Paradise Season 2 Spoiler-Free Review

Paradise Season 2 Spoiler-Free Review Southeast Asia Home Amazon Deals Pro-tips by Codashop PC PS4 Xbox One Nintendo Mobile Entertainment EsportsMoreSearch Home More About IGN SEAContactAdvertisePressUser AgreementPrivacy PolicyCookie PolicyRSSIGN Southeast Asia is operated under license by Media Prima Digital Sdn Bhd (199901014126) Change Region United States United Kingdom Australia Africa Adria Serbian/Croatian Adria Slovenian Benelux / Dutch Brazil China / 中国 Czechia / Slovakia France Germany Greece / Ελλάδα Hungary India Israel Italy / Italia Japan / 日本 Korea / 한국 Latin America Middle East – English Middle East – الأوسطالشرق Nordic Poland Portugal Southeast Asia Spain / España Turkey / Türkiye world.ign.com Register / Login Register / Login Login Register Paradise Paradise Season 2 Spoiler-Free Review Bingeable pulp fun with excellent performances, more sci-fi ideas, and more human moments. This post might contain affiliation links. If you buy something through this post, the publisher may get a share of the sale. By Alex Zalben  Updated: Feb. 21, 2026, 1 a.m. Related reads:MapleStorySEA Celebrates 20th Anniversary With Massive Summer Updates This article contains spoilers for Paradise Season 1; Paradise Season 2 debuts on Hulu on February 23.The first season of Hulu’s Paradise was extremely hard to talk about before it was released, particularly because the premiere episode’s big twist – that the show takes place entirely inside a suburban-style bunker under a mountain in Colorado after the apparent end of the world – was expressly forbidden from being mentioned in reviews. Well, the secret is out, and while there are plenty more twists and turns in Season 2 of the series – including a likely game changer in the finale (seven of the season’s eight episodes were provided to critics for review) – it’s a little easier to talk about this time around. With Season 2, Paradise continues to be one of the most propulsively binge-worthy dramas on TV.To revisit Season 1 just a bit: After the murder of third term President Cal Bradford (James Marsden), Secret Service agent Xavier Collins (Sterling K. Brown) went down a conspiracy rabbit hole, unraveling some of the truth behind the bunker community of Paradise and how Samantha “Sinatra” Redmond (Julianne Nicholson), the billionaire behind its construction, was maybe not being so truthful about what went down outside its walls.Specifically, after a bit of the ol’ insurrection led by Xavier, he discovered that not only are there people alive outside Paradise, his wife – who he thought died the day a super-volcano exploded, causing a tsunami to wreck most of the world – is alive as well, and living in Atlanta. There’s a lot more that happened as the show jumped backwards in time to show how we got here, as well as moving the conspiracy plot forward in the present, but the most important bit of info to know is that the season ended with Sinatra on life support, Xavier exiting the bunker via a small airplane to go find his wife, and Cal (ostensibly the third lead of the show) still very much dead, though often popping up via flashback to give ghostly advice.More like thisOpen Back Headphones: A Sound Experience Like No OtherWith the dual secrets of the premise and how the world ended out of the way, we’re in literal and figurative uncharted territory in Season 2. Granted, showrunner Dan Fogelman has a fair amount of post-apocalyptic TV shows and movies to pull from, as well as mystery box/flashback-heavy shows like Lost, which he picks and chooses from liberally as we explore more of the world outside as well as how life continues inside Paradise. But what characterizes the new season more than anything is that while Fogelman lays in new mysteries and new sci-fi concepts to replace the ones tied with a bow in Season 1, he also leans straight into his comfort zone: emotionally charged character studies.Showrunner Dan Fogelman has a fair amount of post-apocalyptic TV shows and movies to pull from.The thing is that Paradise is an odd note on Fogelman’s resumé. He hasn’t shied away from more fantastical concepts in the past; he wrote Cars, Tangled, and even a draft of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Most of the time, however, he’s been known for more grounded human fare like: Crazy, Stupid, Love; the late, lamented TV show, Pitch; and most notably, This Is Us.Paradise Season 2 – at least in its first half – might as well be called This Is The Last Of Us without the fungal zombies. Yes, they’re in a post-apocalypse that’s been devastated by climate change – though the show rarely says those words – but everybody is so nice. We’ve been trained time and again by shows like The Last of Us and particularly The Walking Dead to expect that every time you encounter a new community, they might seem good at first, but it will turn out that they’re eating people, or they’re fascists, or they’re just not prepared to survive the circumstances of their particular apocalypse.While Fogelman plays with that, he seems far less interested in what makes a world fall apart than what helps build it back up again. To that end, the majority of the season also takes the form of the more focused flashback episodes from Season 1. There, we got the full-on flashback episode of “The Day,” which revealed how the world fell in pulse-pounding real time. Paradise Season 2 isn’t quite on par with that high watermark episode, but instead channels the feeling of an extended sequence in the finale, where we met a construction worker helping build the bunker and followed him as he befriended his crew, discovered things weren’t quite right, tried to stop the bunker from being built, and ultimately failed.Season 2 takes the feeling of that extended sequence and runs with it, almost becoming a Paradise anthology-style series where each episode is done in one, only lightly connecting to the episode that came before, and often keeping our main characters off-screen for episodes at a time. Part of that is utility, given we’re now following multiple characters in multiple locations versus the more focused locale of “just” Paradise in the first season. But another part of it is that it allows Fogelman the space to spend time emotionally with the characters, particularly new cast members like Shailene Woodley’s lost Graceland tour guide, and Thomas Doherty’s mysterious Link (yes, named after the Legend of Zelda character). We don’t know those folks yet the same way we know Xavier, Sinatra, and Cal, so while there might be some audience frustration about our Season 1 stars being in absentia for large chunks of episodes, when you’ve got good actors digging into meaty speeches and one-on-one scenes, you won’t really miss the folks you already know.But don’t worry: Paradise falls back on a more conventional TV structure eventually. The level of restrai