Paradise Season 2 Wisely Keeps The Best Part Of Season 1 Alive

"Paradise" was one of the biggest surprises of 2025: a character drama that's poignant, emotional, nuanced, and with a thrilling sci-fi premise that would delight Michael Crichton. The new show from "This Is Us" creator Dan Fogelman started with the best plot twist of the year, and it only got wilder from there.

The show takes place inside a suburban-style doomsday bunker, in the aftermath of a supervolcano erupting and causing a massive tsunami to destroy civilization. We follow Secret Service agent Xavier (Sterling K. Brown) as he investigates the murder of President Cal Bradford (James Marsden) and  learns the dark secrets of his seemingly idyllic society. By the end of the season we learn there are not only people alive outside of the bunker, but Xavier's wife is also alive and well out there. And so, season 1 ends with Xavier taking a small plane to exit the bunker and go look for his wife.

With both the secret of Cal's death and the secret of what the bunker hides being out of the way, "Paradise" risked losing the plot going into season 2. And yet, the new episodes wisely keep the best part of season 1 alive. As cool as the mysteries were, what made the show worth watching week after week were the fleshed-out and memorable characters. Likewise, the plot was more than just building the mysteries; it also buildt up the world and the characters through flashbacks.

Thankfully, season 2 keeps both of these. The flashbacks are back to flesh out the world even if we already know how the characters got to the bunker and how the world ended. Through these flashbacks, even dead characters like Marsden's Cal can stick around.

It's easy to think of "Lost" and how it kept innovating its flashback format when watching "Paradise" season 2. And yet, this choice is more reminiscent of Dan Fogelman's own work on "This is Us." The new season layers in new mysteries and even a few new sci-fi concepts to replace what we lost in the first season, but it also doubles down on season 1's emotional layers and character study.

Episode 2 uses flashbacks to show us how Xavier (Sterling K. Brown) met his wife Teri (Enuka Okuma) way before the world ended. It's a way to build anticipation for their inevitable reunion, but it also feels like classic "This is Us" melodrama, with a touching love story about Xavier's devotion to this woman he just met at a hospital. It's corny, sure, but it manages to be tense and emotional despite us knowing what their future holds.

Then, episode 3 brings back Cal (James Marsden) and Billy Pace (Jon Beavers) from the dead through the memories of the evil billionaire Sinatra (Julianne Nicholson) meeting both men. We see Sinatra hiring Billy to threaten a tech developer into giving Sinatra his company for the bunker project, which digs a little deeper into his undercover work and also how he got to be a spy when the world ended. As for Cal, the flashbacks flesh out his presidency, and his relationship to Sinatra, mostly how often he ignored the warnings about the supervolcano that ends the world of "Paradise." We know quite a bit about Cal's presidency, but these flashbacks dig deeper into how he fumbled preparations for the end of the world, expanding the worldbuilding of the show — and also just giving us more James Marsden.