Wait, is Paradise Season 2 doing time travel?

Something strange is afoot in Paradise Season 2.

Everyone’s getting nosebleeds. Xavier Collins (Sterling K. Brown) keeps seeing visions of a man he’s never met. And Samantha “Sinatra” Redmond (Julianne Nicholson) is working on a project that’s somehow even more secret and important than the apocalypse bunker. I don’t know about you, but I smell a twist coming, and it could be one of two things: time travel or multiversal shenanigans. Maybe it’s even some combination of the two. After all, Paradise ended its very first episode with the earth-shattering reveal that it was taking place in an underground city. If you want to follow that up, you’ve got to go big or go home — and both time travel or the multiverse would count as going big.

Here are all the clues from Paradise Season 2’s three-episode premiere that point to time travel.

The one thing Sinatra doesn’t have is time.

Julianne Nicholson and Sarah Shahi in “Paradise.”
Credit: Disney / Ser Baffo

In a flashback in episode 3, Sinatra has a disheartening talk with Dr. Louge (Geoffrey Arend), who is convinced a supervolcano-megatsunami combo will destroy the world. (And wouldn’t you know it, he winds up being right!)

Dr. Louge tells Sinatra that even if people did somehow manage to survive the initial disaster and rapid cooling that would follow, the trapped greenhouse gases would soon heat Earth back up to an unlivable temperature. Anyone still around would die due to the heat or crushing pressure. Basically, Sinatra’s bunker would only buy people a few more years.

“There’s only one thing that can fix this, and it’s the one thing even you can’t buy,” Dr. Louge tells Sinatra.

“And what is that?” she replies.

“Time.”

Dr. Louge may intend that statement to be a hard truth, but Sinatra likely takes it as a challenge. Have we ever known Sinatra to back down from a challenge? Absolutely not. This is the woman who built a whole underground city to weather the apocalypse. If someone tells her she doesn’t have time, she is going to find a way to make more time. And how do you make more time? Perhaps with the help of a time machine. Speaking of…

Sinatra has a secret project.

Episode 3 reveals that in addition to building the bunker, Sinatra has been working on another project this whole time, one that’s so big she needs to siphon power from the bunker to keep it running. Paradise has yet to reveal what the project is, but based on how anxious Sinatra is about it, it seems like she’s banking on this project to solve her pesky time problem. Could she actually be building a time machine? Seems like it, but I’m not ruling out multiversal shenanigans quite yet.

Let’s talk about “Advanced Wave Functions, Superposition, and Quantum Entanglement.”

In order to kickstart her project, Sinatra needs to buy the company of a brilliant professor (Patrick Fischler). We don’t learn his name or what his company does, but we do learn the name of the class he teaches for grad students: Advanced Wave Functions, Superposition, and Quantum Entanglement.

Now, I’m no quantum physicist. I’m not even a regular physicist. But I have seen too many Marvel movies, so even just looking at those words makes me think of the multiverse. That thought only persists when you dig into the actual definitions of the terms.

In quantum mechanics, superposition means that systems can exist in multiple states at once — at least, until we observe them. The Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment is the classic example of this. Let’s say you put a cat in a box along with a Geiger counter, a minuscule amount of radioactive substance, and a mechanism that will shatter a vial of poison should the radioactive atoms decay. If you leave this box alone and have no knowledge of whether the atoms have decayed or not, then the cat is theoretically both alive and fatally poisoned until you open the box.

Elsewhere, according to NASA, quantum entanglement is “the idea that particles of the same origin, which were once connected, always stay connected… If something happens to one particle, it affects all the others with which it’s entangled.”

That’s all heady stuff, but in the world of Paradise, perhaps it means that the professor was trying to find a solution to our dying planet through quantum physics. Is there a state in which Earth is simultaneously destroyed and not, and if so, how do we make the “not” option a reality? Or could he be trying to find another version of Earth that’s entangled with ours?

These theories are more multiverse-focused than time travel-focused, but one element of the professor’s involvement brings me all the way back to the time travel element. Right before Billy Pace (Jon Beavers) assassinates him, the professor says, “Today, I am choosing to believe that it all worked. That you are supposed to be here.”

Sir, what is “it”? What are you working on that might have worked and led Billy to you on purpose? Is it some experiment that will only occur in the future and reverberate through the past? My head hurts.

What’s going on with Paradise‘s nosebleeds?

Thomas Doherty in “Paradise.”
Credit: Disney / Ser Baffo

You know who else’s heads hurt? Everyone who’s getting nosebleeds and disorienting headaches, that’s who. Link (Thomas Doherty) gets two nosebleeds in the first episode: both times when he and Geiger (Michael McGrady) are discussing heading to the Colorado bunker and killing Alex (which is its whole own thing). We also learn that Link was the professor’s protégé, so if anyone is able to understand whatever quantum shenanigans are going on here, it would be him.

In episode 2, Xavier gets a nosebleed while flying his plane through an unusual storm that makes him crash. He gets one again while experiencing a vision of him and Link walking together through a white hallway. In episode 3, Billy also gets a nosebleed after meeting Link and sparing his life. Somehow, the professor anticipated this was coming and handed Billy a tissue before he died. Did he know the meeting was coming because the meeting was pre-ordained and he’d witnessed it through time travel? Whatever the answer, something about Link and his relationship to the bunker is causing nosebleeds left and right, and somehow it will impact the fate of the world.

(Again, how do we really know this? Has someone traveled to the apocalyptic future and learned all the events that led to it?)

How did Xavier and Link meet?

Xavier’s strange visions of him and Link might also point to time travel. As of yet, we don’t know if these two characters have ever met in the past, although it seems unlikely. That means they might meet in the future, in which case, why and how is Xavier seeing this? It has to be time travel, right? Or a dream of some other universe where they’ve teamed up? Please, Paradise, I’m begging for answers. My yarn wall can only get so big.

Paradise is now streaming on Hulu, with new episodes every Monday.