We all have our ways of coping with death. Unfortunately, this lady has all the money in the world
Stop me if you've heard this one: after a worldwide disaster destroys the modern world as we know it, a few lucky survivors have moved to a secluded underground habitat to ensure that humankind will endure. However, some years later, the assassination of this small community's leader will risk exposing the secrets of the people who actually run the place, and it will be a random nobody's mission to pursue the leads while still dealing with grief over a lost love, a death our protagonist blames the authorities for. Whom can you trust after the world has ended? How do you even get away with murder in a secluded panopticon? And what's really going on outside the shelter?
The Hulu series Paradise isn't entirely unoriginal. It does a fine job of turning post-apocalyptic drama into a meditation on the various ways we learn to keep living after a loved one dies. Each of the few thousand survivors who live in this underground city has someone to mourn, and the extensive flashbacks that take up a good portion of each episode's runtime provide the necessary context for the main cast's seemingly extravagant choices. The viewer ends with a complete idea of what makes these characters tick, even if sometimes it's a broken moral compass.
All through this first season, characters remind each other (and the viewer) that the placid, uneventful imitation of American suburbia they live in doesn't make up for the billions of deaths that happened on the surface on a single, horrific day. If they were ever on their way to getting too comfortable, the loss of their leader is a shocking reminder that death still exists, and no shelter will ward it off. That realization hits especially hard for the billionaire who funded the entire project, a grieving mother who has embarked on a Quixotic mission to keep death away from her remaining child, the world be damned.
This is the most interesting character in Paradise. Normal people understand that death is a thing that happens and our efforts against it can only succeed so many times. But the founder of this underground city is the world's richest woman, and having so much unchallenged power tends to warp your idea of what's possible. One flashback reveals that, when she heard that environmental devastation was imminent, her first thought wasn't to look for ways to use her fortune to save the world; she looked for ways to use her fortune to save the one person who matters to her. She's already lost one child, and now she lives in permanent alert mode. To keep her living child safe, she'll let civilization go to hell if it comes to that. And as the season progresses, the viewer discovers how many deaths she'll consider acceptable for this monomaniacal goal.
When you believe you're prepared for the end of the world, but one day it takes you by surprise, whatever life you manage to build afterwards will be defined by your actions at the moment of crisis. Paradise builds on that idea, and it traces a few parallel plots that mirror each other: parents who make ugly choices for their children's sake, brokenhearted widowers with survivor guilt looking for absolution, desperate people pushed into impossible dilemmas. Although several characters are already dead by the start of the show, their presence haunts every episode. This is a story that relies very heavily on flashbacks, because the way the living characters are written requires the viewer to keep in mind the details of their past in order to make sense of their current actions. The screenwriters seem to be making an argument that every person, even the ones you dislike, is carrying some burden that explains who they are, and empathy for your fellow human requires that you acknowledge how their pain molded them.
Then again, how do you feel empathy for an unfathomably wealthy person who manipulates several scientific geniuses, hundreds of unsuspecting construction workers, and her own government into indulging her fantasy of safety? We've all heard (and some of us have been) parents who say they'd do anything to protect their children. That sentiment looks quite different when it touches someone who is actually able to do anything.
For a show about an entire underground city, Paradise doesn't look particularly impressive. Part of the reason is that the community is intended to remind people of home. Still, the set design is so lacking in an identity of its own (*cough* Silo *cough*) that some of the flashbacks in the outside world are easy to misread as taking place in the underground present. The show also suffers at times from clumsy dialogues and characterization, with some plot developments transparently contrived for the sake of drama. The songs selected as thematic summaries of each episode come too close to the cringey side of in-your-nose-ness. And again, the overuse of flashbacks is a sledgehammer against any hope of maintaining a sense of cohesive pacing.
The draw, despite these failings, is to be found in the performances. As our protagonist, Sterling K. Brown does a solid job of portraying barely contained fury under a face of professional equanimity. Krys Marshall, who has been fantastic in For All Mankind, is here a complex player in the murder investigation, struggling to balance her conflicting loyalties with her sense of justice. Gerald McRaney is positively frightening as the type of domineering patriarch who can bend a nation's fate. And pay close attention to Nicole Brydon Bloom's meticulously controlled performance. Just saying.
This first season ends in the right cliffhanger that was reasonable to expect, and I wouldn't object to seeing more episodes set in this strange, messy, delusional last hope of humankind. But let's say I won't exactly jump in exhilaration if it comes to happen.
Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.
POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.
