Huge spoilers ahead for the season 2 finale of Hulu’s “Paradise.”

Hulu’s “Paradise” just finished its second season, and the wildest sci-fi thriller series on TV has somehow gotten even wilder. Recall that creator Dan Fogelman opened this show with the best twist on television in 2025, revealing that his seemingly straightforward political thriller actually takes place in an underground doomsday bunker. From there, we learned that a super-volcano ended human civilization as we know it.

Season 2 has since taken things up a notch, evolving “Paradise” into more of an emotional odyssey. This season has been all about Sterling K. Brown’s Xavier Collins going on a journey to find his wife and, in doing so, learning about the state of the post-apocalyptic surface world. Also, leave it to Fogelman to make a show where the most seemingly monstrous person miraculously ends up with enough complexity to earn at least some sympathy. (RIP Julianne Nicholson’s Sinatra.)

Still, as emotional as the show has become, it remains full of outlandish ideas. We’ve been getting hints for weeks that “Paradise” might be a time travel series, and the season 2 finale confirmed as much via the reveal of Alex — a quantum computer that can predict the future and has apparently been altering the past. As such, the show now has its endgame, with the already confirmed season 3 set to center on the search for the second secret bunker housing Alex.

Interestingly, said bunker is located beneath the Denver International Airport and its famed red-eyed blue horse statue, aka “Blucifer.” In real-life, this airport has been the subject of many a conspiracy theory, to the degree that the airport’s terminals have actually housed conspiracy theory exhibitions (per The New York Times). Needless to say, “Paradise” is poking some fun at this.

As mentioned, the Denver International Airport has embraced the conspiracy theories around it by hosting conspiracy-themed exhibitions like the one it did in 2016 (again, via TNYT). The airport only continued to playfully acknowledge this in 2019 by installing an animatronic gargoyle that would say stuff like “Welcome to the Illuminati headquarters.”

Most pertinently, certain conspiracy theories claim the construction of the airport went over budget because it also covered the costs of building underground tunnels that lead to a bunker for rich and powerful individuals (or maybe just aliens and lizard people) to flee to during an apocalyptic event. You can see now why, exactly, the creatives on “Paradise” would cheekily nod to this. (For more on that front, you should check out this delightfully weird and funny guide to all the conspiracy theories around the airport on the Denver Public Library’s official website.)

Then there’s that blue horse statue, which is formally called “Mustang” but has, as mentioned, been dubbed “Blucifer” by locals. It was created by artist Luis Jiménez and is thought to represent the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The fact that Jiménez died after a piece of the statue broke loose and severed an artery in his leg has further given way to superstitions about the statue being supernatural in origin.

This last bit is especially interesting when it comes to “Paradise.” We know Alex will factor heavily into season 3, and it’s likely Xavier will be tracking the computer down with Link (Thomas Doherty), who actually created Alex. Is the series foreshadowing that Alex will murder its own creator? Most likely not, but I choose to believe that “Paradise” is planting the seeds for it to go full “X-Files” from here.