Men's Lifestyle February 24, 2026 0 Comments

Paradise Season 2 Just Dropped – Here’s Why It’s Still Crushing EVERY Expectation and Leaving Fans Hooked!

Who would’ve thought that a show about the apocalypse could sneak in and surprise us by being not only an edge-of-your-seat thriller but also genuinely thoughtful? Paradise returns for its second season with a bang—dropping three episodes at once on Hulu—and let me tell you, it’s still packing the same punch. But here’s the kicker: this time around, it digs a little deeper into what a world-ending scenario really means, beyond just the chaos and the scramble. Instead of falling into the tired trope where the rich lock themselves up and the rest fend for scraps, Paradise dares to ask—can humanity still strive for something better when everything’s falling apart? Trust me, this ain’t your run-of-the-mill doom fest. If you’re wondering whether it’ll join the ranks of other apocalypse shows you can’t quite decide to love or hate, hold tight—because Paradise is carving its own path, mixing mystery, heartbreak, and hope in a way that’s pretty rare these days. Ready to dive into what the first three episodes of season two bring? Let’s unpack it. LEARN MORE

7 min read

Who knew that another show about the end of the world where the wealthy batten down the hatches while millions fight for scraps could be so much fun? Or so thoughtful? Paradise is back for its second season with a salvo of not one, not two, but three episodes on Hulu to kick off its sophomore year. The good news is that Paradise is still the same riveting action-drama from last year, only now with more room to poke and prod its version of the post-apocalypse with greater scrutiny.

There is no bad news. This is simply damn fine television we’re talking about here. We come for the mystery and suspense, but we stay for the weepy heart it wears on its sleeves. Maybe in due time Paradise will devolve into another The Walking Dead or The Last of Us or Station Eleven or Pluribus or Fallout—and your mileage on any given series in that bunch may vary. In shows about scarce resources and even scarcer trust, typically our worst instincts rewrite the rules. But for now, I’m relishing how much Paradise strays from the genre’s most well-traveled roads: Just because doom is here doesn’t mean we can’t try to make a better world.

With three episodes out and a lot of story to go with them, let’s break down Paradise‘s first three episodes of season 2.

Brian Roedel//Hulu

What will Sinatra (Julianne Nicholson) scheme up in season 2 of Paradise?

Elvis Has Left the Building

On paper, kicking off a new season with an episode like “Graceland” is a gamble. We’ve spent a whole year away from Xavier (Sterling K. Brown) and everyone at the Bunker, so why on God’s green Earth are we catching up with someone we’ve never seen before?

But Paradise has a lot going for it. Chief among them Shailene Woodley, the former teen idol who joins this season. Even if you never sobbed at The Fault in Our Stars, Woodley has the movie star chops to give necessary weight to a blank slate. The blank slate’s name is Annie, a brilliant med school dropout who knows too much about Elvis Presley thanks to her late mother. When the world collapses, she’s working as a Graceland tour guide; how fitting it is for us to follow someone whose peace is rooted in something the world no longer has any use, and that even the biggest legacies can vanish in an instant.

Some two years later (that “Day 689” title card hits like a jump scare) strangers come to Graceland. For a minute, it feels like Paradise falls backwards into a Last of Us imitator. But Link (Thomas Doherty) and his buddies aren’t traveling madmen looking for kicks. We learn that they’re not only nerds, but nerds with good intentions to restart the world. (Also, just guess how Link got his name.) They’re traveling to nuclear power plants to prevent a catastrophic meltdown, and Graceland just happens to be a stop on the way. Thank heavens they’re smart, because they provide us simpleton viewers some needed exposition about what happened and how. They don’t know everything, but they have theories.

Carrying the rest of the hour is the inevitable romance between Link and Annie. Their week-long stay blossoms into a Titanic-like affair, and a beautifully shot one at that, which leaves Annie pregnant—and us with lots of questions regarding how she’ll manage when it’s time. (She was a gifted med student, sure, but she didn’t graduate and delivery isn’t exactly safe for only one person to handle.) I’m still scratching my head why Annie stays behind while Link and his nerd brigade leave, honestly. But her pregnancy bump is hard to ignore when another man comes crashing into her life: our guy, Xavier Collins.

“Listen for the Clunk”

Where “Graceland” is one long tragic romance, the second episode “Mayday” is a meet-cute wrapped in dramatic irony. The episode revolves around Xavier, zipping to and from his survival in the present and how he met Teri (the sole motivator of all his actions now) in the past. We’ll get the obvious out of the way: Xavier and Teri’s story is nauseatingly cute, even when it predictably climaxes into what “in sickness and in health” really looks like. “It’s fine, you can lie to me,” Teri says, temporarily blind in her bed. “I would never lie to you,” Xavier tells her. Only an ace actor like Sterling K. Brown can make that feel real.

