PARADISE / LOST: Where/when next for HULU’s sophomore success?
Xavier Collins has fled the Colorado ‘Paradise’ bunker in search of his wife, Terri, after ‘Sinatra’ revealed she likely survived the cataclysmic events that the world suffered. But as far as most are concerned, he’s a fugitive.
On the surface, Xavier finds a world in recovery and stumbles across Annie, a heavily-pregnant survivor. But while Annie wants to head to Colorado in search of the bay’s father, a man she knows as ‘Link’, Xavier is determined to press on to Atlanta to find Terri.
Torn between duty and tragedy, assuring the baby’s survival becomes imperative in a place where trust is at a premium.
But as Xavier finds new friends and enemies above, life in Paradise is far from perfect. Even recovering from her wounds, Sinatra is back in control and armed with knowledge to which no-one else has access even as the fatalities mount up.
However, even Sinatra cannot get everything her way. Fate plays a part and with both Xavier and Link eventually heading back to Paradise, what secrets does the future – and the past – still hold?
UPDATED SERIES OVERVIEW with *major spoilers*
Last year, Hulu series Paradise pulled a quite masterful series of bait-and-switches on its audience. In an era where pre-publicity often spoils the most interesting aspects of a new show, merely as a way to garner more attention ahead of time, it initially seemed that this was just another show with a conventional political lean and a murder most foul. It was nothing of the sort.
It wasn’t until the show debuted and we were seconds away from the closing credits of that first episode that the curtain was pulled back and we realised that though the flashbacks were happening in the real White House in the real Washington DC, much of what we were experiencing in the ‘now’ was not – our main cast of characters were actually in a massive subterranean bunker, built with the latest technology and with a convincing artificial sky. These were the survivors of a (then) undisclosed cataclysmic event that had apparently wrought devastation on the surface. Three years on from populating a sanctuary funded by driven and super-rich trillionnaire Samantha Redmond (Julianne Nicholson), President Cal Bradford (played by James Marsden) is murdered and it’s up to his estranged chief security officer Xavier Collins (Sterling K. Brown) to establish who is behind it and why. Layers of conspiratorial details were shed with genuine surprises, twists and turns each week. Each character had an agenda and some of them were willing to kill to keep the status quo.
It was a shock-per-week format that mostly worked, building the mystery but explaining things as it went. Series creator Dan Fogelman had form for playing with the narrative – he pulled another surprise sleight of hand with his show This is Us, in which it was suddenly revealed that events were actually happening on a generational level over two time-periods…
Paradise was a critical and commercial success and a second season was quickly confirmed, but this is often a pivot point for successful shows – how do you expand out the original catnip of a premise while staying honest to the basic conceit? How far does a show-runner plan ahead when not even guaranteed a full season in these competitive times?
Like many shows (think Lost, The Last of Us) the answer for a sophomore year was to further shift focus and perspective, keeping the idea of slowly filling in blanks but dividing the narrative further and layering the mysteries and perspectives. If the first season solved some of its main mysteries (who was Cal’s killer?) by showing different points in the timeline with both genuine clues and smart mis-directions, the new run adds a further twist: a geographical one. Its first episode, Graceland, introduces an all-new cast of characters facing that global catastrophe – with nary a sign of the bunker and the characters we’ve been following thus far.
There’s Annie (Shailene Woodley) whose childhood trials and tribulations lead her to dropping out of medical training and to become a tour guide, just as the world goes to hell. She’s ensconced at Graceland (yes, that one) for years until Link (Thomas Doherty) and his team show up and talking of killing someone called Alex who they believe at a secret bunker in Colorado (yes, Paradise!). She stays behind and isn’t aware for some time that her night with Link has left her pregnant (though the pre-warning of explicit sexual content on the episode seems bizarre given the soft-focus and judicious editing).
We do encounter Xavier’s plane crashing nearby, but, so far, that would be our only real touchstone with the show as we’ve known it. It’s a potentially perilous/brave shift – while viewers demand to be constantly entertained and surprised, they also grow loyal to the characters they’ve followed and it takes some time to open up to new characters that could prove friends or foes. It has to feel like an organic expansion not a wholesale reinvention or something entirely new.
Xavier survives and after recovering leaves with the now heavily-pregnant Annie… though she wants to follow Link and he’s still searching for Terri who was last seen in Atlanta. It’s an alliance that, sadly isn’t built to last as – another unexpected swerve – Annie dies in childbirth and Xavier takes guardianship of the baby. Over a series of subsequent episodes he tracks Terri and encounters Cameron Britton’s Gary who says he survived the apocalypse with her and a small group, but she’s recently been kidnapped… though it turns out there’s some misdirection there.
