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Watching Paradise is akin to facing off against a remarkably skilled professional wrestler. Initially, you might doubt their prowess, but soon the powerful chops hit your chest, the rapid knees take you by surprise, and the aerial 450 splash finishes you off. The show’s emotional punches are sharp and precise, leaving a lasting impact.
Credit for this goes to directors Glenn Ficara and John Requa, who crafted last season’s pivotal first and final episodes. Their visual style is as radiant as a Middle-earth sunset, with close-ups that evoke the intimacy of a moment before a kiss. They masterfully capture everyday moments that make characters relatable while seamlessly transitioning to action-thriller sequences when needed.
Composer Siddartha Khosla plays an equally significant role, with his music elevating the series to new heights. A less ambitious score could have undermined the show’s impact, but Khosla’s compositions are celestial. The recurring themes and ambient sounds enhance scenes, transforming the ordinary into something extraordinary.
The episode’s extensive flashback sequence exemplifies this. Sparked by a knee injury from a plane crash, we learn that Xavier Collins first injured his left kneecap during Secret Service training.
In the hospital, he encounters Teri, his future wife, portrayed by the delightful Enuka Okuma. Teri is there for scoliosis surgery to alleviate her chronic back pain. Focused on earning her doctorate, she initially keeps the clearly interested Xavier at bay. However, when a rare complication from her surgery temporarily blinds her, Xavier remains by her side with unwavering support, as though they’ve been partners for a decade.
To be honest, the sequence overstays its welcome. Our last several returns to the past prior to the storyline’s conclusion are basically just Xavier standing around as Teri makes no progress, over and over. The material could easily have been condensed or cut, and probably should have been. The longer you watch it, the cornier it looks.
But Khosla’s score makes even treading water feel like bathing in a cool stream descending from Olympus on high. It’s because of him that we make it to the grand finale: Teri regaining her eyesight and reaching for Xavier’s face in the blinding sunset. It’s a whopper of an image, and the music helps us swallow it. At key moments in both the past and present storylines it takes over the scenes entirely, subsuming the dialogue, communicating in sound what perhaps words only imply.
It even adds an additional layer of mysterious awe to the improbable visions of Link, the guy we met last episode, whom we’d no reason to believe had ever met Xavier before. Is this just a memory we weren’t privy to, or is Xavier psychic now? The music makes me feel like either is equally possible.
The show’s finishing move, to borrow once again from wrestling parlance, is its lead. Sterling K. Brown is one of the most likeable actors of the prestige television era. He’s got the chops to handle serious dramatic work — and to make melodrama feel non-formulaic, which is a tricky thing. He has an intense screen presence that makes him convincingly formidable as a physical combatant, like when he kills a would-be killer by drowning him face-down in a puddle of mud. Finally, he has the broad, easy, slightly goofy smile of a cowpoke blushing and holding the brim of his hat and saying “Aw shucks, ma’am, ‘twarn’t nothin’.”
In other words, when you put this guy through his paces — crash his plane in Arkansas before he can rescue his wife in Atlanta, pop out his knee, pelt him with hail, pop in his knee, force him to fight for his life, have a gang of feral children steal all his shit, get rescued by a gun-toting pregnant lady who immediately chains him up and demands he take her and her unborn baby back to his safe bunker in Colorado — you put us through those paces, too.
In the course of all this we see some remarkable things. He strikes up a rapport with Daniel (Alexander Gumpert), the leader of a pack of otherwise almost entirely mute children who were left stranded on their own during a travel-team road trip when the shit hit the fan. He watches the children bury the man he kills, seemingly out of respect for the dead, before passing out from the stab wound we only just realize in that moment he’d incurred at all. He learns that one of the kids keeps his eyes closed all the time not because he’s ill, but because that way he can still see the faces of his parents, whom he does not wish to forget.
It’s all so effectively written and performed, shot and scored, that I don’t particularly care if it’s manipulative. It’s good television, that’s what it is. And hey, it didn’t do the corny “breathy cover of a massive pop-rock hit” gimmick at the end! So far, this season’s three-episode premiere is two for two.
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.