As Xavier continues his quest to find his wife, Teri, and reunite his family, he accrues another quest when he becomes responsible for a new born baby, and, finally, joins in with Dylan’s quest to bring down Sinatra, prise open the doors of the bunker, and force her to share their resources in order to rebuild the world.

Full disclosure, I had been in sunny, chilled-out Australia for a month, only partially aware of the Northern Hemisphere becoming ever more entangled in war and chaos, and doing my best to pay as little attention to all this horrific nonsense as I could. I realised, on the plane home, as I binged the last five episodes of Disney+’s post-apocalyptic bunker thriller, that I had, appropriately enough, been in something of a psychological bunker myself.

So how did it all play out to my jet-lagged brain, all this post-apocalyptic questing? Paradise is without doubt a highly entertaining, easily digestible show, even if, consumed all together from seat 32F, it doesn’t really make a whole heap of sense, can’t make up its mind what sort of show it wants to be, nor which characters it wants us to care about, nor even what story it’s trying to tell. One minute it’s all about Xavier (Sterling K. Brown) and his questing; the next it’s about the inherent goodness of people (which is an interesting deviation from the post-apocalyptic norm); the next it’s suggesting quite the opposite and every other character is secretly a creepy psychopath; until ultimately we discover that it’s not an end-of-the-world story at all and it makes a quantum leap (literally) into a completely different genre altogether.

I had the sense of a writers room where no one could agree on anything so they all went off and just did their own thing. And mostly it works. The story of Annie (Shailene Woodley) and her baby is genuinely affecting… even if by the end of the next episode Xavier has dumped the kid on a pair of amiable lesbians (probably a wise decision). Cameron Britton is excellent as lonely mailman, Gary, who may or may not be one of the aforementioned creepy psychopaths. There is less ambiguity about Jane (Nicole Brydon Bloom) who definitely is a psychopath – we know this because she’s a cut and paste of Villanelle from Killing Eve. I was even entertained by the various quantum nosebleeds (what is it with quantum and nosebleeds? Is that actually a thing?).

As the series reaches its climax, it makes a bold attempt to draw all these disparate strands together, but then decides not to bother and just opts for a lot of running around, and dials juddering into the red, and stuff blowing up for complicated reasons (if you do a thing, and then another thing, but don’t do the other thing, then we’re all in deep shit!!!)…

…all to a soundtrack of someone moodily crooning The Final Countdown (I did wonder if I was hallucinating at that point)…

…until finally, having burned up all its story (and a few of its central characters), the show does a screeching handbrake turn in a (successful) bid to get a third season.

Verdict: Paradise is far dafter than it knows – it takes itself completely seriously – which is perhaps why it’s so wonderfully watchable. I’m definitely in for Season 3, although I may be leaving my brain at the door. 7/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com