Paradise (2025) review

    Paradise is a 2025 political thriller that shockingly diverts into a science fiction one after the first episode. It’s one of those things that is best experienced without spoilers so if you want to enjoy Paradise in the best manner possible, you should go and watch it without reading any further. It’s a good series. There are some flaws but it is a solid and serious take on the subjects it tackles. It also has a truly spectacular seventh episode. That’s about as much as I can say about the series without spoiling anything.

    You ready for more?

    Okay then.

    The premise for Paradise is that Xavier Collins (Sterling K. Brown) is the head of the United States Secret Service, protecting the President of the United States, Cal Bradford (James Marsden). Cal is assassinated and there’s a severe question of how the Secret Service could fail so utterly. A lot of allusion is made to things having gone horribly wrong as well as a once close friendship between the two that went horribly wrong. At the end of the first episode, we finally find at least one of those secrets out.

    You ready?

    No take backs.

    Specifically, the secret is that the two are living in a massive underground city and the rest of the world has been destroyed in some sort of unnamed catastrophe. The disaster was successfully predicted by a billionaire tech mogul, Samantha “Sinatra” Redmond (Julianne Nicholson) who used both her and their government’s resources to make a luxury bunker to ride out the apocalypse.

    Paradise basically takes the premise of Fallout and proceeds to do it completely straight. If I had to make a comparison, I’d say it’s what happens if you combine Fallout with Lost. Every character is carrying immense survivor’s guilt as well as dealing with a variety of tragic backstories. America was not in its best shape even before the apocalypse and what happened to the surface world is another driving mystery. We get a decent set of answers to most of the pressing questions but, like all good writing, adds more questions.

    Sterling K. Brown does a fantastic job at making a lead that isn’t necessarily the most likable individual. His wife didn’t make it down to the bunker in time for it to be shut and his hatred for both the President he’s sworn to protect is only matched for his own. The fact his kids depend on him to provide a semblance of a normal life and the remainder of what qualifies as military force/security in the 10,000 person community falls under him doesn’t relieve his stress. James Marsden also gets to show off his acting chops as Cal is a somewhat Bill Clinton-esque figure who has his vices but was, ultimately, a good man in a horrifying situation. Much of the series deals with flashbacks to his tenure as President as well as setting up his life in the bunker.

9/10 

If the episode has a highlight and lowest point, it will be the seventh and eighth episodes. The seventh episode finally provides concrete answers as to what happened during the End of the World and how everyone responded to it. It is well-written, dramatic, and even genuinely horrifying at times. Some of the best television I’ve seen in the past decade. The eighth episode, sadly, provides a thoroughly unsatisfying answer to the President’s murder.

Paradise has a lot of themes of class consciousness, environmentalism, wealth inequality, government corruption, corporate malfeseance, and more but they’re all very subtle. All of the survivors in the bunker are the “lucky ones” that get to live in a climate controlled Rockwellian community while the rest of humanity has gone extinct (maybe). However, society is set up so there’s still people who clean the toilets, pour coffee, and serve an elite that doesn’t make any sense to have anymore.

In conclusion, I strongly recommend this series. It’s some of the best science fiction I’ve seen in years and certainly deserves to have many more people talking about it than I’ve seen. I was a bit disappointed by the final episode but absolutely want to see another season of this if not several more.

The Last of Us season two review

    THE LAST OF US season two was...okay.

    If that sounds like I'm soft pedaling the opening to a negative review, well, then you are extremely perceptive. The Last of Us season one was one of the best, if not the best, video game adaptations of all time. The only real competition I would say it has is the Fallout show and that is an entirely different genre despite them both being post-apocalypse science fiction programs. It was immensely popular for a reason and introduced a whole new audience to the world of Joel Miller and Ellie Williams. I feel like the attempt to retain this audience is what hurt it versus challenging them like the video game, The Last of Us 2, did.

    The premise is that a fungal outbreak has turned the majority of individuals into horrifying monsters. Ellie Williams (Bella Ramsey) is a young girl immune to the condition protected by Joel Miller (Pedro Pascal) that ended the previous season with a devastating secret between them. The second game was deeply controversial as it shifted focus from the relationship between these two to a devastating cycle of revenge between Ellie and a new character, Abby Anderson (Kaitlyn Dever).

    I'm generally a defender of the video game and its most controversial choice (spoilers ahead) with the fact that it is an attack on the typical post-apocalypse lack of morality that is in so many works. The two women are incredibly hardass survivors and vicious without civilization to hold them back. However, it is shown to be a dark path that doesn't make either of them better. Instead, it just gradually winnows down their morality and breaking the cycle of violence is more important than any form of justice. It wasn't very popular in some circles because of Joel Miller being the most popular character in the franchise by far but it was an effective artistic statement.

    Season Two of the Last of Us seems to really wish it wasn't adapting the second game. I say that as a strange criticism but it feels like the best summary of the show I can think of. It doesn't change everything but it tries to softpedal, move around events, explain everything, and generally screwing with the tone. Ironically, it doesn't change any of the actual story so that its efforts are more or less vain. Like if you have someone who hates beef stew (or grimdark), you can't really prepare the beef stew in a way that will satisfy the negativity. The story is a horribly dark and depressing one that was still too dark for a lot of people.

