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“You’ll still be terrified, but the joy will be unbelievable. Picture yourself playing with your child, watching them splash in the bath or kick a soccer ball for the first time. Sometimes, Annie, it feels like your heart might just burst.”
“My dad always said that if you were lucky, you’d have moments when you experience life at full volume. That’s how he described it: ‘life at full volume.’ Those instances when you’re completely present, and everything around you slows down, and all the textures, colors, and sounds become vividly clear.”
Conveying the impact of Paradise has been a challenge. On the surface, it’s one of the most whimsical shows I’ve encountered, blending the premise of Fallout with the style of an NBC prime-time drama. Yet, time and again, it hits me with the force of a freight train. I pride myself on not being easily swayed by drama, so what makes this show different?
The answer is straightforward: Paradise captures life at full volume. It focuses on those moments when it feels like your heart is about to explode. It’s an emotional powerhouse, using a mix of human interest and post-apocalyptic, survivalist, political-thriller, and sci-fi elements to evoke love, hope, and grief in profound ways. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.
I’m genuinely impressed by the courage it takes to create something like this, and by the boldness required for this particular episode’s storyline. Barely after introducing us to Shailene Woodley’s resilient and reclusive character, Annie, Paradise unexpectedly removes her from the narrative.
The blow hits harder because of the work the script, by Stephen Markley, does in leading us to expect the opposite. Remember how our hero, Secret Service agent turned rebel Xavier Collins, ended the previous episode chained to his bed by Annie? She frees him within minutes in this one, obviously aware that there’s no way she can simultaneously help him regain his strength and force him to bring her back to his safe bunker community in Colorado.
In fact, there’s no way she can force him to do that at all, as they both eventually come to acknowledge. (You get the sense Annie new her plan wouldn’t work, and was just hoping against hope.) Xavier’s trying to reunite with a wife estranged from him by the end of the goddamn world, for crying out loud. As sympathetic as he is to Annie’s plight, he has to find Teri before he’ll return to the bunker. Annie, to her credit, understands, and doesn’t fight it anymore.
Only after they’ve been on the road for a while, however, does the extent of Annie’s trouble become apparent. She suffers from preeclampsia, causing pain, blurred vision, and a great deal of risk to both mother and child. When she goes into labor, Xavier races off — and I mean it, he books it, on foot — to a nearby survivor homestead.
The pair have already argued about this group. Annie admits she stayed behind in her Graceland hideaway when her babydaddy, Link, headed West because she was afraid of the outside world. Her advice to Xavier upon passing a horse-drawn Chevy pickup in the road is to avoid eye contact, say nothing, and white-knuckle it till the threat has passed. Xavier, however, insists that they cannot begin to treat every other human being as a threat.
You have to have a little trust in times like these, he argues — despite the fact that he trusted in an entire system that betrayed him and his family over and over. Maybe this is shoddy writing, but it doesn’t come across that way in the hands of actor Sterling K. Brown. No, he makes it sound like trusting other people, believing the best about them, is not naïveté, but the foundation of what makes us human.
When he runs off to find the other survivors to gather supplies, director Ken Olin gives us every reason to believe this is a huge mistake. For one thing, Xavier sneaks past a series of signs reading NO TRESPASSING – NO FOOD HERE in big block letters, clearly intended to discourage foraging attempts just like this. For another, he is Black, and he enters a home owned by a bearded, middle-aged white gun owner. You don’t really need to follow current events particularly closely to assume how this might go.
But it’s not just current events working against him here, it’s the entire 21st-century post-apocalypse genre. Its most popular, zeitgeisty incarnation, The Walking Dead pre–ratings crash, had a surefire recipe for sequences like this: The group of survivors you’re beseeching for help are always psychopaths or cannibals, because everyone else is always out to get you, the viewer, specifically. Whether they intended it or not, TWD’s message so resonated with fascist paranoia about the monstrous Other that Jared Kushner once crowed about placing Trump 2016 ads during its commercial breaks.
Paradise counts on its viewers’ familiarity with The Walking Dead, The Last of Us, and other post-Romero post-apocalypses, where the greatest threat always comes from other people. It counts on it — then subverts it. Because within a minute or two of Xavier getting into a life-or-death brawl with the male survivors, the bearded patriarch (Scott Peat) shows up in the abandoned waffle joint where Annie prepares to give birth, carrying his gun…and bringing Xavier and a whole community of survivors with them to help.
I wish i could say it worked out. Annie’s baby daughter is delivered alive and well into the world. It’s an echo of the episode’s flashback sequences, which touchingly depict Xavier, President Cal Bradford (whose bedside manner is incredible for a non-physician), and the billionaire dictator Sinatra — who lost her own son to illness — all fight to emotionally make it through the bunker’s first underground birth. (Of course, she secretly has no plans to let the kid or anyone else live their whole life down there, but no one else knows that yet.)
We’re given every reason to believe neither the baby nor the mother will make it, until both do. I adored the moment when Cal points out to the mom that the doctors are all leaving the delivery room, since the baby is safe and there’s nothing more they need to do. It’s such a smart way of comforting a person.
But Annie’s story ends differently. Unable to extract her placenta or stop her bleeding, the survivors and Xavier can only watch helplessly as she bleeds out. In her final acts she leaves her baby in Xavier’s care, charging him with reuniniting the kid with her father out in Colorado. “Link,” as we know him, is busy almost at that moment, threatening the bunker community’s video camera using Love, Actually–style handwritten signs unless they let him and his fellow survivors in.
The moment he sees Xavier Link’s student ID, he recognizes him as the man from the post-concussion dream-memory-visions he’s been having. No, I have no idea what that could mean, any more than I knew what it meant that that scientist played by Patrick Fischler predicted that his assassin, Billy Pace, would soon have a nosebleed after killing him. Some larger force appears to be at work here, that’s for sure.
In the end, after riding off to the sunset with a baby strapped to his chest in an adventure-hero image I thought I’d grown tired of until seeing it here, Xavier does reach Atlanta to find Teri, his wife. There, a coworker and friend of Teri’s (played by Cameron Britton, best known as Mindhunter’s towering, taciturn maniac Ed Kemper) informs him she’s been “taken from me.” I trust the larger force at work to reunite them, wherever they are.
For now, though, I return to Annie’s great fear, expressed to Xavier when she tells the story of seeing a lightning-streaked tornado the size of a city pass by. With her child nearly arrived, she worried about “what storms will come.” It’s a phrase that haunts Xavier, as he tells the weed-smoking ex–chemistry teacher who helped deliver the baby (Celeste Oliva). It haunted Annie, too, whose pre-written letter to her baby informs her she’s been born into “a hard world.” Looking around our own climate-ravaged, fascist-run world, it’s hard to disagree.
But the lightning storm serves a dual purpose, I think. Spectacle is the language of unspeakable emotion, of feelings too big for us to articulate in the vocabulary of the everyday. In that massive stormcloud, I see a representation of everything else Xavier and Annie have talked about. I see joy capable of making your heart explode. I see the “holy charge” Xavier and Annie lay upon one another to safeguard that baby, a charge made electrically literal.
And not a moment too soon to see it, either. Though I had a feeling what the show might do, my reaction to Xavier and the other survivors’ arrival at that waffle place was one of the most unique I’ve had in many years of watching television professionally. After the initial fakeout where the grandpa comes in with his gun drawn, when I saw that he was actually there not to hurt or dominate Annie, but to help her, I burst out in joyous laughter. Then I cried. To give of yourself to another person, expecting nothing in return: What is such an act, if not life lived at full volume?
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.