We do have glimpses back to Paradise. Sam/Sinatra has survived the fateful events that we saw at the end of the previous run and though hospitalised at the start it’s not long before she reasserts control and seems to be concerned about someone/something called Alex. Jeremy Bradford (played by Charlie Evans) is leading a ‘resistance’ against her, but ends up in a deeper underground prison facility for his troubles. Duplicitous and, let’s admit it, totally sociopathic and outright bonkers security agent Jane Driscoll (Nicole Brydon Bloom) sets out to neutralise/kill Sarah Shahi’s Dr. Gabriela Torabi and previous head of security Nicole Robinson ( Krys Marshall) and seems to be the most dangerous person in Paradise (and that’s saying something).
Eventually Xavier, Terri head back to Colorado, where Link (otherwise known as Dylan – hey, isn’t that same name as Sam/Sinatra’s son who died over a decade before? Hmmmm) is about to force Paradise to open its doors. But with both he and Xavier having impossible visions of each other, what’s their connection and how will events spiral even more out of control?
Paradise certainly continued to be entertaining, often zigging instead of zagging, but if there was nothing quite like it anywhere else in its first run, there were several shows it felt organically linked to in its second – at least in the surface world. Xavier may not have encountered zombies or infected while he was out and about in makeshift communes and communities. but dodging iffy strangers and looking after young survivors certainly had a The Last of Us and The Walking Dead vibe.
Refreshingly, a show that was cynical about the powerplays in the bunker, lent into the idea that above ground – and while suspicions were natural (and sometimes well-founded) – there was also times when you had to trust in the more positive aspects of humanity (Link’s group invading Graceland is of a practical need and they mean no harm to Annie; Xavier finds help for the pregnant Annie from people he initially fears and the trains-folk he later encounters aren’t holding Terri against her will).
But what was originally a political story with touches of high concept decided to double-down on the latter to a metaphysical level. The mentions of ‘Alex’ become more obvious, even if the nature of who or what that is remains vague of a long time. We get more and more flashbacks, often with the idea that some events are happening because of destiny not mere happenstance or opportunism. Is Sam/Sinatra evil or just amoral and pragmatic in pursuit of her goals?
The ‘things are not what you think they are!‘ is a good dramatic tool but can blunted by over-use and vague handwavery explanations… audiences want to feel that they’re just ahead of the characters and have invested their time wisely. Series like LOST floundered after piling on the mysteries but rarely having consistent answers. That Alex is, in fact…………….spoilers!…………… a prescient quantum computer funded by Sinatra and housed in a separate bunker and may be tampering with time, feels awfully like a bunker on LOST‘s island where the survivors had to regularly put in a series of numbers for… reasons. (It also has some linkage to another Sarah Shahi show Person of Interest and the sentient AI system that guided the human contingent to help people).
So are we heading into pure sf realms and continuity headaches and dead-ended side-stories galore? Fogelman has stated that the plan in advance for Paradise was – and remains – a three season story, so that’s a refreshing set number in an era where too many shows are extended beyond their organic life. On the flipside, there seemed so much going on this season, whole episodic diversions that entertain but slow the pace, a mixture of intricate link of cause and effect and very loosely orchestrated side-stories that it feels like there could be two episodes’ worth of important details and nuances on the cutting-room …and certainly, by the time we get to the finale, Exodus, things are rattling along so fast that a ton of connective tissue seems to get lost in the shuffle. And that’s a shame… as a show built on intricate details, overtly handwaves some events and convenient motivational changes as we rush by.
(For a supposedly secret bunker, a lot of surface-people seem to have heard about Paradise and have a good idea of where to find it. Also, for a community that’s been told the outside world is unlivable, there’s not a huge degree of shock when Link’s crew come knocking at a very big door, camped under what seems a pretty nice, sunny day. We’re told that the surface conditions are likely to vary considerably and the world isn’t ‘safe’ yet, but… hmmmm redux…)
Paradise remains good television, but it does seem that the third season will have to pivot again into full science-fiction… can it keep that conspiratorial core that worked so well? (I rated the first season a ‘9’, but this time around it gets an ‘8’ with caveats).
Fogelman’s Law seems to be “This isn’t what you thought it was…” That continual reinvention can be fun and cat-nip television, especially when populated with interesting characters with conflicting agendas but somewhere, somewhen Paradise needs a stable core for the maelstrom to swirl around and as we ready to enter the third chapter, the production will have to learn from previous classic shows that got scuppered on the rocks of abstract ambitions.
Three seasons in, then done? Okay. But it does need a firm ending, though I suspect four seasons might have served it better when it came to actual pacing. Paradise found an audience but will need to decide its narrative more firmly – providing actual direction not just bespoke misdirection mystique. To quote Fox Mulder, I want to believe. I do NOT want to find out this is being made up as we go along with bluster and bravado and that then there’s a scurry to make it all make sense and no way to do so.
Because everyone wants their Paradise found, but no-one wants Paradise/LOST.
All of Paradise: Season Two is now available on Hulu…