Paradise Left Us With Another Cliffhanger, And Now I'm Worried About Xavier For The First Time

WARNING! There are spoilers ahead for Paradise Episode 5 of Season 5. If you haven't watched it yet, log in with your Hulu subscription to check out the latest in the best show on the streamer right now.

The one thing you can count on in Paradise is that as a viewer, you’ll usually get a pretty good cliffhanger at the end of each episode. Often, of course, those involve Xavier (Sterling K. Brown), and lately, they’ve involved the search for his wife, Teri (Enuka Okuma). After Episode 5’s cliffhanger, for the first time, I'm genuinely worried about Xavier, and given the theories about where the show is headed, I think I have good reason to be.

What Are Gary’s Intentions?

At the end of Episode 4, Xavier meets Gary, played by the always great Cameron Britton. We suspect Gary is innocent enough, even heroic, in saving both Teri and the young kid, Bean, as we see in the latest episode. We also learn that Gary is in love with Teri, but the love is unrequited. While it seems like Gary is able to move on by the middle of the episode, with the final reveal, we learn that’s not the case at all.

Desperate to keep Teri from learning that the people on the train are traveling to Colorado, we see in a flashback that he had murdered his partner and fellow survivor, Ennis (Andy McQueen). Xavier is on to him pretty early on in the episode, but plays things close to the vest, never revealing too much to Gary. Still, at the end, we see Gary lie to Xavier about his feelings for Teri, and the two men shake hands as Bean watches from behind some bushes.

Gary seems like a coward, but we know he is willing to kill to keep Teri close. Will he pull a fast one and take Xavier out, too? With three episodes left in this excellent Season 2 of a planned three seasons, I feel like Xavier’s fate is up in the air for the first time.

If The Time Travel Or Multiverse Theories Are Real, No One Is Safe

Practically speaking, it’s pretty unlikely that Brown won’t be a part of the show until the end. Not only does he have a long working relationship with the show’s creator, Dan Fogelman (Fogelman also created This Is Us), but Brown is also a producer on the show. Not to mention Xavier has been the main focus of every aspect of the show, given him pretty strong plot armor. It would be pretty weird to shift the attention away from him completely.

However, if the online theories are correct, and there are some time-traveling/multiverse shenanigans at play, it’s pretty easy for that plot armor to be exposed. It would mean no one, not even Xavier, is safe, at least not in the present timeline, or the present universe.

Of course, I don’t think it means that Brown is leaving the show, nor would Xavier being murdered in this timeline or multiverse mean the end of Brown’s time on the show. Heck, even dead characters are part of flashbacks at least. This makes Xavier’s plot armor even thinner.

We’re still early in the 2026 TV schedule, but Paradise has proven to be the show I most look forward to each week. While I’ve grown used to the twists and turns, surprise character deaths, and everything else the show throws at us, losing Xavier, or this Xavier, would be devastating.