The best way to sum up “The Day,” Paradise’s genuinely harrowing seventh episode, is this: There’s no ironic slowcore ’80s hair-rock cover to close out the episode. Someone thought better of it, and I’m glad. The covers are so obviously goofy I refuse to believe creator Dan Fogelman is unaware; it stands to reason that when you’re depicting the end of the world, it’s better to enjoy the silence. 

Using Agent Xavier Collins, President Cal Bradford, and the countless colleagues, friends, and family of theirs who either are or aren’t going to make it to the end of the day as focal points, this episode finally reveals what went down on that terrible day. A massive supervolcano erupts beneath the surface of Antarctica. Countless tons of ice and ash are spewed into the atmosphere, creating conditions for a permanent winter. The ice sheet collapses into the ocean, sending a tsunami over twenty stories tall to ricochet back and forth across the globe. Working upwards from the South Pole, city after coastal city is destroyed, while entire island and low-lying countries are erased from the map. A powerful soundwave precedes the tsunami, inflicting intense pain and knocking planes from the sky. Nuclear powers and rogue actors alike launch preemptive resource wars, with bombs detonating around the globe. Only the decision by Bradford to use his heretofore secret ability to set off a global electromagnetic pulse, frying every electronic circuit on the planet, safely knocks a fleet of nukes out of the sky before they can detonate in multiple American cities — including Atlanta, where Xavier’s wife works, and survives to this day. 

This last bit is the episode’s other big revelation. Despite his promises, Cal Bradford knew Xavier’s wife Teri would never be able to make it back from Atlanta to Air Force One in Washington in time to escape the wave. He lulled Xavier into a false sense of security because he was needed, not just by Cal but by his and Teri’s children, whom Bradford was able to save. This deception was the unmendable breach between the two men, but Xavier didn’t know about the EMP and how Atlanta was spared its expected nuclear strike until Sinatra tells him with his gun pointed at her head.

She then provides him with both a reason to believe — a recording of Teri, searching for her husband and children in Colorado — and a reason to obey — she’s abducted their daughter, and if he wants to see either of his loved ones again, he’ll quit his rebellion bullshit and play ball. That’s where the episode leaves us.

What will linger, though, isn’t the mystery-box twist, but the painstaking portrayal of a planet in collapse. This is first-reel-of-the-post-apocalyptic-horror-movie stuff. Manic scientists ranting on television about how everyone needs to wake up, dammit. Increasingly blunt and horrified news anchors watching their colleagues disappear as the disaster takes them out one by one. The government lying right up until the moment someone decides they can’t lie any longer. Grainy footage of waves the size of high-rise apartment buildings wiping out entire cities, coastlines, countries. The dawning realization on the faces of those who are doomed to be left behind so the president and his inner circle can survive. People saying everything will be alright to people they know are about to die. 

The whole thing reminded me favorably of some stone classics in the horror-as-mass-casualty-event canon: Dawn of the Dead, both the Romero and Snyder versions; War of the Worlds, both the Welles and Spielberg versions; Stephen King’s The Stand, and so on. It also reminded me of the initial movie that launched the acclaimed Battlestar Galactica reboot in 2004, which was also about the power structure left behind to govern a ragtag band of survivors fleeing a human extinction event. 

This, in turn, made me wonder something: Would Paradise have been better off showing us this part first? After all, BSG didn’t drop us in medias res into humanity’s desperate flight from the clutches of the robotic, genocidal Cylons: It started by showing us the Cylons’ surprise attack and total victory. It had plenty of mysteries up its sleeve, but “what the hell happened?” was not one of them. More recently, Fallout’s first scene showed the bombs dropping, a nauseating decision that anchored all the goofy splatstick hijinks to come in real tragedy and trauma.

Paradise might have lost that wild twist reveal of its underground-bunker setting at the end of its pilot if it revealed that the end of the world had happened right up front, true. But this episode is far and away the most powerful, memorable, frightening stuff the show has delivered. And it loses none of the rest of the show’s mass appeal, either, since that appeal is located in the soulful performances of Sterling K. Brown as Xavier and James Marsden as Cal, both of which are better here than ever. You still get all of that trademark Fogelman tearjerking and heartwringing and eye-to-eye, heart-to-heart human drama — and, yes, the occasional howler, like Bradford’s line about the innate decency of the American people, lol, lmao — but it comes wrapped up in an apocalypse scary enough to stand out in a crowded apocalyptic-TV field. Something that darkly special is worth celebrating.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.