Well, there’s just one episode left. One character at the center of every unanswered question.
The Paradise’s finale arrives March 30 on Hulu, and it has to do the impossible. It has the task of paying off a season’s worth of mythology while leaving enough runway for a third season that was already greenlit before Season 2 even finished its run.
That character is Link. And the actor playing him, Thomas Doherty, has quietly turned a recurring guest role into the most important presence in Paradise Season 2.
Who Is Thomas Doherty?
Doherty is a 29-year-old Scottish actor born in Edinburgh. He built his profile through Disney’s The Lodge and Descendants 2, where he played Harry Hook, before landing the Max Gossip Girl reboot as the self-described “habitual pleasure seeker” Max Wolfe.
He followed that with The Invitation and then Season 2 of Hulu’s Tell Me Lies, where he played Leo.
He also made his New York stage debut in an off-Broadway revival of Little Shop of Horrors in 2025, playing Seymour Krelborn.
Paradise Season 2 is his biggest platform yet. He plays Link, real name Dylan, the charismatic and guarded leader of a biker survivor group traveling toward Colorado after hearing rumors of an underground bunker.
His crew stopped at Graceland specifically to harvest parts from Elvis’s car collection for the cross-country trip. That is where he met Annie. That is where everything started.
“He’s definitely built up this protective mechanism and wall,” Doherty explained in a cast interview. “And it’s when he meets Annie that falls apart. I tried to personalize what it would feel like to live in a post-apocalyptic world and how that would impact my nature and characteristics and all the rest of it.”
The Question That Has Driven The Entire Season
From the moment Link and his group arrived at Graceland, they had a singular stated mission, find the bunker and kill Alex.
That mission, kill Alex, restart the world, became the engine of Season 2 in the same way that “who killed President Cal Bradford?” drove Season 1.
But who or what is Alex?
In Episode 3, a flashback to the pre-apocalypse bunker construction days showed Billy Pace (Jon Beavers) being hired by Samantha “Sinatra” Redmond (Julianne Nicholson) to kill Henry Miller (Patrick Fischler), an inventor who refused to hand over his mysterious technology.
In that flashback, we saw Henry tenderly caring for his ailing wife, whose name is Alex, and euthanizing her just before Billy shoots him dead.
We also see that Henry’s protégé, the brilliant kid who helped create his technology, is a young Link, still in his college-kid era.
Later in the season, Sinatra meets with a doomsday scientist first glimpsed in Season 1 who warns her about what he calls “Venus syndrome.”
After the supervolcano erupts, the waters will recede and the ash cloud will dissipate, making it appear that nature is healing.
But the damage to the atmosphere will be lasting. The greenhouse effect will intensify to uninhabitable levels. And when Sinatra suggests throwing money at the problem, the scientist dismisses her — because the one thing she actually needs is more time. And you can’t buy time.
Or can you?
Henry’s loaded remarks to Billy in the flashback, “Do you think that things happen for a reason, or are they just random?,” combined with the “Alex” thread and Sinatra’s mysterious hidden section of the bunker where she greets someone or something with a cheerful “Hi, Alex” at the end of Episode 7, has pointed most viewers toward one conclusion.
Alex is either a time travel device or a multiverse technology. Henry built something that bends time, Sinatra had him killed to take it, and Link has been trying to get to it ever since without fully understanding what it is.
The Dylan Revelation
Episode 7, “The Final Countdown,” delivered the biggest gut-punch of the season. We learn that Link is really named Dylan.
He is 26 years old. His birthday is May 16.
Those details mean everything because a core part of Sinatra’s backstory is that her young son Dylan died of a rare illness years before the apocalypse.
He would have been 26 now. His birthday was May 16.
When Sinatra processes this, that the man who has been threatening to bring her entire operation down shares her dead son’s name, age, and exact birthday, something visibly shifts in her.
She becomes lighter. She tells her husband afterward: “I think it worked.”
At their summit, Link had compared their dynamic to Luke and Vader, a fraught parent-child relationship if there ever was one.
He said it as a power play. Sinatra may have heard it differently.
Is Link somehow Sinatra’s Dylan, brought back or forward through whatever technology Henry Miller built? That is the question the finale needs to at least begin answering.
The Nosebleeds And Xavier’s Visions
Xavier Collins (Sterling K. Brown) has been having visions of Link all season, a man he has never met but recognizes immediately when he spots his photo on an old student ID.
He describes these visions as memories of things that haven’t happened yet.
Then there are the nosebleeds. Xavier gets one while flying a plane away from the bunker. Link gets one right after his survivalist companion mentions “Alex.”
In the flashback, Henry hands Billy a tissue in anticipation of his nosebleed, which hits just as Billy is leaving the scene after shooting Henry, crossing paths with a young Link on his way out.
In Episode 7, both Link and Sinatra wipe their noses when their summit turns heated, precisely after Link brings up Alex and gets shut down.
This is not coincidental staging. Something is connecting these characters across time or across realities, and the nosebleeds are the show’s shorthand for it.
The finale needs to clarify whether this is a Stranger Things-style psychic link, a side effect of time travel technology, or something else entirely, because it is the thread that ties Xavier to Link before they ever meet, and it has been running all season without explanation.
The Bunker Crisis And Jane
While the Alex mythology burns at the center, the bunker itself is in freefall. By the end of “The Final Countdown,” two decisions were made simultaneously and independently, someone sabotaged the oxygen supply to force the exterior doors open, and someone enacted a total lockdown to prevent Link’s group from entering.
The result is a potential system collapse trapping roughly 25,000 people underground with a dwindling air supply, a possible radiation leak, and a stuck elevator containing Sinatra’s daughter Hadley (Kate Godfrey) and Xavier’s daughter Presley (Aliyah Mastin).
Those two teenagers are not collateral damage, they are too central to the main characters to be disposable.
And then there is Jane. Agent Jane Driscoll (Nicole Brydon Bloom), the show’s resident psychopath, ended “The Final Countdown” bleeding out in Gabi’s shower.
Paradise has too much invested in that character for a quiet exit to feel satisfying. Whether she survives, and what those 1997 “a killer will be born” warning messages to a random computer repair guy about Jane’s future arrival in the world actually mean, that is another thread the finale will need to address.
The messages were signed “AlexQ.” Draw your own conclusions.
What Will Happen In The Finale?
The Paradise Season 2 finale airs March 30 on Hulu. Series creator Dan Fogelman built this story with a three-season arc in mind, Season 3 was already renewed on March 17, 2026, before Season 2 even concluded.
That renewal is a signal and a constraint. It means the finale does not have to resolve everything. It means it probably won’t.
But it does need to tell us what Alex is. It needs to give us something definitive on whether Link is Dylan, whether the thing Sinatra built actually worked.
It needs to account for the bunker’s 25,000 residents and two trapped teenagers. And it needs to do all of that while leaving enough open thread for an entire season of story still to come.
Thomas Doherty has carried the outside-world half of this season on his back. Link is the character everyone is watching, and the finale is the episode where his true identity either lands or doesn’t.
Everything points toward that moment. The question is what it means when it gets there.
It arrives March 30 on Hulu.
