The Paradise Season 2 Trailer Takes Us Outside the Bunker at the End of the World
Paradise Season 2 will follow Xavier Colilns's search for his wife and offer some answers about what happened to the rest of humanity.
It won’t be just another day in Paradise when the eponymous Hulu series returns for its second season this winter. The series, which follows the fallout from a devastating climate disaster that destroyed much of the Earth as we know it, will finally move outside the restrictive bunker setting that has defined so much of its premise. Season 2 will send Sterling K. Brown’s Secret Service agent Xavier Collins back to the surface on a quest to find his wife, and finally allow us to see how the rest of humanity has survived during the years he and the rest of humanity’s elites were below ground.
For those who are unfamiliar with Paradise — and consider this an exhortation to fix your life immediately if so — the show’s concept is a fascinating (and frightening) one. Set three years after a supervolcano caused a devastating climate disaster that destroyed much of the planet, a select group of 25,000 people (mostly political figures, billionaires, those who work for them, and people with particularly specialized skills) have been living in an underground bunker city beneath a Colorado mountain. Creepily reconstructed to resemble the real world, Truman Show-style, the aspirationally named Paradise is hardly the utopia it was promised to be. But it turns out that it may not actually be all that’s left.
Fresh off of solving the mystery of the president’s murder at the end of last season, Xavier Collins is now headed into the unknown to look for his wife, Teri (Enuka Okuma), who was presumed dead in the cataclysm. But, according to the show’s most generally unreliable figure — villainous billionaire leader Sinatra (Julianne Nicholson) — she just may have survived, along with a not insignificant number of other folks who’ve essentially been left to fend for themselves in the years since the world as they knew it ended. And while the season 2 trailer doesn’t weigh in on whether Teri’s alive, it does introduce several intriguing new faces, including Shailene Woodley, as a survivalist who rescues Xavier after his plane crashes.
The eight-episode second season will not only follow the pair’s search for Teri, but it will also explore how those living outside the bunker have survived the years since The Day that changed everything. And back in Paradise, its citizens — including Xavier’s children — must deal with the aftermath of everything that has happened, and all the secrets Sinatra still hasn’t told them. Which sounds as if they go well beyond the existence of the bunker.
Plus, in true Paradise fashion, it looks like we’re not quite done with the stories of President Cal Bradford or Agent Billy Pace just yet, since both James Marsden and Jon Beavers appear in the trailer. (This isn’t as weird as it sounds; Marsden had a major role throughout the series first season, even though his character technically died in the opening moments of its pilot.)
Where Paradise goes next is anyone’s guess — but if its bonkers first season is anything to go by, the journey’s going to be just as thrilling as the destination.