Paradise Season 2, Episode 2 Review – “Mayday”

After an hour-long, frustratingly unhurried season premiere, one might expect Paradise season two’s second episode, “Mayday”, to bring itself full circle, tying Annie’s story of loneliness and a fateful one-nightstand to the larger stories of sociopolitical intrigue and Daddy Survivor story. After all, there’s only eight episodes in the season, so the idea of spending a full quarter of it paralleling two characters and their journeys to discovering each other seems like a bit of a crazy one: it just doesn’t leave the rest of the season a lot of room to dig into its many stories of psycho security personnel, malignant billionaires and the rich putting their thumbs on the scale of humanity’s survival happening inside the bumper, much less provide enough room for Xavier (and Annie) to make their way from Arkansas to Atlanta, before credits roll on the season finale.

Given that, it seems rather crazy that “Mayday” only brings us from the end of “The Man Who Kept the Secrets” (which saw Xavier get on a plane after seeing Jane shoot Sinatra, and the president’s killer launch himself through the top of the artificial light dome above Paradise) to barely past the end of “Graceland”, detailing the days (weeks?) after Xavier crashes his plane somewhere near the Mississippi River. To fill its time, “Mayday” splits its attention between two points in Xavier’s life; what happened after he crashed the plane – and more importantly, what happened when he dislocated his knee in 2004, and found himself in a hospital bed next to the woman who would become his wife.

The former of these is remarkably empty; after crashing, a child happens upon Xavier (whose leg is broken yet again) and brings him to shelter, a landlocked boat that the child, named Daniel, and about a half-dozen other kids have been staying. The children are not communicative or friendly, but allow Xavier a place to heal and pontificate loudly about his life before “The Day”; as you can imagine, the dynamic is hardly an exciting one. There are hints of something more interesting and tense on the surface, with a ragtag group of kids that don’t immediately resort to violence, and somehow have survived nearly three years in a place Annie was warned is a particularly “bad pocket”, making their passively pacifist ways a curious counterpart to the very driven, goal-focused Xavier, especially considering Xavier spends most of his time engaging with the ghosts of the past inside his mind.

In his memories, we see how him and Teri met in 2004, a classic case of young playboy meets career-driven woman, singular beats of character “Mayday” streeeeetches out across the episode’s 46-minute running time. Teri is very hesitant towards him, the curtain separating their two hospital beds a simple metaphor for Xavier’s attempts to get to know the woman in the room next to him (even against the warnings of their nurse). Unfortunately, outside of some Jell-O sharing, “Mayday” struggles to find space to make Teri a more compelling character, rather than a short list of personality traits for our protagonist to react to (and eventually, pine longingly for in the post-apocalyptic future).

While I appreciate the episode doesn’t end with them having a momentous kiss, or the show rambling through a montage of scenes of them building a life together (there’s still plenty of time for that, of course), how long it draws out Teri’s hesitations robs her opportunity to have agency as a character – especially after she goes temporarily blind following back surgery, in turn giving Xavier an excuse to continue hanging out, taking care of her and making sure she had everything she needed, in its specific place, right in front of her. The scenes are pleasant, but they lack any kind of narrative or emotional thrust; it certainly doesn’t work as building an emotional bridge to a character we’ve still not seen in the present… and more presciently, it does absolutely nothing to get the pulse of season two to accelerate anywhere beyond a resting rate.

“Mayday” just takes too long to get going, and then doesn’t afford itself any time to explore when it gets there; from the nascently defined pack of pubescents, to the paper-thin slices of character we see in the interminably long flashbacks, “Mayday” goes to great lengths to lay out pieces of character and story it doesn’t have any intention on following up with in the moment, simply laying big, obvious teases for future episodes to build upon – and if those clarifying moments and twists don’t hit, it’s going to leave episodes like this feeling like enormous head-scratchers.

After a promising, albeit limited premiere, “Mayday” is an unfortunately unearned self-indulgence; we’re already two hours into an eight-hour season, with no bearing on what is happening or what anyone is doing, except Xavier’s on a side quest to find his wife and bring her back to Colorado (where Link and his group are going, and where Annie so clearly wants to go herself), itself a piece of plot that has remained completely stationary since Paradise rolled credits on season one. If this is the pace season two is aiming for across all eight episodes, we could be in for a real bumpy ride.

Grade: C-

Other thoughts/observations:

• what, no more Elvis cues?
  
• Xavier’s “I’m-a need your number in a second, know what I’m sayin’?” is a moment so casually smooth, it feels like it comes forth from a completely different character. It is strange.
  
• Teri running through the reasons she can’t date Xavier is painfully cliche.
  
• the one time Xavier tries to leave the children’s care, he takes ten steps outside before he has to kill an adult who puts a gun to his head, revealing that he’s been following them for awhile. The kids help bury the dead guy, then leave Xavier to fend for himself, stealing all of his stuff in the process. What a waste!