Paradise Season 2, Episode 3 Review – “Another Day in Paradise”

After opening the season outside the Paradise bunker with “Graceland” and “Mayday”, Paradise finally begins to connect its many disparate dots with “Another Day in Paradise”, season two’s fairly unremarkable return underground to the idyllic town full of faceless people, a few politicians, a burgeoning resistance – and of course, an opportunistic, sadistic billionaire and her mercenaries, whose vague plans form the foundation of another mildly intriguing story delivered in thoroughly unremarkable, seemingly joyless fashion.

For the most part, “Another Day in Paradise” divides its time in the present between its four lead female characters: conniving, world-saving billionaire Sinatra, former best friend and psychologist with zero patients Gabriela, the incredibly unstable Wii Sports aficionado Jane, and former sex buddy of President Bradford, the eternally-behind-on-getting-the-point Nicole. Through them, Paradise picks up mostly where it left off, picking up a month after Sinatra took a bullet at the end of “The Man Who Keeps the Secrets”, detailing her first days back into the “real” world of the bunker – which has almost entirely returned to normal after a few weeks ago there were rockets being fired, messages being written in the artificial sky, and the rumblings of a civilian uprising in the face of Bradford’s death (at the hands of the not-librarian, revealed to be one of the workers who executed architect Ander’s plans for the bunker).

Putting aside the absolutely ridiculous, empty world Paradise returns us to in the bunker, “Another Day in Paradise” mostly uses its time to reinforce facts we already know: Nicole has a nose for being suspicious, Jane likes to stare emptily at people, and Sinatra is able to manipulate every situation to benefit her, even when she’s in theoretical mortal danger, as she tries to fight against the effects of nature she’s warned about during a conference before the disaster. This breaks the episode up into three parts, all of which have their own mind-numbingly obvious ulterior motives which act as stark reminders to how flat and one-dimensional the stories inside the bunker were in season one, an affect only magnified when “Another Day in Paradise” tries to tie all of its stories together through Link (a character whose name is so overtly obvious at this point, it would make the show seem satirical if it wasn’t so incredibly straight-faced all the time). Which is telling, given how much of “Another Day in Paradise” spends with the women of Paradise – and ultimately, how their stories are mostly, save for maybe Sinatra, mostly vehicles for ideas and dreams of other characters far away from the bunker we spend this 55-minute episode in.

It’s a particularly bad episode for Nicole, despite being the character “Another Day in Paradise” opens and closes on, gets the short end of the stick in just about every regard. She’s been demoted following the events at the end of season one (now taking her orders for Jane, which includes morning coffee delivery), she’s trying to keep her eye on not one, but two children that aren’t hers, and she’s also trying to investigate what’s going on around her, as the new president quickly adopts authoritarianism, and Sinatra makes her way back to the conscious world. For being such a focus of the story, Nicole feels mostly like a delivery mechanism for other stories on Paradise – something her character was trapped in for much of the first season, but something the new reality of season two could potentially benefit from being released from.

Unfortunately, that is not the case: Nicole remains a half-step behind everything happening, which culminates in a hilarious scene interspersing her “reading” Jane’s unredacted case file with shots of her digging through Billy Pace’s place (more on him in a bit) for clues about his still-suspicious death (though nobody’s really mentioned it since it happened). Not only does this tie Nicole into arguably the most pointless conspiracy of the series, but it keeps her consistently a half-step behind the rest of the series, catching up – and with the children, even falling behind – the reality of what’s happening that we can already see, which makes her journey of discovery all the less rewarding (and engaging, given we’re stuck following a rigid character through a story with an obvious ending) as it plays out through the third act of the episode.

Elsewhere, Paradise‘s attempts to make Jane Driscoll a slippery enigma continue to rely on melodramatic plot twists, ones that are not grounded in any sort of reality (how does Jane end up on another presidential detail, when everyone keeps dying around her?), and rely on a character who mostly exists as “stares blankly through every human interaction” to establish just how insane she is. And her actions continue the trend of defying logic; I mean, she kills the goddamn president in the middle of the street, but a few scenes after surveillance cameras are being set up all over town – and then she somehow manages to hide from, and then sneak up on Nicole (who, again, does her supposed intelligence no favors), choke her out, and then frame her as the president’s murderer, before ending the episode by calling the Secret Service team to let them know “the president’s gone”.

