What The Number 812092 Means In Hulu’s Paradise

This article contains spoilers for “Paradise.”

Mystery boxes are notoriously hard to pull off. You have to balance the big mystery while introducing new elements and questions at the same time as you provide answers, lest the audience grows bored and stops watching. And yet, you don’t want the entire story to be explicitly and singularly about the mysteries, as that makes for a good Wikipedia entry but not necessarily a good narrative. It’s the difference between “Lost” continuing to captivate audiences 20 years after its premiere and “Severance” severely slowing down to answer a dumb question no one was asking.

Then we have “Paradise,” which is one of the best TV shows of the year and a great example of the mystery box done right. That is because the show treats them not like lore mysteries but narrative mysteries. The one big question this season is who kills President Bradford (James Marsden) in the first episode. That is a question that drives the entire narrative, the inciting incident that Secret Service agent Xavier Collins (Sterling K. Brown) spends the entire season trying to answer. That is not the same as the question of what happened to the world, as that is more of a background question that the characters already are aware of, and the audience knows they’ll eventually find out. So the anticipation becomes how “Paradise” will answer it rather than the answer itself.

This is to say, when “Paradise” introduced a small mystery in the form of numbers written on a cigarette Bradford had on him before he died, it felt like a throwaway thing the audience was meant to forget until it was finally brought back. When that happened, it tied everything together.

In the very first episode, Xavier finds a cigarette next to Bradford’s body that has the number 812092 on it, in a pack marked with a big, bloody “X.” Xavier, though smart enough to organize a coup in the post-apocalyptic bunker they live in, is apparently not smart enough to investigate what the president did not just the hours before his death, but the days leading up to it. Though he asks several people about the number to no avail, episode 5 shows Cal Bradford writing the number the day he died after he learned about files in his tablet that were previously sealed — files revealing that the outside world is still inhabitable despite the apocalyptic events that led to people moving to a bunker.

As we learn about Bradford’s actions leading up to his death, we see him go to the town’s local library to make a mixtape for his son — the first time he’d gone there, apparently. Such a significant and memorable detail would be something Xavier would have learned about, you’d think, but apparently he’s not that smart.

The season finale of “Paradise” we learned who killed President Bradford, and what the number means. Turns out it was a number corresponding to the Dewey Decimal System, and Bradford hid something in a library book. Specifically, he hid transcripts revealing the truth about the outside world in a biography of Peter Lawford, the hanger-on to the Rat Pack. That’s why you always check the library, folks.

The whole first season of “Paradise” is now streaming on Hulu in the U.S. and Disney+ internationally. Season 2 has been greenlit.