Paradise Season 2 Was a Stunning Emotional Drama but a Frustrating Sci-Fi Mystery

[Warning: The following contains spoilers for the Season 2 finale of Paradise, "Exodus."]

Paradise is a little chameleon of a show, isn't it? The Hulu series was originally marketed as a political thriller from This Is Us creator Dan Fogelman, with a pilot episode that set up a story about a Secret Service agent named Xavier Collins (Sterling K. Brown) investigating the murder of President of the United States Cal Bradford (James Marsden) — until the last few minutes of that episode revealed that, surprise, all of these people are actually living inside an idyllically designed bunker deep underground in Colorado because some apocalyptic event has taken place. Season 1 expertly toggled between following that murder mystery storyline and slowly revealing what had happened to necessitate that bunker. In the finale of Season 1, there was yet another reveal: There are survivors up on the surface, and the woman in charge inside the bunker, billionaire with a grief kink Samantha Redmond (Julianne Nicholson), has been hiding that fact from everyone else. It blew the show wide open. Paradise had a much bigger scope than what was going on inside the bunker. It felt like a true feat to pull off a show with so many sides and do it with such tight, focused storytelling. 

Season 2 is also two shows at once. This time around, Paradise is an emotional character drama and a major sci-fi/speculative fiction story. Like Season 1, the premiere is completely unexpected: It tells the story of a completely new character, Annie (Shailene Woodley), who grows up lonely and eventually has to try to survive the end of the world barricaded in the place where she worked when things went tits up — Graceland. Her story eventually ties into that of Paradise at large, but for the most part, it is untethered from Season 1 and yet still packs an emotional punch so effective that viewers are fine totally ditching the bunker. Annie's other big episode, "A Holy Charge," sees her teaming up with Xavier to find his now very much alive wife, Teri (Enuka Okuma), in Atlanta before bringing a very pregnant Annie back to the bunker in Colorado, so she can unite with Link (Thomas Doherty), the man she's in love with, who happens to be plotting to lay siege to our underground home. (It's a whole thing.) Again, this episode, in which Annie tragically dies in childbirth with Xavier at her side, is, both literally and emotionally speaking, miles away from the bunker story and yet also might be the best episode of the season. 

Its only real competition for that title comes from the following episode, "The Mailman," yet another installment that takes us completely away from bunker business and shows us another new character who survives the end of the world, Gary the Mailman (Cameron Britton). His story, fairly quickly, intersects with that of Teri Rogers-Collins, whom he saves and brings into his small survivalist group at an Atlanta post office, but the episode is focused on Gary, and even though we just met him and have zero ties to this character, it delivers a whopper of an emotional impact. These two episodes are Paradise Season 2 at its absolute best — they are stunning hours of TV with two incredible central performances — and yet that somehow still seems like a problem. 

Remember, Paradise Season 2 hasn't cast off the bunker and its inhabitants — mainly, Samantha Redmond — in favor of some emotional character-forward drama about people trying to make a life at the end of the world (although clearly, I would watch that show). No, instead, the other half of this season pulls the show into a full-on science-fiction mystery box series by tossing in some good old-fashioned allusions to quantum entanglement, timeline anomalies, and changing the future by manipulating the past. By the end of the season finale, Paradise confirms that the mysterious "Alex" Samantha has been fixated on is a quantum computer being housed in a second bunker underneath the Denver Airport that is perhaps more powerful than they imagined, and it seems to be making predictions — including Samantha's death — and possibly manipulating time. 

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Early in the season, we learn that Samantha was informed that the supervolcano eruption that caused the tsunami that destroyed the planet was just the beginning of the apocalypse. While the surface would be livable for a few years following that catastrophe, sooner or later the Venus Syndrome would kick in, trapping greenhouse gases within the atmosphere, turning the planet into an inhospitable desert, killing most remaining living things. She's told that the only thing that can save people from that fate is the one thing she cannot buy — time. By the end of Season 2, it seems she has attempted to buy more time anyway by somehow using this computer to somehow save the world, perhaps by resetting the timeline or by letting ALEX somehow manipulate the past to change the future. 

All of those "somehow"s aren't a typo — Paradise is infuriatingly vague as to how ALEX can be used to save the world. The season ends with the primary bunker suffering a nuclear meltdown and imploding, the bunker inhabitants escaping to safety on the surface, Samantha sacrificing herself to protect those people from a radiation blast by staying in the bunker as her ship goes down, so to speak, and Samantha passing on a mission to Xavier handed to her from ALEX, in which she informs him of the computer, hands him a card with coordinates, and tells him it's on him to save the world. When Xavier asks why she thinks he will do any of what she's asking, she replies, "I believe you already have." It's a banger of a line and clearly sets the stakes for Season 3, but it is perhaps too mysterious for its own good. 

So much of Samantha's storyline suffers from that issue this season. Sure, a mystery box sci-fi show needs to keep up some mystery for future seasons; it needs to build to a final reveal. But the best ones at least drop exciting clues along the way. In Season 2, we get some information as to what ALEX is, and we know Samantha dies believing ALEX and her plan are working, but we get nothing in between. And by the end of the season, even these reveals aren't exactly surprising if you've been paying attention. Because there is nothing remotely concrete in these episodes that explains how Samantha is using ALEX to prevent the end of the world, it feels like rather than telling a full story on its own, Season 2 is fully in service of setting up Season 3. The season needs to do some setup to hook the audience for more, sure, but it makes for a much less satisfying watch on its own than the first season did. 

Paradise Season 1 deftly tied together two distinct genres of television, making both the murder mystery and the apocalypse drama equally compelling. Season 2 can't pull off the same magic trick while balancing the deeply emotional human drama, where it excels, and the sci-fi mystery it is revealing itself to be. By playing too coy with what this show is seemingly trying to make its endgame, that portion of the show doesn't satisfy the same way its deep dives into characters do. Sure, when Paradise concludes its story, we can look back and say Season 2 was a bridge to get to the point of it all, but we already know this show can pull off a satisfying arc while juggling sometimes disparate genres and still open up the story for what's next. Here's hoping Season 3 will course correct, whether by quantum computer or by tightening up the storytelling to make all aspects of the series not only satisfying but as riveting as this season's character work was.

Paradise Season 2 is now streaming on Hulu.