Sterling K. Brown Returns in Hulu Thriller

If Hulu’s post-apocalyptic drama Paradise has a secret weapon, it’s This Is Us creator Dan Fogelman’s skill for provoking emotion. The new second season knows just how to get a viewer in their feelings, spilling tears over characters in the pits of despair, or joy as they rediscover lost pleasures, or warmth as lonely souls find camaraderie in dark days.

As the episodes wore on, however, I found other, less pleasant emotions starting to creep in as well. Frustration at the accumulation of little plot holes. Exasperation at intriguing storylines that fizzled into dead ends. While Paradise has always been more heart than head, the latest run prioritizes the former to such a degree that the entire thing feels out of whack.

For all its ambition and enormous cast, the first season of Paradise remained anchored to a single place (a city-sized bunker underneath Colorado) and organized around a single propulsive mystery (who killed James Marsden’s President Cal Bradford?). Sure, it was never as profound as it seemed to want to be — more often, it was like one of its own lugubrious covers of ’80s pop songs, silly fun trying to pass itself off as Classy and Serious — but it had an addictive momentum.

Then the finale saw Xavier (Sterling K. Brown), our Secret Service protagonist, preparing to fly out into the outside world. The narrative possibilities on both sides of the fortress walls seemed endless. What would Xavier find out there — his wife (Enuka Okuma’s Teri)? A desolate wasteland? New friends, or new foes? While he was gone, what would become of the home he was leaving behind? And with so many intriguing narrative options, how would Paradise pick a new path to go forward?

I’ll refrain from spoiling most of those questions, but on the last front I can tell you: It…doesn’t. The seven hours (of eight) sent to critics sprawl out in every direction, scattering existing characters on disjointed journeys while adding a slew of new ones. In all, the plot in the present day covers thousands of miles, while the flashbacks — so, so many flashbacks — span dozens of years.

There are some upsides to the broadened scope. It’s thrilling to get our first extended glimpse of life on the outside in the Glenn Ficarra and John Requa-directed premiere, which chronicles the experience of a tour guide (Shailene Woodley‘s Annie) riding out the end times in Elvis’ Graceland. The episode takes the time to get to know the lonely rhythm of her days before piercing the quiet with a roving band of scavengers, led by the charismatic Link (Thomas Doherty). Woodley, always a sensitive performer, plays Annie’s swirling emotions beautifully, as she moves from panic to resignation to bittersweet pleasure at getting to interact with other humans for the first time in ages.

Other chapters introduce a group of doomsday preppers who become a found family over years stuck in a basement and a band of orphaned children whose survival instincts have been honed at the cost of their innocence. (When an injured grown-up offers to read them a story, the shyest among them responds with a question: When the man dies, can he have his jacket?) At its most effective, Paradise‘s second season evokes the haunting beauty, though not the brutality, of HBO’s The Last of Us.

It’s enough to make you want to not sweat the small stuff, like, “Would it really take three years for someone to think to raid Graceland?” Or “Wouldn’t a tech genius come up with a better computer password than a four-digit code?” Or “Why does this character’s before-times ID have only their picture but not their name, thus defeating the entire purpose of an ID?” Who cares about such nitpicky details when we’re busy tearing up at Annie feeling alive again, or Xavier’s desperation to be reunited with Teri?

But as with greenhouse gases under apocalyptic clouds of ash, it’s the cumulative effect that screws you. A few inconsistencies are forgivable. Too many of them will eat away at the structural integrity of a season — especially if its foundations are already shaky.

One of the major trade-offs of Paradise’s newly expanded scale is a loss of focus. Without a single driving mystery, subplots like Cal’s angsty son Jeremy (Charlie Evans) mounting a youth rebellion are given so little oxygen that it’s easy to forget they exist at all, while compelling characters like Annie get abruptly sidelined once their utility has run out. More time is spent reminding us that we don’t know what characters like billionaire mastermind Sinatra (Julianne Nicholson) are really up to, than establishing why we’re meant to care.

Moment to moment, Paradise remains an engrossing experience, thanks in large part to the charm of its cast. But the plot makes less and less sense upon further reflection. Meanwhile, the overreliance on flashbacks to fill in character motivations and goals stalls the momentum, so that it starts to seem that Paradise is a collection of backstories loosely connected by a shared present, rather than an ongoing thriller enhanced by deeper context.

Even Fogelman’s knack for weepy emotionality turns out to have its limits. Season one managed the neat trick of humanizing the seemingly monstrous Billy (Jon Beaver) through — what else? — a tragic past. Season two tries to repeat the feat with a similarly shady character, but only manages to make her seem more alien. (This is an especially rough stretch for the female characters in general, who are treated with a “nice guy” chivalry that can look, in certain lights, a lot like condescension.)

This is a season that feels like it’s constantly in motion, yet never actually seems to get anywhere. Inadvertently, Paradise seems to have adopted the same philosophy to storytelling that Xavier’s son, as he explains in an overwritten but persuasively performed monologue, once took to his toys. “Maybe it’s not fun to play with trains that ride smoothly along their tracks,” Xavier muses of the boy’s thinking. “Maybe the thing that’s interesting about trains is the possibility that these huge metal contraptions could one day crash into one another.”

In season two, whatever destination Paradise was headed for seems to have been forgotten. Whatever bigger themes it once evoked (like the greed of megalomaniacal billionaires, or the complicity of powerful men) have fallen by the wayside. It’s just a collision of characters and ideas and subplots, resulting in the rubble — some of it salvageable and some of it less so — of something that used to run smoothly enough.