Written by Sean Merkel
Paradise Season 2 is the kid at the buffet who overfills their plate. Everything is good on its own, but there’s so much that it just doesn’t really work together.
The series, created by Dan Fogleman (This is Us) and starring Sterling K Brown (Black Panther) as Agent Xavier Collins, sort of picks up where season one leaves off. For the uninitiated, Paradise Season 1 is great. It’s a tight(ish) self-contained murder mystery with a great premise. The President of the United States (James Marsden, X-Men) has been killed, but all of civilization is in a massive bunker following some kind of global catastrophe. When we last left our intrepid Agent Collins, he was flying off into the distance to go reunite with his wife. Meanwhile, society in the bunker had been forever changed, and everything remained uncertain. It was a compelling ending that made you want more.
And it seems like the second season simply did not know how to deliver.
What made Season 1 so compelling was the way it gradually unspooled several different interlocking mysteries and conspiracies. The charming but largely incompetent President Cal Bradford (Marsden) is dead. Who killed him and why? Why is humanity living in the bunker? What’s really going on here? Throughout the season, we are gradually given more information until we finally see the whole picture, only for everything to change forever. It’s a very good season of television.
Season 2 had some big shoes to fill. And it starts out strong. We are introduced to a new character, Annie (Shailene Woodley, Big Little Lies) — she is a smart, capable med school dropout-turned employee at Graceland, where the first episode of the season takes place. The Grounds of Elvis’ mansion are where she survived the end of the world. We get to know Annie for the first several episodes of the season, and see as she survives, thrives, deals with other people, and — ultimately — dies in childbirth. She meets with our hero Xavier and the foil for this season, Link (Thomas Doherty, Disney’ Descendants 2). There are at least half a dozen characters like Annie, all with their own backstories, flaws, and charms. The season gives us the whole story of how they survived the end of the world. The result is some admittedly quite good character-development that slows the pace of the main plot to a glacial crawl.
Speaking of plot, these new character developments are intercut with goings on back in Collins’ original bunker. Remember how at the end of Season 1 everything changed? Just kidding. The new president is replaced almost immediately with the old villain from last season, Samantha Redmond, codename Sinatra (Julianne Nicholson, The Outsider) and things are back to normal for almost everyone. The only change is now the bunker city has a secret prison camp. The plot of life in the bunker follows roughly the same trajectory as Season 1, until the entire society collapses, largely out of nowhere.
Season 2, much like the first season, is told largely through flashbacks. In Season 1 this was interesting, because part of the fun of watching was piecing together the mystery of how the world got to be the way it is. In this season, these flashbacks show character development (which is a problem when you introduce too many characters) and take up massive chunks of each episode. There are flashbacks to people who survived the end of the world, people who didn’t, and people who died in Season 1. These flashbacks, if used a little more judiciously, could have created a show that gave us just enough to get a sense of the world and the people in it. However, they just make every episode feel about 10 minutes too long.
A good suspense series needs to keep the audience hooked, especially once the initial mystery is revealed. Paradise Season 2 attempts to do this by giving every single episode a plot twist. Secret backstories, secret motivations, secret children, you name it, it’s in here. It gets to the point where, after the final big twist of the show — that Samantha Redmond helped build an all-powerful supercomputer that is going to save the world through time travel — you just become numb to all the plot twists and heel turns the show has thrown at you. Sure, whatever, let’s have this literal Deus Ex Machina go back in time to stop a super-volcano from erupting. Presumably, that will be the plot of Season 3. Paradise did not realize that too many twists become no twist at all.
Up until the very end, Paradise Season 2 is more character study than plot. In fairness, the characters are mostly believable and compelling, but when so much of the last season centered around plots and the people making them, the stories of the survivors enduring hardship for years start to drag the whole series down. Then at the very end, when all the character development is done, the sudden, massive, explosive shift from slow post-apocalyptic character building to science fiction hits like a sledgehammer to the gut. The acting is great. The sound design is enrapturing. There’s much of the story that is quite compelling. Yet, it hurts to say that this feels messier than Season 1. Less sure of what it wants to do and wants to be. Though the show is so obsessed with Elvis in the beginning, it failed to learn his most important lesson: Always leave them wanting more.
