The 3-Part Paradise Season 2 Premiere Is Trying So Hard to Confound, It’s Utterly Predictable

This article discusses the first three episodes of Paradise Season 2.

Watching the first season of Paradise was like riding one of those theme park rides designed to make you dizzy. The hit Hulu thriller’s plot alternately barreled forward and lurched backward in time, whipping around hairpin twists and regularly turning everything we thought we knew upside down. Good guys were really bad guys. A town that looked like your typical wealthy suburb was revealed, early on, to be an enormous underground bunker where elites and their enablers had taken refuge in the wake of a mass extinction event. No one could be trusted except our hero, Sterling K. Brown’s stoic Secret Service agent and father, Xavier Collins. By the end of the season, a bunch of ostensibly key characters were either dead or critically injured. Also: some 55 million Americans had survived the apocalypse, including Xavier’s wife.

As Xavier—who was, rather conveniently, a licensed pilot—guided a plane out of the Colorado bunker in a quest to find her in Atlanta, viewers staggered off the Paradise ride, too confused to tell if that queasiness in the pit of our stomachs was excitement or just motion sickness. A year later, creator Dan Fogelman, who previously applied this whiplash approach to storytelling to family drama with NBC’s This Is Us, returns with a second season that tries even harder to keep us guessing. A show that already had too many characters and timelines now has more. But Fogelman’s feints are so dependent on worn tropes that, in the three-part Season 2 premiere that is now streaming on Hulu, Paradise becomes not just predictable, but also kind of dull.

Comprising more than a third of the eight-episode season, this triptych exploits a basic strategy of thrillers: Never resolve a cliffhanger immediately when you can keep the suspense going by temporarily shifting attention elsewhere. Hence the full, excessively hourlong first episode titled “Graceland,” in which we get the life story of a new character—Shailene Woodley’s Annie—who has spent the three years since the cascading global cataclysm that Paradise calls “The Day” hiding out in, yes, Elvis’ home turned museum. Fogelman needs us to know that Annie’s single mother was a Duke-educated genius who succumbed to mental health issues and died in a chair directly under her Duke diploma of deep-vein thrombosis. A triggering moment with a DVT patient derails Annie’s own training in medicine, after three years. Luckily, a kind Graceland employee finds her freaking out, and soon she’s giving tours there. This is all an extended prologue to The Day, when she and her coworker hunker down at the semi-fortified mansion as civilization collapses around them. Despite Annie’s medical knowledge, the coworker soon dies.

It turns out that that whole ordeal is a prologue to the arrival, a couple years of self-sufficient isolation later, of some rugged geeks hoping to appropriate the King’s vintage cars for a journey to Colorado. That’s right—they know about the bunker. Annie, whose time alone in the Jungle Room has left her paranoid, if not wholly feral, initially hides from this all-male crew. Slowly (because that’s how everything in this episode happens), she comes to trust and then, inevitably, fall for their young, good-looking leader, Link (Thomas Doherty). When it’s time for the group to move on, he begs her to join them: “Come restart the world with me, Annie.” But she’s back to hiding. In quick succession, Link reluctantly departs (after leaving a note promising to come back for her), we learn that Annie is pregnant, and, finally, we watch her gallop off on a horse before spotting an unconscious Xavier on the ground next to his crashed, smoking plane.

Is he dead? Of course not; Brown is the show’s Emmy-nominated star and executive producer, as well as its most compelling performer. And yet, Paradise still goes through the motions of making us wait for confirmation, in a second episode that braids together Xavier’s journey from Colorado to Memphis with a flashback to his courtship with his wife, Teri (Enuka Okuma). The former finds him falling in with some eerily quiet, dirty-faced kids who were on a sports team trip on The Day. (At this point, I thought about how much I would rather be watching Yellowjackets.) Meanwhile, in 2004, Xavier hurts his knee and lands in the hospital, where he charms his brusque, beautiful, career-minded roommate, Teri, by caring for her after scoliosis surgery leaves her temporarily blind. “Is this what you do?” she breathes. “Make sure I have what I need?” The point, I guess, is that he truly loves her. But didn’t we already know that, seeing as he just risked his life, piloting a stolen plane out of what is now perhaps the safest place on the planet, to bring her back to Colorado?

