Paradise season two: Post-apocalyptic drama offers crucial lesson in humanity and trust

Are we really living through a time of apocalyptic vibes?

There are climate catastrophes, regional wars that become greater questions about what we will and will not accept depending on who’s doing the dying, and the fact the bad guys are now openly flaunting their villainy.

It feels all a bit end-of-days. Maybe that’s why there are so many dystopian TV shows and movies – The Last of Us, Silo, Fallout, The Handmaid’s Tale, Pluribus, 28 Years Later, Snowpiercer, The Midnight Sky and The Quiet Place are just some of the many.

But like all those people who watched Contagion at the start of the pandemic, by seeing our fears and hopefully-still-paranoia play out on screen, it actually helps to process some of those anxieties.

The unknowable becomes knowable. There’s something of a roadmap, and the thing that almost all these stories have in common is they try to find the humanity that still exists in the face of societal obliteration.

There’s a grace to them, as well as a warning.

In the lead-up to TV series Paradise’s first season, it hid its true self. It was packaged as a slick murder mystery starring Sterling K. Brown, Julianne Nicholson and James Marsden, but what it revealed at the end of that first episode was that it all took place in a doomsday bunker populated by 30,000 handpicked survivors.

There was a Truman Show-esque artificiality to its very curated and controlled bunker world, right down to the controlling head manipulating everything, in this case, a tech billionaire named Sam “Sinatra” Redmond (Nicholson). Those billionaires, am I right?

The centrepiece of the first season was its penultimate chapter which detailed, in alarming and impressive strokes, the day everything ended. There was panic and there was redemption amid the seemingly very potentially real scenario of how it could go down. One word: supervolcano.

The big reveal at the end of the first season is the world outside the bunker didn’t disappear. The former president, Cal Bradford (Marsden, who returns this season in limited flashback moments), chose not to activate nuclear annihilation, instead, to give everyone a chance to salvage what remained.

That, and Xavier Collins’s (Brown) wife, Teri, was still alive, last heard somewhere near Atlanta. The closing shots were of Xavier making a break from the bunker in search of the woman he had assumed dead for the past three years.

The second season opens not with Xavier but with an entirely new character, Annie (Shailene Woodley), who was a tour guide at Elvis’s Graceland when the apocalypse hits.

Annie’s story is a stunning piece of storytelling because the series, created by Dan Fogelman, has the confidence to divert that whole first hour to telling it, trusting that audiences will find the emotional value in discovering how people survive the impossible.

In Annie’s case, it’s to hole up inside Graceland, subsisting on canned food and using candles sold in the gift shop. She’s also someone who was already a lonely person before the end of days, and being put in an extreme situation doesn’t help her to trust people more.

But it’s something Annie will have to confront when a group of survivors push their way into Gracelands three years later, including a young man named Link (Thomas Doherty).

Annie will eventually cross paths with Xavier but there’s something incredibly urgent about her story. In a dystopian environment (or even just one where the vibes feel like it’s going that way), the easier thing to do is to harden your heart, to be sceptical of everyone you meet and their motives.

But that’s not how we’re supposed to live. Humans are pack animals, we need other people, and for that to work you have to put your trust in someone else, in strangers.

When the political rhetoric not just overseas but also in Australia becomes a race to the bottom of “us” versus “them”, when so-called leaders use immigrants and values tests as footballs, or when they speak of “meeting people where they are” as opposed to actually, you know, leading, it’s all too easy to see the world along divisions.

When anxiety levels are high, your instinct is to cocoon and hoard, to protect yourself and yours, but humanity has always thrived as an open collective.

That’s the real value in Paradise. Not the plot machinations and mystery box layers of narratives (and there are quite a few in this at-times convoluted second season of which seven out of eight episodes were made available to reviewers), but in characters who believe or learn that love, trust and faith in the best of people is the only way forward.

There will always be bad people driven by self-interest and prejudice, and there will be set-backs, tragedies and disappointments, but you don’t win by giving into fear.

Paradise season two is on Disney+ with new episodes weekly on Mondays