Paradise Season-Premiere Recap: Elvis Has Left the Bunker
Fire up your favorite emo cover of an ‘80s rock anthem because Paradise is back, baby. Let’s begin with a quick refresher as to where we left off with your favorite bunker show: A super volcano underneath the Antarctic ice shelf erupted and caused both worldwide tsunamis — Australia was gone first, I’m sorry to say — and a massive ash cloud that blocked out the sun. On top of Mother Nature’s chaos, as the world began to collapse, several governments got trigger-happy with their missiles, and it looked like everyone was about to go nuclear, because sure, why not? It’s the end of the world as we know it … until President Cal Bradford steps in.
In a game-changing twist, we learn that at the last minute, Cal uses a super-secret failsafe that fries every electric circuit on earth and thus kills all the nuclear warheads before they can detonate, while also leaving any non-bunker survivors without any electricity. Because oh yes! There are survivors outside the not-so-secret Colorado bunker! And, as our evil billionaire Samantha “Sinatra” Redmond reveals to Secret Service Agent Xavier Collins, his wife, whom he had believed died after watching a nuke on track to blow up Atlanta, is one of the survivors, and she’s been using a radio to try and get in touch with him. Once Xavier and fellow agent (and Cal’s secret girlfriend) Robinson have solved the mystery of the president’s murder — it was the fake librarian with a vendetta after the love of his life got sick and died while they were helping construct the bunker! — Xavier gets on a plane, escapes the bunker, and goes to get his girl.
Even just skimming the surface, there’s a whole lot to remember. But guess what? You actually don’t need to remember most of it because the season-two premiere has almost nothing to do with our main players from the bunker (until it totally does). In fact, we spend the entire hour with new characters and we trade in the Colorado bunker for a much cooler place to hunker down while the world ends: Graceland. I know what your first question must be: Does this mean that instead of ‘80s rock, we get emo covers of Elvis Presley songs? You betcha. So many emo Elvis covers.
Instead of picking up where Paradise left off, “Graceland” takes us back in time and introduces us to Annie Clay (played by Shailene Woodley) and proceeds to show us what happened to her before, during, and after the apocalypse. I’m sure some people might be frustrated that we aren’t hopping directly back into the main action of the series, but if I’m being honest, it took me maybe five minutes to be completely invested in Annie’s story. This is partially because I’ve lived through Dan Fogelman and Sterling K. Brown’s other joint venture, This Is Us, so I’ve become accustomed to detours with random characters who eventually tie into the main story. But mostly, “Graceland” works because of Woodley’s magnetic performance.
When we first meet Annie, she’s a poor teenager taking care of her ailing mother, at one time a successful doctor who was eventually felled by her mental health issues. The one thing that seems to help her mother is Elvis Presley. His portrait is on the mantle. Annie goes on the tour at Graceland over and over and over again to tell her mother about it. After her mother dies, Annie’s on her own. We see her in med school. She’s smarter than her colleagues. She’d be an excellent doctor. Unfortunately, she has debilitating panic attacks. The day she drops out of med school, she finds herself crying in her car outside the gates of Graceland. We’ve all been there. When security guard Gayle comes upon her and hears her story, she takes pity on her and eventually Annie becomes a tour guide at Graceland. Elvis’s safest place in the world has now become hers. And that’s before she turns it into her own personal fallout shelter and post-apocalypse living space.
One day, Annie’s giving a tour when she notices everyone checking their phones and freaking the fuck out. This is it, the end of the world. We catch glimpses of news reports we saw in season one, and we hear Cal’s big speech. Annie is smart enough to know not to waste time panicking. Instead, she grabs Gayle and the two gather as many supplies as they can find. Food from the Visitor Center, blankets from the Presleys personal collection upstairs, and Annie even breaks into the case displaying one of Elvis’s guns. At the end of the world, she might need to be armed. They’re going to hunker down in the TV room, and it all seems like a good plan until Gayle takes a tumble down the stairs and breaks her leg.
Paradise speeds through Annie and Gayle’s first 45 days in the TV room. Gayle’s injury is a doozy — Annie has reset her leg, but there is an infection, and Annie doesn’t have much to work with. The huge ash cloud has settled in, and it’s freezing, but Annie refuses to set a fire in the fireplace lest the smoke alert others that someone’s in Graceland. From the glimpses they get of what’s going on out in the streets — looting, fires, violence — that’s a smart move. Annie tries to keep Gayle’s spirits up with her Elvis impersonation, as one does. On Day 45, Gayle isn’t cold anymore, and Annie knows exactly what that means — she holds her only friend in the world until she dies and then she buries her in the Presley family plot before finally letting out every emotion she’s been feeling with one gut-wrenching scream. Annie is truly alone at the end of the world.
