There are essentially two Paul Serenes in Quantum Break.
There’s the young Paul, Jack’s friend, the enthusiastic, ambitious businessman who sees unprecedented fame and success on the horizon—and a chance to improve the world. Cocky, brash, talented, somewhat idealistic and very, very hungry to leave his mark, Paul is the kind of person any start-up would love to have as its founder. Paul considers himself to be a good person, and Jack—not a bad judge of character—would wholeheartedly agree.
Paul is not a scientist, he’s a businessman—and a very good one, but one, in the end, driven more by ambition than caution. When faced with William’s warnings, he sees it as one unstable man’s word against his entire staff’s —and if that isn’t enough to tip the scales, the fear of humiliating failure certainly helps. For Paul, Project Promenade is everything, the thing that will turn him from a successful hi-tech entrepreneur to a household name, a Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, or Elon Musk.
And then there’s the older Serene, the one who travels to the End of Time and is forever changed by what he sees—the one who then returns to 1999, and is determined to find a way to keep humanity going even after time ends, no matter the cost. Powerful, driven, and utterly ruthless. Serene takes no pleasure in the things he has to do, but in his mind, the world is already a graveyard. Most people will be caught in the End of Time. With the stakes as high as they are, no sacrifice is too great. If people get caught in the crossfire, if he has to make hard decisions that lead to the deaths of innocents, Serene will not hesitate.
More than anything else, Serene is driven by the conviction that nothing can change. He has tried over and over again, tested and finally accepted that things will go the way things will go, and he can’t change the tiniest detail. Every single decision he makes is already a part of the pattern that leads, indirectly or directly, to the fateful events at Project Promenade. His visions of the future, though useful, all point to the inevitability of all things, and even the power to choose his future only lets him fill in the blanks, not truly change the fate of mankind.
Despite all this, despite the Chronon Syndrome that consumes him and makes his life agony, ultimately Serene’s philosophy is one of hope: he believes that even though he can’t keep time from ending, he can find a way to survive the apocalypse, and, with enough resources and dedication, perhaps even restart time.
For Jack, the appearance of the older Serene is a sudden, shocking event—his friend seems to have suddenly changed to a monster. But for Serene, Jack is a memory—somebody he knew 17 years ago. There’s a part of Serene that treasures that memory, but he’s dedicated his entire life to his mission. He has no use for sentimentality.
Serene is portrayed by Aidan Gillen.
