Paradise‘s penultimate freshman episode, “The Day”, is one of the best hours of television so far in 2025 – and that’s exactly what makes it such a frustrating series.
Six weeks ago, I alluded to Paradise‘s seventh episode in my review of the first season (or at least, the first seven episodes available to critics at the time). But “The Day” is such a different episode of television, something completely non-representative of what the other six laborious hours of the show’s first season has been, save for the few pockets where the show briefly contended with much weightier ideas of humanity and morality. And now, with “The Day” upon us, it only magnifies how frustratingly good this hour of television is – and how I fear it may be lightning in a bottle this show will never capture again.
A quick recap for those who tuned out; the first six episodes of Paradise involve a post-apocalyptic underground bunker in Colorado, where the president (James Marsden) is murdered and his Secret Service Agent/Sad Dad Guy Xavier Collins starts to unravel the conspiracy around it. There’s a billionaire bunker overlord (Julianne Nicholson), another agent who was banging the president (Krys Marshall), dead mercenary, dementia-riddled oil barons; Paradise opened its story with a wide swath of characters, and spent its first six hours bouncing back and forth between the Before Times and the Underground Bunker times, where Collins begins building a resistance force against the mysterious, presumably evil billionaire.
Those six hours were not compelling television, relying too heavily on creator Dan Fogelman’s signature narrative tricks to obfuscate the real heart of the story – which, turns out, is the 57-minute anxiety-riddled hour that is “The Day”, the first season’s penultimate episode. And with an entire episode, “Agent Billy Pace”, spent building up a character to immediately murder them for utterly pointless reasons, Paradise has struggled to, quite frankly, get to the fucking point.
Until “The Day” arrives; set in real-time as the President and the American government realize the megatsunami they were preparing for (with their secret little billionaire-driven bunker city project) is arriving much earlier than expected, Paradise smartly shifts its focus entirely onto Xavier Collins and puts us inside the White House as the world ends. As a news broadcast plays in the background, detailing the events happening around the world (complete with blithering panel of talking heads, which grows increasingly smaller as the co-hosts abandon the discussion), Paradise shifts away from some of its less satisfying, mindless science fiction elements and fully embraces its potential as a challenging, deeply unnerving story of survival and sacrifice that its central characters face.
If only it had been the second episode of the series, rather than the seventh; Paradise plays coy for too long with the heart of its story in its first six hours, which threatened to deaden the impact of “The Day” (especially since it ignores entire elements of the first six episodes, including some abysmal teen plotlines and power struggles between Collins and ‘Sinatra’). Had Paradise flashed immediately back from the moment of the president’s death to the events of “The Day”, it would’ve set the season up with such compelling force, even the most unsure audiences would be willing to sit through six hours of silly subterfuge, meandering plot lines, and the indulgent, whiny remakes of hit songs playing over the closing scene of each episode (except this one; I wonder why).
“The Day” is compelling television, expertly directed by Glenn Ficarra & John Requa with an incredibly bold script credited to John Hoberg; it is the moment where the characters in power of Paradise have to put their cards on the table, turning the White House into this claustrophobic space of anxious faces, deeply frightening silences, and the literal crescendo of images on-screen as the last remaining news broadcast in America detailed the horrific, 300+ foot tall waves consuming the southern hemisphere.
With “The Day”, Paradise finally grounds both its bigger narrative conceits with its more focused attempts at character; anchored by Collins’ journey to find his children and the sad story of Marsha, one of many staffers abandoned by the government in their attempts to save themselves and those they considered “important”. It also leads to the episode’s best conversations, where Marsden’s Cal Bradford has to contend with his lack of preparedness, his position as the leader of his country – and, most interestingly, a human being trying to hold onto any faint glimmer of hope as the entire world is consumed by darkness (long story short, there’s an EMP in the nuclear football he triggers to disable the nuclear armaments of every nation in the world, who’d begun launching nukes at each other in a pre-emptive power grab for whatever would be left post-tsunami… which is also oddly framed as a blue pill/red pill reference, but let’s just shelf that part for the sake of brevity).
As “The Day” ratchets up the pressure on its characters and the audience, it becomes a disaster film of epic proportions, one that operates mostly as a bottle episode as it follows Xavier through the White House as the cascade of chaos slowly consumes everyone inside it, only finally letting him outside and towards the events of the first six episodes in the very final minutes of the hour-long episode.
Expertly paced and incredibly effective (except for that one scene where Bradford solemnly addresses a janitor who is so clueless to what’s going on, it almost feels a little racist), “The Day” is Paradise capturing lightning in a bottle for an hour; in a way I’m thoroughly unconvinced it can capture again, when it returns to the present and the more menial conflicts and conspiracies begin to interweave themselves again. After all, the six hours preceding “The Day” are the real foundation of Paradise, this episode merely a delayed reveal of so many catalyzing events for the series. But with that now in its rearview, where does all that narrative momentum go when it snaps back to the present?
Paradise is already teasing another big story for season two (the hunt for Xavier’s wife, who is revealed to be possibly alive at the end of the episode), which certainly will take it in a number of different, Fallout-meets-Waterworld-y type directions. But where in its winding spider web of loyalties, politics, and dystopian construction is Paradise supposed to recapture the grounded horror of “The Day”, which posits Paradise as a completely different series? Though I don’t love Fogelman’s time-hopping antics, I think that brand of storytelling would do this series justice if it had used this story as a catalyst, rather than considering it the final piece of what amounts to a completely underwhelming attempt at a dystopian fiction puzzle, the first brick of which it most assuredly considers the part of a larger, more sprawling story to discover in season two.
“The Day” is a fascinating episode of television; not only for how expertly crafted and focused it is, but in how it presents an underwhelming series with an incredibly potent identity crisis. If Paradise doubles down on using its unsettling, occasionally nature-driven morality tests of human self-preservation as the backbone for its story of conflicted characters, it could easily become one of the most exciting, sweat-inducing series television’s seen in years.
However, how it is positioned as a revelatory episode rather than a foundational one is something that continues to stick in my brain, a sign that Paradise‘s priorities may not line up with the incredibly impressive strengths on display in this episode. It’s certainly something I have more thoughts on after seeing the season finale, “The Man Who Kept the Secrets”( which I’ll discuss in a full review next week, of course) – for now, however, “The Day” is one of the most harrowing, confounding white-knuckling episodes of television in recent memory, a series highlight that curiously raises more questions about the show’s viability than it answers.