Paradise's ‘The Day’ Was An Emotional Explosion, But That Last Scene With Sterling K. Brown Won't Stop Breaking My Heart

Spoiler alert! This story contains major spoilers for the Paradise episode “The Day,” which dropped February 25. If you’re not caught up, stream it with your Hulu subscription before reading further!

For the first six episodes of Sterling K. Brown’s new thriller Paradise, we've largely been kept in the dark regarding the tragedy that forced a fraction of society to descend to Sinatra’s man-made utopia. We knew only that people died, the planet was destroyed and its underground survivors deeply traumatized. In “The Day,” we finally learned what happened to the world, and while my jaw was on the ground for pretty much the entire episode, my heart may not recover from the final conversation between Brown’s character and his wife.

This Disaster Episode Felt Like Something That Could Really Happen

Paradise has easily become one of my favorite shows on the 2025 TV schedule, and “The Day” really leveled up in terms of both story and character development. Much of the episode played out like a Roland Emmerich film, after an Antarctic volcano erupted, causing part of the ice shelf to melt and triggering tsunamis that quickly took out cities around the world. War broke out immediately, and a crowd outside the Oval Office watched a TV reporter in Jakarta get taken out by a wave while standing at the top of a 20-story building.

As for Xavier Collins (Sterling K. Brown), his focus was on getting the president to safety and getting his wife Teri out of Atlanta. We’ve known from the start that Teri never made it that day, but that sure didn’t keep me from feeling Xavier’s desperation with every dropped phone call and failed text.

On top of that, of course, was the absolute pandemonium happening around President Cal Bradford (James Marsden). As people realized they were being left to die, panic took over. A staffer reached for a gun and was shot. The aide carrying the nuclear football was killed trying to board Marine One. A Secret Service agent pulled a gun on Xavier, only to be taken out himself.

To see this all go down in and around even a fictional White House was beyond disturbing, because even though the weather events were straight out of a disaster movie, there didn’t seem to be anything too exaggerated about people’s reactions to what was happening.

I felt a momentary sense of relief when Xavier was reunited with his and Teri’s children on their flight to Colorado, but my heart broke when Presley and James started asking, “Where’s mommy?” and Xavier was too overcome with sorrow to even respond. Then came that final phone call.

Xavier And Teri’s Phone Call Broke Me

I wasn’t expecting Xavier to get to talk to his wife one last time, and I certainly wasn’t prepared for how heart-wrenching that scene would be. Xavier tried to comfort Teri, who was understandably distraught. As he watched a real-time map of nuclear missiles approaching their targets — with Atlanta being one of them — they cried and said they loved each other, and then Teri uttered her final words, a message to their children:

Jesus, I can’t even transcribe that without tearing up again. It honestly doesn’t matter to me that Teri didn’t actually die (I predicted that twist early on). In that moment, she thought she was gone, Xavier thought it, and he and their kids have — in the show’s current timeline — been dealing with that grief for years.

We’ve got just one episode left for Xavier to identify the outsider who killed the president, find his kids, reunite with Teri and take down Sinatra. I’m not sure it’s possible to fit all that into one episode (or how my emotions would handle it), so thank goodness Paradise has already been renewed for Season 2. The Season 1 finale will be available to stream on Hulu on March 4.