Major spoilers for the opening episodes, so please watch episodes 1-3 before reading any further here.

Agent Xavier Collins has been warned that his colleague and best friend might be part of the conspiracy that murdered President Bradford.

In the show’s first slightly hokey sequence, episode 4 kicks off with a resumé of Agent Billy Pace’s back-story – explaining why he might indeed be something of a wild card.  But despite the slightly heavy handed opening, this week’s instalment of Paradise is another 50 minutes of engaging and twisty story telling.

It is without doubt an unusual show. The premise, for those in the know (you still have time to look away!), is essentially Silo with showers and nice shops. Instead of a dirty cylindrical tower block build down into the earth, the artificial world created to save the remnants of mankind following an as yet unspecified global catastrophe is the contrived small town America familiar from The Truman Show rather than any kind of subterranean industrial slum. But the concept and many of the narrative questions are exactly the same as in the Apple+ rival.

I think the setting works in Paradise’s favour, because it allows for more nuance of character. In the oily grime of Silo, everyone’s understandably miserable and wearing terrible clothes, and it’s so blooming gloomy it’s hard to tell the characters apart through the murk. Paradise – as its title suggests – poses a more complex question. The bunker is perfect, so they should all be happy, right? Of course they aren’t, but the degree to which they engage with the artificiality of their new existence varies from character to character. When the status quo is challenged and Xavier battles to see justice done, it’s fair to question to what end. What exactly is he trying to protect, what principles is he trying to uphold?

In this fourth episode, the pace drops a little as the action is somewhat randomly centred around the community’s annual carnival, but as Xavier starts to doubt his friend, there’s an ominous anticipation of what’s to come by way of two plot twists which, although a tad predictable, still manage to be narratively gripping – perhaps because they feel so inevitable when by now we have really started to care about the characters.

Verdict: Paradise isn’t perfect – clunking awkwardly at times – but the story telling is terrific and I’m looking forward to seeing what new twists await us in the weeks to come. 8/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com