Just like Sterling K. Brown promised, the “Paradise” finale revealed who killed President Cal Bradford.
The March 4 episode of the “Hulu” drama series begins 12 years earlier than current events, with the creation of the underground city, known as Paradise, and the group of workers who unknowingly built it.
With the excavation of the bunker comes health risks, which puts the workers lives’ in danger. When the project manager brings his concerns to the architect in charge’s attention, he gets fired. The architect warns him to forget about the job and that something catastrophic is coming.
In turn, the project manager attempts to contact news organizations to reveal the president’s plans.
Earlier in the season, viewers saw Brown’s Agent Xavier Collins take a bullet for the president, portrayed by James Marsden. The Season 1 finale shows that it was the project manager posing as a journalist who shot President Bradford.
Additionally, Samantha “Sinatra” Redmond previously told Collins that the DNA from the president’s murder didn’t match anyone who is in the bunker.
“It appears our killer came from the outside,” she says.
Adding to the mystery, Brown previously told TODAY.com that we had already seen the killer in past episodes, “We’ve met them. We’ve met them, that’s all I’m saying.”
He added that he was, “very curious to see how the audience (responded)” to their identity.
How did President Bradford die?
President Bradford was found dead in his room after learning that there are survivors above ground after the catastrophic events.
The president told Sinatra that the people in Paradise needed to know about the survivors, which she was very much against. The next morning, Agent Collins discovers his dead body in his room. While Bradford’s team investigates his murder, Sinatra has the public believe that the president died of natural causes.
In the finale, it’s announced to the Paradise residents that the president may have died as a result of foul play.
Who killed President Bradford?
The “Paradise” season finale shows that the person who killed President Bradford was the librarian.
However, in yet another unexpected twist, the man is not who he says he is.
It turns out that the librarian was the project manager working on the Paradise site from the beginning of the show. After he shot the president, he was taken to jail in Colorado near the construction site where the bunker was being built.
Amid the chaos of the world ending, there was a mass breakout at the prison and he escaped. On his way out, he took a dead police officer’s uniform. He is later seen posing as an officer, checking people’s IDs who are stuck in traffic and on their way to the underground bunker.
The man ends up meeting the real librarian and his wife who were approved to enter Paradise. He kills them and takes their IDs and belongings. After changing his appearance to look like the librarian, he meets a woman who is unfulfilled with her life and offers her the wife’s ID card as her own.
When they are being scanned to go into Paradise, it shows that the two have taken the identities of Eli and Margaret Davis.
Why and how did he kill President Bradford?
While in the library, Collins gets knocked out by the librarian after he discovers the president’s secret book with information about how to leave Paradise.
After tying Collins up, the man confesses and admits that after entering Paradise he got comfortable and didn’t go through with his initial plan to kill the president. But when President Bradford came into the library asking if he could make a mixed CD, the man says that his feelings of anger towards the president “came flooding back.”
“I knew I had to finish what I started,” the man tells Collins, expressing that he wanted revenge for the people who died building Paradise and for them not being invited into the bunker.
The man was able to kill the president by sneaking into his room at night and hitting him over the head with a large rotary drill bit that was seen on display at the library.
While still conscious, President Bradford attempted to leave a sign for Collins by drawing an X with his blood on his cigarettes. As viewers saw earlier, one of the cigarettes contained a code that led to a library book with secret information about how to get out of Paradise.
The man saw that the president was still alive and hit him over the head again, killing him.