Paradise Season 2 Episode Review: A Holy Charge

On Paradise Season 2, Episode 4 “A Holy Charge,” we witness two new lives coming into a new world. But because this new world is also a brutal one, another life is lost in the process.

Things are still tense as we pick back up with Xavier and Annie, but they bond as he physically recovers. They agree to a truce: find Terri in Atlanta and then return to the bunker in Colorado, where Link and his team are already headed.

Naturally, Annie goes into labor at about the worst moment, and Xavier runs to the homestead of other survivors they pass. Though an entire group arrives to help and Annie delivers a healthy girl, she keeps bleeding and dies shortly after.

In flashbacks, another baby is delivered in the bunker—the first to be born after The Day. Cal assists, and Sinatra goes to visit the new mother and give her a break. Alone, she tells the infant that she has a plan to one day leave Paradise.

Xavier leaves with Annie’s baby for Atlanta, finally arriving at the city limits to find a man who knows her but says she’s been taken away. At about the same time, Link and the other arrive outside the mountain and “ask” to be let inside.

For how little time we get to spend with Annie, it speaks to the quality of this show, its writing, and the acting that her death feels so cruel when, with proper treatment in an actual medical facility, she could easily have been saved.

As they travel, she and Xavier debate the safety of trusting anyone now. While his faith in others brings them to help her, it’s still not enough to save her. It does at least give us some hope that human goodness persists.

The aftermath is heartbreaking, particularly seeing Annie’s horse refuse to leave her grave until he hears her newborn daughter cry, and the letter Annie leaves behind for the girl, asking her to follow Xavier’s thinking and have faith in others.

There’s plenty to challenge that notion, too. We can’t exactly blame any outsiders for being rash in their attempts to enter the bunker, but years of desperation and them seeing what much of the world is denied will likely end badly.

But our real “record scratch” moment is the knowledge that Sinatra knows of a plan for the future, which almost certainly meets other powers that be do as well. How much has that unknowingly shaped all we’ve seen so far?

As for the ending, I’m holding out that wherever Terri has been taken, she’s been taken alive. The single most optimistic thing that’s happened so far is the possibility of her and Xavier reuniting, and I’m not giving that up just yet.

Still, as good as it is, Paradise seems to become more depressing with every episode. From the loss of Annie to this update on Terri to seeing Sam remember her own son she lost to illness, we’re long owed one iota of true good news.

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Paradise streams Mondays on Hulu.

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