inspiration from James Cameron's "Terminator," potentially teasing some future catastrophe or enemy being so big that a resistance is trying to go back to the past to fix it or prevent it. It starts in episode 2, when Dr. Louge (Geoffrey Arend) tells Sinatra (Julianne Nicholson) that even if people survive the initial disaster, things will get worse. Specifically, the trapped greenhouse gases would raise the Earth's temperature drastically, evaporating the oceans, while the pressure eventually crushes everyone left alive.

Unless something, or someone, stops it.

We know Sinatra has some secret project in the works, siphoning power away from the bunker to keep it running. To start the project, she forcibly acquired a company from a professor of Advanced Wave Functions, Superposition, and Quantum Entanglement — all words associated with things like time travel, and even the multiverse.

Then there are the nosebleeds. In the first episode, we meet Link, played by familiar face Thomas Doherty. He gets nosebleeds twice in the first episode, specifically when discussing heading to the Colorado bunker to kill some mysterious person or thing called Alex. We also learn he was the protégé of the quantum physics professor and is said to know more about the field than anyone. That sounds like some serious Kyle Reese-in-"Terminator" stuff to me — especially after Link gets Shailene Woodley's Annie pregnant, with her child possibly serving as this show's equivalent of "Terminator" savior John Connor.

Things get weirder when Xavier (Sterling K. Brown) also gets nosebleeds and starts having visions of him and Link walking together through a hallway. Thing is, he specifically says the visions feel like a memory, but not a memory of past events. If he and Link haven't met, but they see each other in visions, then Link must be from the future.

If the "Terminator" references weren't enough, episode 6 begins with a flashback of a man back in 1997 getting strange emails and text messages warning him that "a killer will be born" and noting the exact time Jane (Nicole Brydon Bloom) is born. How could the sender possibly know this? And what level of future threat is Jane that someone from the future would go to great lengths to convince some random guy to try and stop that baby?

What is the end goal of "Paradise" dropping these time travel hints? The answer might be found in "Alex."

Throughout the season, we've heard of the mysterious "Alex," a person or thing Sinatra seems obsessed with. It's Alex that Link and his group are traveling to the bunker to kill. And when Sinatra at one point asks about Alex, all she learns is that Alex is "improving."

It seems very possible Alex is not a person, but some kind of machine meant to terraform the planet to prevent the second catastrophe Dr. Louge warned Sinatra about. This could be the "Paradise" equivalent of Skynet. The biggest evidence that supports this is that Alex is a very secret project not even the high-ranking officers of the bunker know about. Not even the President seems to know about it. Only Sinatra. If this machine is meant to literally save the people of the bunker, why keep it secret? Possibly because the nature of it is something more sinister and dangerous, so much so that she can't or won't explain it to people.

The plot of "Paradise" season 2 seems to be taking some inspiration from Gregory Benford's 1980 sci-fi novel "Timescape." That novel tells the story of a group of scientists in 1998 trying desperately to communicate with scientists of 1962 to warn of an ecological disaster that destroys oceans in the future, hoping the past scientists can prevent it. Most notably, the novel served as inspiration for John Carpenter's "Prince of Darkness."

Alex could very possibly end up being some kind of time traveling machine of some kind, one dangerous enough that Link wants to kill it. We don't know where "Paradise" is going with this, but we remain hooked.