Through Jane, however, we can start to understand why it took Paradise so long to get back down to the bunker, and how disinterested it really is with most of the larger themes and ideas of the first season. Sure, there’s a hint of it in the background with the other dead president’s son (who seems to have become the guerrilla leader of the most privileged rebellion in human history, sending notes to Xavier’s daughter from hiding… just another thing Nicole has no idea is going on), but for the most part, “Another Day in Paradise” leans incredibly hard on the Next Big Tease, which revolves around the other secret project Sinatra’s been working on – the one that involves the phrase “quantum”, and is quite obviously draining all of the power away from the bunker’s power grid (let’s put a pin in that for one second – but we’ll come back to this quantum-fueled project). Pretty telling when the season’s big twist is a secret that is clearly designed to pull attention away from the bunker; it’s not only revealing in how disinterested Paradise is in supposed titular setting, but how careless it is, and continues to be, with the construction of the characters and story inside of it, none of which are offered even the slightest opportunity to find pathos – except when Paradise shifts to the past for a long (and long-haired) Billy Pace flashback sequence, where we learn the origin story of how Sinatra got a taste for power, domination, and death.

The tale of Henry Miller is the episode’s most interesting sequence – both in how it once again sidelines its main narrative for a rather obvious excursion, and in how it shifts its entire perspective to once again explore a character left dead on a kitchen floor halfway through the first season. It’s a strange place for the Fogelman Flashback DNA to shine through, and once again feels like a needless diversion to fill a big piece of backstory in a way that feels incredibly small and disconnected. And when the story ends with Herman euthanizing himself and basically begging for Billy to kill him (asking him only one favor, that he allow his protege, who turns out to be the guy who impregnated Annie in “Graceland”), it gets even sillier, a piece of story that tries to depict a large, emotional journey for Sinatra as she embraces a monster (supposedly for the betterment and preservation of humanity) as both deep and incredibly slight, leaving her on the sidelines for most of the story’s attempts at grounding itself in emotion, which just makes it another empty gesture towards depth for the show’s most cold calculating, manipulative billionaire monstrosity.

So where is this all going? For some reason, Jane’s in on some plan to pin the president’s murder on both Nicole and Jeremy’s mostly-unseen rebellion, which seems like an idiotic idea from any number of angles. Plus, it’s hard to dive right back into thriller intrigue when most of Sinatra’s plot in the episode is either potentially setting up some insane left-field plot twists (like time travel, potentially) or her waiting around for Jane (or whomever) to get the message and kill the president, after giving the vague, super-secret murder code at her post-shooting deposition. It’s also incredibly weird to see such a focus on Sinatra as she bends the word to her will, given the sharp thematic drive of the first two episodes to depict the survival instincts of people in crisis; for her, any crisis is manufactured, and any potential restriction to resources or power are but a blip in her self-professed, dominant assertions that she’s “saving the world” after not being able to save her dead child years and billions of dollars of profit ago.

One has to give “Another Day in Paradise” credit; it drops a quick trio of succeeding soap opera worthy twists to end the episode on a fever pitch as a shitty Phil Collins cover plays in the background; Gabriela (presumably on the side of the now-dead president) bugs a photo and puts in the office of her former friend, right as Jeremy and Anders get thrown into prison together (head rebel and disgruntled architect? Yeah, throw them in a shared cell together, great idea), Jane slits the president’s throat and frames Nicole the Laughably Bad Agent, and we see Billy let a beardless Link go free from Henry Miller’s extremely bloody home. By filling the last fifteen minutes with this quick succession of scenes and images, the episode almost completely obfuscates how thin and weightless the construction of it all is – and how, three full hours of an eight-hour season in, it feels like it’s just getting started.

It’s also a lot for what seems to be rather straightforward arc for season two; the group Annie met (and is now following with Xavier) are going to Colorado – not to get into the bunker, but to go to whatever technology Link remembers from the before times, which could be anything from a time travel device, to something to cool down the Venus effect that’s described in Sinatra’s opening flashback. Which is fine, if Paradise affords itself some room to really define its characters, which are approaching La Brea levels of translucency at this point – if “Another Day in Paradise” is a precursor to the rest of season two, it’s going to be an incredibly strange, and often underwhelming, ride.

Grade: D