To save the world she had to destroy it.
Such was Sinatra’s fate in the second season finale of Paradise. Believing her son, Dylan, was alive — resurrected by AI in the adult form of Link (Thomas Doherty) — Samantha Redmond (Julianne Nicholson) accepted her mission with a preternatural calm. After entering the final command that would blow up the bunker, she took a final stroll through the emptied streets of Paradise, as LED panels tumbled from the sky around her, imagining herself holding hands with young Dylan.
“One of my favorite things in the entire show is those panels falling as Sinatra is walking through [the town] as her world is falling apart around her,” executive producer John Hoberg tells Gold Derby. “I just found that just incredibly executed.”
He says that the production team pulled off “every trick in the book to try to make it feel as epic as possible at the end.” And indeed they did.
Production designer Kevin Bird calls it a “team sport” — which involved not just his team, but also visual effects (led by John Weckworth), editing (Howard Leder), cinematography (Yasu Tanida), and especially the performance by Julianne Nicholson, who was nominated for an Emmy Award for her work on the show in the first season. “We wanted to make sure that we were using the sets that we all recognized and telling it in a convincing way with a mixture of everybody,” Bird tells Gold Derby.
Bird says they wanted to use the destruction of Paradise to show how the town worked — essentially by taking it apart. “For me personally, I really want to show it was the façade, the fake town crumbling,” he says. That meant plumes of steam, falling ash, shaking, and the sky collapsing. “We really thought about all of it, and then the writers really nerded-out on the oxygen supply.”
The biggest challenge in delivering on all of the above, he says, was the limits of their production schedule — executing at that scale on their limited time frame. Not to mention the sheer physicality of having the construction guys set up giant sets of doors out in the mountains in 100-degree heat.
But what was always top of mind was one overall note from showrunner Dan Fogelman: keep it real. “We pushed the limits, but we didn’t do anything that isn’t possible now,” says Bird. “We didn’t veer off into too much sci-fi, and that kept us pretty honest.” No matter how “insane” Paradise can get, says Bird, “it’s really about family and emotion.”
So the key for them all was restraint. Just because they could didn’t mean that they should.
Take those crashing LED panels, for example. Using them was a callback to Season 1, when the concept of the sky being built out of LED panels were first introduced. “The audience knew what they were, so for us, we could move them around,” says visual effects supervisor John Weckworth. “We go above the panels, we fall through them, and we see them from all these different angles. It really became something we could use.”
The first time we see them falling from the sky, they’re nearly hitting Dr. Torabi (Sarah Shahi) as she’s helping the townspeople evacuate. That scene was choreographed on set with practical effects. Ultimately, those panels were replaced digitally in the final edit, “but for us for reference, we could see exactly how things look in the environment,” says Weckworth.
So when it came to Sinatra’s turns with the panels, it was “a little more loose,” he says. Director of photography Yasu Tanida filmed Nicholson walking through the streets at “golden hour” with the sun behind her, which meant “we already had a really good place to start from,” says Weckworth. “So it was ours to mess up at that point.”
Weckworth reveals that initially they’d planned for much more destruction happening around Sinatra, even closer to her. But as they got into post-production, they discovered that the more “we peeled it back, it really started become kind of elegant,” he says. The same was true of the sound design. Earlier versions had big crashes as the panels hit the ground — but in the end they stripped it all out.
“It was written to be an explosion,” agrees editor Howard Leder, who’s worked with Fogelman for a decade on shows like Pitch and This Is Us. “I tend not to do visual effects-heavy shows,” he says. “My bread and butter is two people in a room talking to each other.”
And so his instinct, too, was to keep coming back to making it emotionally grounded, despite all of the technological bells and whistles the team employed. “One of the things of the show always has been it’s not necessarily a show about the end of the world — it’s a show about people’s reaction to the end of the world,” says Leder. “It’s about the emotional journey that you’re going through with climate change, or with these huge apocalyptic, cataclysmic events. How do individuals react to that? How do they behave? How do they re-form their family relationships? So to me, that was always the most important question: What is Sinatra experiencing as she goes through this?”
Leder points out that Sinatra had already gotten the message earlier in the episode that she was going to die that day. “It allows the completion of that long, long story that’s come from episode two of season one, of her son who died, and just feeling some closure with that,” he says. “It’s in slow motion, of just her taking that in for one last time. And she looks at peace, not necessarily terrified to die.”
And so what came through in the final edit was Nicholson’s powerful performance, which Bird calls “poetic and beautiful.” “She’s alone in the most fake world you could possibly create as it’s falling around her,” he says, crediting the team’s restraint. “They could have done full carnage behind her. They didn’t. They just did this beautiful, falling leaves of LED panels coming down. I love that moment that it is catastrophic failure of the dome, and she’s the most serene and calm as she’s been the whole show. And then when her kid’s there — just Fogelman genius.”
That’s key to the ultimate thesis of the show — it’s a story driven show, and visual effects has to pick their moments. “If it looks cool and it’s in service of the story, then it wins,” says Weckworth. “And if it doesn’t, then it’s out.”
For the Paradise team, that’s the difference between Paradise and other post-apocalyptic shows, like Fallout and Silo, which were premiering at the same time. “That’s not the quite the show we’re doing,” explains Leder. “This is more what happens to me and mine during this kind of event.”
So for all of the tricks at their disposal, what it ultimately came down to was emotion.
But yes, they did actually build Alex — she’s a huge, 15-foot-tall, 60-foot-wide quantum computer. The only design change Bird made for TV was to flip her horizontally given the screen’s aspect ratio. But it still got the ultimate stamp of approval: “Dan had one of his friends at Google Deep Mind give it the thumbs-up,” reveals Bird.
“It was one of those things when it showed up on set, everybody wanted to check it out,” adds Weckworth with a laugh. And yes, we will see her again in Season 3. But as for why it’s under the Denver Airport, we’ll have to wait to find out.
The team is knee-deep in production on Season 3, and Bird admits he’s missing the bunker. “What really worked was that contrast of being outside and being in the bunker and the clean fake Disneyfied world they were in,” he says. “But it is being replaced with something else, which I can’t say. But I will say it is a completely different show Season 3.”
