Diksha Sundriyal
The first season of Hulu’s dystopian series ‘Paradise’ follows Xavier Collins’ quest to find the murderer of President Cal Bradford. Over the course of eight episodes, the show takes many twists and turns, but what makes it brilliant is how it sets up the events of the finale right from the first episode. When Cal is killed, Xavier is the first person to enter the room. He gets the first look at the crime scene before it is contaminated by the presence of other people, which is why he is the one to find Cal’s cigarette pack marked with an X in blood. Inside the pack, he finds a cigarette with the number 812092 written on it. The true meaning of this number is revealed in the finale, which answers more questions than Xavier had asked for. SPOILERS AHEAD.
The Numbers are a Measure of Cal Bradford’s Desire to do Good
While Cal Bradford may have been the president, he wasn’t the one to wield real power in the world before the catastrophic tsunami, and neither was he in Paradise. True power lay with people like Sinatra, who had come up with the plan to make Paradise and funneled their money into its creation. Cal’s father was one of those people, and he used his son as a pawn to get what he and other billionaires wanted. Meanwhile, the President remained unaware of the most crucial things. Eventually, it turns out that Cal was kept out of the loop for a good reason.
When he discovers the string of lies and misdeeds committed by Sinatra, he is horrified. He is shocked to discover that there are survivors on the Earth’s surface and that Sinatra has buried the truth about their existence. Moreover, the scientists who were sent to the surface to make this discovery were killed at Sinatra’s behest, especially after she discovered that the group was bringing back a survivor with them. By far, we know that Cal is inherently a good person, and he would have tried his best to save the people or go down with the ship if other people hadn’t taken charge of the situation. So, when he discovers the truth, he feels a sense of responsibility to tell it to the public, but more importantly, he feels obliged to tell it to Xavier.
Even though Xavier was his bodyguard, Cal always treated him as a friend. When he discovered that Teri was flying to Atlanta for work, he advised Xavier to stop her. Later, when all hell broke loose, he even tried to have a plane sent to Atlanta to bring Teri to them, but things didn’t go as planned. Xavier hated Cal for not telling him the truth outright, due to which he didn’t feel it was necessary to stop his wife. The guilt of his friend losing his loved one weighs heavily on the President, so when he realizes that Teri might be alive, he decides to do something about it. This is where the numbers on the cigarette come into the picture.
812092 is the Key to Exit From Paradise
When Cal found the truth about the survivors, he confronted Sinatra for lying to him and the public. While he threatened to make everything public, he also knew that his own threat could backfire on him. He didn’t put it beyond Sinatra to have him killed, so he prepared for the emergency. He left a CD for his son, Jeremy, to find a confession of sorts, along with the truth, in which he didn’t just leave songs. At the same time, he also jotted down everything he found about the surface and the survivors, leaving detailed instructions about how to leave Paradise and how to find the habitable places in Atlanta where Teri would most likely be found. He couldn’t simply leave these papers lying around, so he left them in a book in the library. The numbers of the cigarette correspond to the Dewey decimal system, which would allow his son or Xavier to find the book.
While Xavier finds the cigarette in the first episode, it takes some time for him to realize what the numbers might mean. Over seven episodes, the show gives us all sorts of possibilities about what the numbers could mean, from the numbers corresponding to a file or to a plane. In the end, Xavier realizes that they correspond to a book when he hears in Cal’s mixtape for Jeremy that he was in the library when he made the tape. This isn’t just a coincidence, but a clear hint left by Cal, directing whoever finds the CD and the cigarette to the library. Not surprisingly, the number leads Xavier to a book about Frank Sinatra, behind which is a book called “The Man Who Kept the Secrets,” inside which Xavier finds all the answers he had been looking for.
Read More: Where is Hulu’s Paradise Filmed?
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