Though “The Man Who Kept Secrets” solved Paradise’s opening mystery, the finale leaves the door to a second season open via the many questions it didn’t answer. Photo: Brian Roedel/Disney
On January 26, 2025, curious viewers got their first look at Paradise, a new series created by Dan Fogelman and starring Sterling K. Brown, who’d previously collaborated on the hit drama This Is Us. For most of its running time, “Wildcat Is Down,” the series’ first episode, took the form of an intriguing political thriller while offering the occasional hint that something weird was going on. Brown plays Xavier Collins, a Secret Service agent charged with protecting President Cal Bradford, a seemingly retired U.S. president who now lives in an idyllic small-town community. Then Bradford is murdered, thrusting Collins into the middle of a mystery in which he’s also a suspect, thanks to his complicated relationship with Bradford.
Juicy stuff, right? And while the question of who killed President Bradford remained at the heart of Paradise’s first season, the premiere’s final moments delivered one of the most “but wait, there’s more” reveals in recent memory. That seemingly perfect, upscale, all-American town that Bradford, Collins, and the other characters call home? It’s actually a high-tech community carved into a Colorado mountain by tech kajillionaire Samantha “Sinatra” Redmond (Julianne Nicholson), and its residents are all survivors of some kind of apocalyptic event.
Questions piled up from there, many of which were answered by the conclusion of “The Man Who Kept Secrets,” Paradise’s first-season finale. Many, but not all. Though Paradise explained who killed Bradford, the series left the door to a second season open via the many questions it didn’t answer. Here’s what we’ll be chewing on as the long wait for season two begins.
As depicted in the first season’s genuinely harrowing penultimate episode, “The Day,” the flight to Paradise was instigated by a massive environmental disaster that in turn triggered a string of nuclear attacks as nations preemptively attempted to gain the upper hand in whatever was left of the world after the apocalypse. As one of his final acts before heading underground, Bradford refrained from pushing the button, instead triggering an electromagnetic pulse that would disable the nukes, along with the rest of the world’s electronics. That apparently left parts of the United States looking less apocalyptic than the rest of the globe, including Atlanta, where Collins has reason to believe his wife Teri (Enuka Okuma) is among the survivors. As the episode winds down, Collins has boarded a plane out of Paradise with the intention of looking for her.
But what’s outside? We’ve only seen glimpses of the region beyond Paradise’s walls via images from an ill-fated search for survivors cut short by fellow secret agent Billy Pace (Jon Beavers). These, unsurprisingly, made the rest of the U.S. look pretty unpleasant by comparison, but they really only suggest what one part of America might look like. How many have survived? Has any attempt to rebuild civilization begun? Are there zombies? The answer to that last question is probably “no,” but the fact that it can’t be answered definitively suggests just how much we don’t know.
For all Paradise’s science-fiction trappings, Bradford’s murder remained the series’ spine in its first season. So what will serve as the spine of season two? Collins’s search for his wife will surely play a major role, but can that take the form of a mystery that’s slowly unraveled over the course of a season? Of course, it’s possible Paradise will just abandon its mystery elements and fully commit to being a postapocalyptic survival drama, but that would fundamentally alter the nature of the show.
A related question: Now that Bradford’s murder has been solved, how big a role will the president play? Obviously, Bradford’s ability to participate in Paradise’s present-day events is limited by his death, but Bradford retained a strong presence throughout the first season via flashbacks. Like This Is Us, Paradise has used scenes from the past to comment on the present, so that could continue in a second season. But at this point, we know seemingly the entirety of Bradford’s story from its privileged beginnings to its bloody end. There is at least one loose thread, however: President Bradford’s widow, Jessica (Cassidy Freeman). The former First Lady didn’t have much of a role to play after her estranged husband’s funeral, and while it’s possible the writers came to consider her an extraneous character, maybe the show has other plans for her next season?
Sure, “crazy” is a word that gets frowned upon these days, and with good reason. But what other word applies to Jane (Nicole Brydon Bloom), a character willing to go to great and nefarious measures just to obtain a Wii? Surely that can’t have been the sole reason she pretended to kill Collins’s daughter Presley (Aliyah Mastin), then grievously wounded Sinatra, right? True, Jane’s happily playing Wii Sports when last we see her, but her actions suggest she had no intention of killing Sinatra, just taking her out. Maybe the Wii is just a fringe benefit of some other, bigger scheme.