Almost two years after the eruption — it’s Day 689 — the sun returns. Annie can breathe again. She can also start to grow things, which is so nice because how many cans of beans has this woman eaten and is her GI tract okay? Annie is alone, but things could be so much worse than spending your day reading in the Jungle Room and mainlining Bush’s Best; She’s tucked away safely and no one seems to bother her.
And then someone bothers her. One day, Annie spots a group of six armed men at the gates. She grabs her gun and hides up by Elvis’s handy two-way mirror. But while these guys, led by a scruffy young guy named Link, pull Annie out of her hiding spot, they don’t seem to want to hurt her. They want to know where Elvis’s collection of vintage cars is. Link tries to talk to Annie and prove he isn’t a bad guy, and just as you think it might be working, Annie slams his head with something very heavy and makes a run for the TV room. Her safe space. She locks herself in there for three days. On that third day, the men are still in the house, but they are also cooking something that smells amazing and so she leaves the room. Finally, although still hesitant to let anyone in, Annie can see that these guys don’t want to hurt her. In fact, they’re just a big bunch of nerds. Link explains that he was in Louisville working at an REI store when the volcano erupted, and he wisely stocked up on sleeping bags and coats. He eventually ran into Geiger, an older guy who decided someone needed to travel around the country to each of the 94 nuclear power plants and attempt to shut them down before a disastrous meltdown could occur. Nerdiest of the nerds — they call him Urkel — explains that because of the ash cloud, the earth’s temperature has dropped twenty degrees. He also has a theory about a secret device that must have knocked all the power out. His buddies brush it off, but my fingers are crossed that one day he’ll learn he was dead right and he’ll drop a sarcastic “did I do that?” and we’ll all laugh about it. We need some laughs!
While hearing about the catastrophic changes to the environment and the unfathomable death toll — Link estimates two-thirds of the U.S. population has been wiped out — these are all things we knew or, at least, could have guessed. One of the most important pieces of info dropped by this group, however, is that when they show up at Graceland, it’s been about three years since the volcano erupted. This, of course, means that Annie’s timeline has caught up with where we were in season one of Paradise.
Link and his team assure Annie that they’ll be out of her hair soon enough, and slowly, she begins to warm up to them. She fixes Link’s broken wrist, and the team takes apart some of Elvis’s cars to use the parts elsewhere. She and Link talk about the stars and the falling satellites, about his terrible beard, and he shows her his pre-beard student ID card. (The fact that he went to Caltech tells us he’s probably more than just a sales clerk.) On the eve of the team’s departure, they all have a fancy dinner together in the dining room. Annie puts on one of the Presleys’ dresses. Link cuts back his beard. They totally want to fuck. At dinner, they play “one thing you miss/one thing you don’t,” and it takes Annie awhile, since so much of life before was hard for her, but what she misses most is giving tours here at Graceland. And so, they ask her for a tour. Eventually, Annie and Link pair off and things get hot and heavy in the Jungle Room. As someone who has been on the Graceland tour, I’m assuming this is a new addition.
It’s a gorgeous scene that goes from the two of them talking, of Annie opening up, and then breaking down into sobs as he holds her close to him, to them in bed together. The chemistry between Shailene Woodley and Thomas Doherty is off the charts, and I buy everything they’re selling. I can’t shake the moment when Annie weeps into his shoulder. She’s been holding everything in for so long to survive, and finally being seen, being touched again after three years, is the push to just release it all. And he doesn’t back away from it. He understands it from the jump. Maybe this isn’t the speculative fiction thriller from season one, but I’m down with basking in a little story about human connection for an hour.
The episode isn’t solely a reflective one. There are some important developments. In the morning, Link and his team are headed up to St. Louis — in order to avoid the apparently rough parts of Arkansas — and then out to Colorado … to find a secret bunker they know is out there that has enough power that could restart the world. He also mentions something dangerous in the bunker, but can’t explain further. He wants Annie to “come restart the world” with him. But in the morning, Annie has once again locked herself in the TV room. She is too scared to leave her safe place, even for Link. Link, who is suffering from a mysterious nose bleed and headaches by the way, begs her to open the door but she won’t, and he doesn’t have time to wait. Geiger comes and grabs him and reminds him how urgent it is to get to that bunker and to find and “kill Alex.” Are you also trying to list the names of everyone we know in the bunker? I cannot think of an Alex. Is “Alex” a person at all? When they leave, and Annie finally comes out of the room, she finds that Link has left her gear, a map, and a note that promises he’ll come back for her.
This promise sustains Annie as she remains at Graceland alone once again and — surprise! — turns out to be pregnant. This promise is probably why, when a now VERY pregnant Annie hears a plane crash and sees that the wreckage and pilot are in the rough parts of Arkansas, she assumes it must be Link coming back for her, and she hops on her horse to rescue him. Out alone in the woods, Annie comes across that wrecked plane and its unconscious pilot, but it is not Link — it’s Xavier.
Paradise Season-Premiere Recap: Elvis Has Left the Bunker