Paradise was lauded the ‘best show of 2025’ – season 2 let me down

Paradise season 1 blew me away like a caldera explosion in the Antarctic when it debuted last year.  

A strange mash-up of a murder-mystery and post-apocalyptic thriller set in an underground bunker, the sci-fi series followed the last remnants of humanity after a mass extinction event known as ‘The Day’. 

What on paper sounds like another clichéd action series quickly proved to be a thought-provoking political drama about family and connection in the face of extinction. 

Heck, some people even called it ‘the best show of 2025’!

Our hero was Xavier (Sterling K. Brown), a Secret Service agent in The Bunker investigating the murder of the US President, who uncovers a frankly bonkers conspiracy theory.  

Indeed, I enjoyed the first season so much that I half-expected it to get cancelled, as is often the fate of shows I love that ended on a cliffhanger.  

Thankfully, my cynicism proved misplaced, and here we are with season two now streaming on Disney Plus.  

So, what did I make of it? Well, it’s complicated.  

Let’s start with some of the good. Part of what made the first season so entertaining was that it was essentially a mystery box-type series that kept audiences guessing from start to finish.  

And if you thought that, now that Xavier had left The Bunker, you knew where this story was going, well, think again. 

Whenever you expect Paradise to zig after it zags, you’ll quickly be proven wrong, and its ambition to keep you guessing remains arguably one of its greatest strengths. 

Yet, this ambition is also its biggest weakness.  

Paradise season 2 is far too scattershot and disjointed, haphazardly introducing multiple new locations, jumping between timelines, and picking up different people’s stories between episodes.  

This all makes it surprisingly difficult to follow at times, not least of all because there’s only so many times you can see people learning about The Day before wanting to fast forward through them Googling ‘caldera’ and ‘nuclear winter’.   

The vaguely incoherent pacing and plotting are made worse by the decision to take the drama out of The Bunker and into what remains of society.  

The Bunker was just a more interesting setting, which was creepy in its insidious innocuousness. 

Now, on the surface (pun unintended,) the wasteland may seem more dangerous, but it’s also a setting that fans of post-apocalyptic fiction know far too well. 

If you’ve seen The Last of Us or Fallout, then you’ve seen the ruins of yesterday so many times at this point that it’s hard to get too worried about psychotic raiders, hopeful survivors and the last dregs of a species running on empty. 

By contrast, The Bunker was a place that seemed familiar but alien at the same time.  

It was an uncanny facsimile of the world that was, where dangerous secrets hid behind picket fences and middle-class housing.  

In short, it was scarier because you never really knew how deep the conspiracy ran, which gave Paradise such an oppressive atmosphere where you couldn’t trust anyone.  

Season 2, with its muddled story, cavalcade of different characters, and familiar setting, never quite manages to reach the paranoid and mysterious heights of the first eight episodes.  

There’s just too much going on, which makes it weird that at times you can feel the show spinning its wheels.

And yet for all my gripes, I still found myself entertained by Paradise season 2, or at least I was never bored.

It’s like Lost or Silo, I might moan about mysteries for the sake of mysteries I still want to know the answers.  

I think that might come down to the characters. Yes, I know I said there were too many of them, but there are a handful that’ll leave an impression on you, and it remains very well acted.

Ultimately, though, Paradise season two is a victim of the first series success and my high expectations.

I wanted Paradise, and I got purgatory…

Paradise season 2 episodes one to three are available to stream now on Disney Plus, with new episodes available weekly. 

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