Speaking of Sinatra’s injury, it opens up both a wound in her torso and a power vacuum within the world of Paradise. Who will step up? With all due respect to the feckless vice-president, Henry Baines (Matt Malloy), he does not seem suited for the task. We haven’t seen many strong contenders, either, just a lot of hollering. To extend the Rat Pack metaphor, if Redmond is Frank Sinatra and Bradford Peter Lawford, it’s unclear who Paradise’s Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. are. Baines seems, at best, like a Joey Bishop. The first season made it clear just how easily the illusion of Paradise could be shattered even with Sinatra’s iron hand at the controls. Without it, who knows?
President Bradford’s floppy-haired son Jeremy (Charlie Evans) ended the season attempting to get the word out about all the ways in which the residents of Paradise have been lied to by the powers that be. He has the truth on his side, but how seriously will he be taken? It’s possible that the residents of Paradise will want to continue believing in the foundational illusions of their new home and regard Jeremy as an unhinged conspiracy theorist at best and a grifter at worst. (There’s no way the scion of a famous political family could be either of those, right?) But even beyond knowing the truth and being willing to speak his mind, Jeremy’s charismatic and handsome, and he sports a famous name. It’s easy to see a resistance cult forming around him (perhaps including his mom, assuming we see her again).
Beyond bringing President Bradford’s story full circle, “The Day” seemingly filled in most of the blanks that needed filling to explain the origins of Paradise. Sure, we undoubtedly still don’t have all the relevant details from other characters’ past, but is there enough left for the flashbacks to remain central to the series? Maybe, but if not, any survivors the show introduces in the second season will have stories that need to be told. And what better way to tell them than portioning them out over several episodes?
In “The Man Who Kept Secrets,” we learn that Paradise librarian Trent (Ian Merrigan), who’s been quietly, helpfully hanging out in the background throughout the season, is not who he claimed to be. In fact, he was an aggrieved outsider who unsuccessfully attempted to kill President Bradford in the before-times, then faked his way into Paradise to finish the job. (Yes, Trent had some valid reasons to want Bradford dead, but that’s a discussion for another forum.)
Trent’s fate remains pretty unambiguous at episode’s end. (RIP.) But what of “Maggie” (Michelle Meredith), the woman who posed as his wife and found her place cheerfully serving up cheese fries (or “cheese” fries) to hungry diner patrons? As the episode draws to a close, we see Dr. Gabriela Torabi (Sarah Shahi) being served her favorite appetizer as she dines alone, but it’s not Maggie serving them. Is she in custody? Will she be allowed to assume her old life? (Maggie had no designs on killing the president; she just wanted to live in safety.) Who will serve the cheese fries in the post-Bradford era?
This is a question that points to all sorts of other questions. Collins’s neighbor Carl (Richard Robichaux) has broken the rules by smuggling a small dog into Paradise, an environment where animals are seemingly verboten. Did Carl consider that he might be in possession of the earth’s last living canine? Did he ever think of the pressure this puts on the pup to be the best dog in the whole wide world? (Actually, come to think of it, maybe there’s not that much pressure when you might be the only dog in the whole wide world.) But, no animals, really? Surely that makes for a tough-to-sustain ecosystem, right? What about microbes? What about insects? What pollinates the flowers? Where are the plants grown, anyway? And, following this thought to its logical conclusion, where do the sewers drain?
The first episode established that President Bradford had a deep enthusiasm for some of the most, let’s kindly say, basic hits of the 1980s. This preference became a kind of subplot throughout the series thanks to a mix CD he left for Jesse that contained both clues about the secrets of Paradise and some of his favorite jams. Many of these, in what quickly became one of the series’ trademarks, would be reprised as mournful covers on the soundtrack, the unlikelier the better. Did you think it would be impossible to tease out the melancholy undercurrents of Starship’s “We Built This City”? Think again!
Assuming future seasons will keep this going, how many songs are left? That’s a little tricky. If every ’80s hit we’ve heard — whether in its original form or via cover — is on the disc, that’s six slots, which would take up about 20 to 25 minutes on the disc. A CD-R can hold about 74 minutes of music. If Paradise keeps up its current pace and the show is worried about verisimilitude, which it probably is not, that leaves room for another two seasons’ worth of songs. But what will they be? And how sad will Paradise’s fresh takes on, say, Peter Cetera’s “Glory of Love” or Baltimora’s “Tarzan Boy” be? Of all the series’ unanswered questions, this might be the most haunting.
