Summary
Paradise Season 2 gets off to a bold start in “Graceland”, a largely unrelated hour about grief and loneliness that only connects to the main plot at the very end.
If you remember anything about the first season of Paradise, what springs to mind is probably the brilliant fake-out premiere that revealed what seemed like a fairly standard murder-mystery to really be a post-apocalyptic political thriller of an extremely distinguished vintage. Season 2 couldn’t really outdo that, so it doesn’t try to. Instead, Episode 1 is ballsy in a different way — by being nothing at all to do with the first season’s plot, at least not until the very end.
What this means functionally is that all those tantalising cliffhangers from the finale aren’t addressed. We’ll have to wait. Instead, “Graceland” introduces a small handful of totally new characters and takes the exact opposite approach of the first season’s sheltered look at the end of the world from those privileged enough to have survived it. Now we’re seeing what happened on the outside, from a totally new perspective.
It’s a bold idea. Paradise is no stranger to those, of course, but the expansive flashback approach feels more specific to series creator Dan Fogelman and to This Is Us than to this show specifically. There’s a risk of frustrating returning fans by refusing to pick right up from where things were left off, but the quality is still there, so perhaps it doesn’t matter. That’s what I like about Paradise — it respects the audience’s patience and intelligence, and trusts us to buy into the emotional character drama above the twists and turns of the plot.
Our point-of-view character in this premiere is Annie (Shailene Woodley), who we meet as a young girl during a Graceland tour. Her mother is a giant Elvis fan. And then she dies. These two things aren’t strictly related, but her mother’s love for Elvis becomes inextricably tangled in Annie’s grief, as we’ll see.
Adult Annie is a medical student, but still burdened by this trauma, so when a patient’s symptoms reflect her mother’s, she nearly passes out and drops out of medical school immediately. To console herself, she parks outside Graceland. It’s the closest she can get to her mother, or at least her memory. She also can’t park there, technically, but the security guard, Gail, realises something is amiss and is not only gentle with her but also offers her a job as a tour guide. In a nice touch, Annie’s tours reflect the ones she experienced as a child; same facts, same anecdotes, same bad joke.
There’s a Graceland tour underway when President Bradford gives his emergency address. This is the first time that Paradise Season 2, Episode 1 reveals itself to be connected to the first season’s plot at all. In case you’ve forgotten, the eruption of a supervolcano underneath the Antarctic ice shelf triggered a calamitous tsunami that also led to a nuclear stand-off. Instead of obliterating the surviving superpowers, Cal instead triggered a giant EMP network that preserved the Earth but deprived it of all power and technology. It’s eventually revealed that Annie was living in Graceland the entire time.
Initially, Annie had company in the form of Gail, but she eventually expired due to infection from a badly broken leg. Then Annie was alone for a long time. Years. And she remained alone until a group of survivors stumbled upon her, looking for Elvis’s cars. Most of this premiere is about the tentative relationship that Annie forms with Link, a member of the group. It’s like a sweet, capsule love story as two people who have become used to simply surviving get a fleeting opportunity to live again.
Link’s group doesn’t mean Annie any harm, but they do mean someone harm, since upon their departure, one of them mentions finding the bunker — which to them is just a rumour — and “killing Alex”, whoever that is. We get some helpful information from this group, estimating that 60+% of the population was wiped out by the tsunami and ensuing societal collapse. In the years since, they have been touring America and disabling nuclear power plants, which are disasters waiting to happen. We also learn that the giant ash cloud cooled the Earth. One of their group, Urkel — named after his passing resemblance to Steve — has even theorised that a major superpower set off an EMP, which is laughed off as a kind of madcap conspiracy theory, even though we know it’s true.
But it’s also lovely. Annie and Link’s little relationship is romantic but steeped in tragedy, which comes to the fore in a beautiful scene where they both cry with the relief of some physical intimacy and companionship, and then again when Link’s group is leaving, and Annie can’t bring herself to go with them. It isn’t until the sped-up months pass by that we realise Annie is pregnant with Link’s child.
At the very end of the premiere, now on the cusp of giving birth, Annie hears an explosion outside. Recalling a note Link left claiming he’d come back and get her, she thinks this might be his return, so she grabs a gun, jumps astride a horse, and sets out to investigate. What she finds instead is a crash site, and on the ground, an unconscious Xavier Collins.
