Paradise, the hit post-apocalyptic thriller from This Is Us creator Dan Fogelman, stars Sterling K. Brown as Xavier Collins, a Secret Service agent living in an underground bunker in Colorado, where the country’s richest and most powerful people work in secret to control the survivors. After the murder of his boss, the President (James Marsden), leads him to uncover the conspiracy’s leader, the billionaire known as Sinatra (Julianne Nicholson), Xavier must set out to the surface world to rescue his still-living wife —
Hang on, I’m receiving an update. [pause] Really? Interesting! Okay, I’ll start again.
Paradise, the hit post-apocalyptic thriller from This Is Us creator Dan Fogelman, stars Shailene Woodley as Annie, a Graceland tour guide living in Elvis’s old home, where a group of interloping do-gooders camp out before heading west for the Colorado bunker. They’re joining a larger group of people who hope to crack the bunker’s secret wide open — and kill someone named Alex, whoever that is. After Annie discovers she’s pregnant by one of the do-gooders, a man nickamed Link (Thomas Doherty), she heads out to a plane crash site expecting to find him returning for her. Instead, she finds Xavier Collins, who needs no further introduction.
That about covers both the events of the Season 2 premiere of Paradise, and the bold gambit that co-writers Fogelman and Eric Wen employ with this episode. Without a word of explanation, they plop us down in the life of a lonely little girl (Alora Brooke Johnson) and her sickly, chain-smoking mother (Betsy Moore), an Elvis obsessive whose daughter has the Graceland tour committed to memory. The girl, of course, is Annie, who goes into medical school in an implied attempt to right the wrongs of her mother’s death.
But the stress of med school triggers Annie’s residual trauma. She drops out and finds herself back at Graceland, the one place she feels safe. Gail (Angel Laketa Moore), a friendly security guard, takes pity on her and lets her know they’re looking for tour guides. Naturally, she gets the job…so Graceland is where she and Gail hole up when the world ends in a catastrophic mega-volcano/tsunami/ash cloud/eternal winter combo. Gail, unfortunately, breaks her leg on her way down into Elvis’s subterranean TV room the day of, and dies of the infection within two months.
Years pass, and Annie spends them alone. Then a gang of post-apocalyptic wanderers with heavy equipment and motorcycles bursts in, looking for Elvis’s vintage cars. Link, the youngest member of the group, is sort of their half-leader, half-mascot. Despite some early misgivings — she concusses him and steals his gun — Annie warms to Link and the rest of the crew.
How can you not? They’re friendly, they’re nerdy in the non-Gamergate sense, and they go around safely shutting down nuclear plants to prevent meltdowns. You literally could not pick a better gang of roving barbarians to hook up with.
Hooking up is exactly what Annie does, eventually. Wearing one of Priscilla’s pink dresses, she attends the group’s final candlelit dinner before they head west. The other guys subtly allow her and Link to disappear into the recesses of Elvis’s mansion, where eventually they make love. But when Link asks her to come with them, she refuses, unable to leave the jungle-themed womb she’s lived in since Gail’s death.
Months pass, and Annie is visibly pregnant when she hears a low-flying plane crash into a nearby no man’s land, one Link warned her about. Getting it into her head that this is her man, returned to her at last only to be brought low at the last minute, the very preggo Annie packs heat, gets on a horse, and rides off into the wilderness. It’s exactly as badass as it sounds.
But she doesn’t find Link. She finds Xavier, who escaped the billionaire rat’s nest in Colorado in search of his scientist wife. His belief that she, along with everyone on the surface, was dead animated much of his life underground. Now that he knows the truth, he’s more than just a loose cannon, he’s a liability to the powers that be. I’ve got a feeling Annie’s about to learn that at her leisure.
Annie’s story itself is fairly standard, straightforward survival-fiction fare. The storytelling is marked with the usual flashes of Fogelman schmaltz and cheese. Poverty is signified by ashtrays, laundry on a line, and a woman in a housedress. Goodness is signified by handsomeness. There are breathy female-vocal covers of not one but two pop classics, in now-standard maximum-cringe Paradise fashion: “Unchained Melody” and “Can’t Help Falling in Love.” They do the “woman gets pregnant after having sex with a guy one time because he’s just that important to her” trope, for god’s sake!
But I’d forgotten just how effective, how ruthless, Fogelman can be when he’s determined to make the audience feel something. And like, I’m sorry, but I fell in love with Annie and Link in this episode!
It’s the scene where they finally get together that does it for me. For one thing, they don’t fall instantly into each other’s arms. They chat, then fall silent, awkwardly prowling around each other. As they’ve done throughout their relationship, they suffer unintentionally revealing communication breakdowns when Link, who’s much younger than Annie, doesn’t recognize her pop-culture references. (He asks what her favorite Elvis song is, she eventually says “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”, and he answers as if she were really asking him the question.)
When they do finally fall into each other’s arms, it’s not to kiss, but to cry. Neither of these people has been intimate with anyone in years; Annie, at least, seems to have foreclosed on the possibility entirely. So now we watch as she sobs into him, deep into an unbroken four-plus minute shot of just the two of them. She’s not sad, not even upset really, just overwhelmed that this kind of intimacy is once again possible in her life.
When they begin to kiss, the action starts cross-cutting, bouncing back and forth between different points in their night together. One moment they’ll be fucking, naked; the next she’s turning around to have him unzip her dress. It’s an homage to the similarly spacetime-confounding sex scene in Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, but I frankly prefer this version to that one, in which the couple were reminiscing about their lovemaking as they got dressed. This is more an experience of everything everywhere all at once, the way a first breathless sexual encounter can feel. Composer Siddartha Khosla’s score swells and hums expectantly, tremulously, throughout.
And Woodley is remarkable. She carries the entire episode on her back; even in her relationships with Gail and Link, the real question is how Annie navigates losing someone and gaining someone, placing the weight on Woodley’s shoulders. Sustaining that long unbroken take through multiple stages of flirting and crying and grieving and laughing and caressing is no joke. I won’t say she makes it look easy: She makes it look hard, because it is hard. Then she’ll crack a joke about her armpit hair, which the show presents as the sexiest thing in the world, like she didn’t just spend four minutes mourning a lost world and celebrating a rebirth of love within it. That’s acting, baby!
I’d imagine a premiere that doesn’t include a single character with whom we’re familiar until the final seconds is going to test some viewers’ patience, but it piqued my interest and fired my enthusiasm. This is wild play for Paradise to make starting up — essentially enlarging the Desmond/Hatch or Juliet/Others opening scenes from old Lost season remieres to episode length — and it succeeds completely. If this show keeps throwing curveballs like this, we’re in for a treat.
Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.