A present-tense plot begins to coalesce in the final minutes of Episode 2, “Mayday,” as Xavier wakes up at Graceland and a gun-wielding Annie informs him that they’re not going to Atlanta, where Teri is. She wants him to take her to the bunker, where she will presumably reunite with her baby’s father—whose mysterious inside knowledge of the Colorado project finally starts to make sense in the third episode, which revisits Paradise for the first time, a full quarter of the way through the draggy season. It is called “Another Day in Paradise,” and you betcha you’ll hear more plaintive covers of the Phil Collins song, as if the show hadn’t exhausted that reference in Season 1. (Couldn’t they at least switch things up with, say, Green Day’s “Welcome to Paradise”? I’d even accept Meat Loaf’s “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” at this point.)

Despite its groan-inducing title and soundtrack, which returns to the ’80s soft rock beloved by James Marsden’s late President Cal Bradford after an equally on-the-nose detour into mournful Elvis covers at Graceland, “Another Day in Paradise” is the best of the three episodes. It brings us back to the bunker, where Xavier’s colleagues are still caring for his kids; Sinatra (Julianne Nicholson) is still recovering from a nonfatal shooting by her in-house assassin, Jane (Nicole Brydon Bloom), while facing accusations that she has been siphoning the bunker’s power for personal gain; and Jane is still a raging psycho (RIP to another underwhelming president, Matt Malloy’s Henry Baines, and his plan to make summer hot again). And we get some background on Sinatra, who, in flashbacks, has a sobering conversation with a doomer scientist in which he explains that what happened on The Day would inevitably be followed by a second, far worse climate disaster a few years later. We also learn that she wasn’t always the kind of person who hired contract killers. She crossed that rubicon when she had an academic and entrepreneur (Patrick Fischler) murdered who refused to sell her technology she needed for the bunker. 

(As much as I enjoy Fischler, I did roll my eyes at the melodramatic choice to cast him as not just the sweetest man on the planet, but also the caretaker to a wife rendered unconscious by Huntington’s disease. We get it: Sinatra sucks. Then again, a Fogelman show without histrionics would probably be like a reality soap without screaming matches. What would even be left?)   

The episode generates suspense by foreshadowing a second existential threat—one that intriguingly complicates Sinatra’s motivations with regard to power siphoning. If only these plot points had come 15 or 30 minutes into the season. One problem with the first two episodes, aside from the fact that they’re often boring, is the way they reflect Fogelman’s conflation of backstory with character development; we get too much information about what people have done in the past yet never really get a handle on their personalities. A more worrisome issue, as the show continues, is the way “Graceland” and “Mayday” distract from what, in Season 1, differentiated Paradise from so many other recent postapocalyptic epics: The Last of Us, Fallout, The Walking Dead and 28 Days Later franchises. How many times have we seen scrappy found families fight to survive in a wasteland, and to make some perilous journey to a rumored safe haven, in a lawless society? How many pregnant-at-the-end-of-the-world stories?

Paradise was not, in my estimation, a great show in its debut season. It substituted an abundance of characters for rich characterizations, a novel setting for world-building that actually made sense, constant movement for the making of meaning. It was yet another saga of billionaire greed, though its obligatory penultimate flashback episode did go farther and feel more specific in its indictment of people who had done the most to cause the world’s gravest problems but were the first to escape them. Still, it was thrilling enough to keep us invested. If Fogelman’s intent was to make the first two episodes of Season 2 feel like a different show, then he succeeded. It just happens to be a show that a lot of us have seen too many times before.