But where “Mayday” really shines is reminding us that Xavier, at his core, is a protector. We met him as a Secret Service agent, essentially a bodyguard and a babysitter with an earpiece. We’ve seen him as a loving father, and we’ve now seen him as a bedside romantic. But “Mayday” lets us see Xavier in his most uncomfortable position yet: vulnerable.

Brian Roedel//Hulu

Xavier Collins (Sterling K. Brown) is back, baby.

His first encounter after his plane crash isn’t with Annie (as we saw at the end of the first episode), but with a gaggle of orphans that the end of the world left behind. For the hour we watch Xavier care for traumatized children as best he can on an injured leg. Despite his limitations, Xavier can and will protect people even when they’re strangers, including kids whose names and stories we never know. (At least for now—Paradise has a way of bringing people back in unexpected manners.) So it hurts when the kids “betray” him by taking his things, including his belongings that contain all he needs to find Teri.

Fate is funny, though. Xavier’s resolve to keep on going no matter what leads him back to the crash site, and back to where we left off just one episode prior. At last, our two protagonists meet.

A Day Unlike Any Other

“Another Day in Paradise,” the third episode, hardly feels typical and Presley is right to call it out. (Also, it just occurred to me that Presley’s name might be how Xavier and Elvis-obsessed Annie might bond.) It’s a dense hour that packs in a lot of material, not to mention ending on a plot-progressing murder.

At the hospital, Samantha (Julianne Nicholson) wakes up from her injuries sustained by Jane (Nicole Brydon Bloom), whom we already know is a menace in a babygirl’s disguise. While Samantha grapples with the fallout of her actions, the bunker has grown rife with paranoia. As Nicole (Krys Marshall) looks after Xavier’s family in his absence, armed police now patrol the streets, disrupting what’s meant to be utopia. Compare the warmth of the (artificial) sun in season 1 to the overcast gloom when Jeremy (Charlie Evans) is arrested for vandalizing the closed library.

It’s a brave and scary new bunker under the new president, Henry (Matt Malloy), who exerts pathetic authority. His master plan to heal morale? Seasons! Because who doesn’t love summer? Never mind the dwindling power supply caused by Samantha’s own hidden plans. Although the season 1 finale implied that Henry is actually a capable leader, he’s really just a dumb dipshit who can’t recognize the threats in front of him. Like Jane. More on that in a bit.)

The flashbacks this episode follow Samantha pre-bunker, who is in the early stages of putting together the bunker’s very existence. Scared stiff by the doomsday lecture, Samantha pursues a company on the verge of a technological breakthrough—heavily implied to be something that makes the bunker possible—by hiring a hitman to force him to sign over the company.

Because Paradise is also a show about fates intertwining, the hitman is none other than Billy Pace (Jon Beavers), joining Cal Bradford (James Marsden) as the show’s growing roster of dead guys who will show up again and again in relevant flashbacks. It’s here that we witness Billy and Samantha’s first-ever meeting, and that Samantha wasn’t always the cold and calculating individual we know her to be. No one is born in darkness. Everyone takes a first step into the abyss, and “Another Day in Paradise” invites us to glimpse Samantha’s baby steps into her more monstrous self.

While Billy is dead as a doornail, he gets another meaningful moment in this episode. After establishing contact with his target—a wiry intellect, whose name is never really revealed, played by guest character actor Patrick Fischler—Billy catches up with the man in his home. There he finds that he isn’t just a bookish executive but a philosophical man caring for his dying wife. (Paradise has a serious thing for ill spouses.) “Do you think that you’re here by random happenstance, or are you here because you’re supposed to be here?” he asks, to which Billy responds, “Fuck if I know, bro.”

Before he’s killed, the man pleads to Billy to spare his brilliant protege, because the fate of the world may depend on him. And he’s right. Minutes later, Billy meets said protege—and it’s Link. Once again, fates are intertwined. Paradise is a thoughtful series, and its spy movie antics and post-apocalyptic settings fail to overwhelm the big heart and soul the show possesses.

The dense “Another Day in Paradise” finally ends with both Jane murdering Henry—poetic that Samantha issues the order in a way she learned from Billy—and framing it on Krys, who is too close to sussing out Jane as Samantha’s own mercenary. Meanwhile, the rift between Gabriela (Sarah Stahl) and Samantha widens.