    Since it's Pride month, it's also fascinating to see how the show handles its queer romance and leads with Ellie and Dina. The show seems to be much more interested in the chemistry between Bella Ramsey and Isabel Merced. The show seems like it would much rather be doing a story about them falling in love in the post-apocalypse rather than how vengeance poisons even the best things in our lives. Maybe I'm merely misjudging the pacing and we'll see that happen. Also, the scenes between the two are genuinely cute with some bittersweet ones like the fact the pair have no idea what the rainbow signifies when they enter one of Seattle's neigborhoods.

    The show has some genuinely fantastic acting throughout with Pedro Pascal and Jeffrey Wright (who was the voice of Isaac in the game) doing amazing jobs. Bella Ramsey is always great when she's the younger Ellie and Isabella Merced is a cool collected survivor throughout. I certainly don't think the show is bad by any means. I'm definitely going to watch the next season. However, I think the show pulls its punches.

    Ellie Williams in the game is someone on a horrible road of revenge and while the show version definitely does some terrible things, I feel like it doesn't feel like she's fully committed to the path of revenge that would match a book accurate Arya Stark. This one seems to not fully in the mind of wanting to kill Abby and all of her crew but just Abby, which doesn't make sense to me and weakens the game's message. I think this may be a Catch-22, though, because a lot of more casual viewers were horrified by even the softened version on display here.

    Oh well, we'll see where the road of revenge leads in...two years.

    Oof.

The Guy in the Corgi Shirt 1#: Fallout the Series

 

Exactly what the title says. I really enjoyed Fallout: The Series and here's a video where I discuss it with fellow post-apocalypse author Eric Malikyte. I think the two of us provide a pretty unique perspective on the show from people who make these kind of stories for a living. As a note, "The Guy in the Corgi Shirt" is my Youtube persona.

Review - Silo: Season One

    SILO is based on the similarly titled book series by Hugh Howey. After finishing FALLOUT, I was still in a post-apocalypse mood and didn’t want to deal with zombies, so I decided to check out this series on Apple TV that I’d seen advertised at my local comic book store.

    I'm a fan of Rebecca Ferguson from her work in the Mission Impossible movies so I figured it would certainly be up my alley. I have to admit that it was the look of the show that sold me on it and the idea of living in what appeared to be a literal nuclear silo was something that I definitely was attracted by. Certainly, I ended up getting the book after finishing the first season. Still, it’s not going to be a wholly positive endorsement. It’s a good show but I have thoughts.

    The premise is that humanity, at least as far as we know, only exists in the Silo now. There’s ten thousand people living in a single vertical tube stretching down into the depths of the Earth with the outside considered to be wholly toxic. They have forgotten all of their history and all records of it have been destroyed due to a great rebellion that was put down a century and a half ago. Relics of the before times are illegal and a vibrant trade in them still exists. If you screw up or are feeling suicidal, you are sent outside to clean the cameras watching the outside and will inevitably die within minutes.

    The first couple of episodes deal with Sheriff Holston Becker (David Oyelowo) and his wife, Allison (Rashida Jones), dealing with the fact that they are unable to conceive during their preordained period to have a child. They are also people who have stumbled into possible secrets of the time before, including an actual hard drive. This story will segue into the story of Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson), a “Mechanical” working in the lowest, dingiest levels of the Silo. Opposing their efforts is Robert Sims (Common), a sinister Judicial agent, and the ambiguously loyal Bernard Holland (Tim Robbins).

    The plot is, obviously, stretched from the original novel. You can tell they have added a large amount of content in order to fill out the show’s ten episode runtime. This seems like it could easily have been a movie and probably should have been. There’s quite a bit of melodrama that feels contrived and designed to just maximize the conflict despite the fact that the story is fairly straightforward despite a few twists.

    Next, Silo feels a great deal like a an adult aged cast of characters in a YA novel. There’s the sinister conspiracy, the plucky heroine with way too much plot armor, and the somewhat contrived backstory that lets her keep a role as a working class hero while also being an educated young woman with ties to the upper class as well as eventually falling her way into law enforcement. Having read the books, I feel like they did a much better job of getting straight to the point and not getting sidetracked.

    That doesn’t mean the show is bad, per se, but it does lower its score a bit. The show has fantastic set-building and a strong claustrophobic feel throughout. Much of the technology is analog and feels very much like Fallout without the retro-futurism or wacky humor. Everything feels appropriately worn down and you believe these people are living in a slowly dying ruin. The little rules and feel of the place are all well done as well.

    The acting is good, too, and none of the performers do anything less than their A-game. All of them are very talented and even if they don’t have much to work with, they manage to expand the characters and give them a humanity that the writing doesn’t necessarily justify. Even if you can see who the villains are from a mile away, you also believe that they have justifiable (at least to themselves) reasons for their activities.

    In conclusion, this is an entertaining show with some flaws. I recommend it to individuals who enjoy dystopian fiction, post-apocalypse storytelling, and those who don’t mind a little melodrama to round out their dramatic acting and tragedy of circumstance. The world of Silo is well-realized and the acting is good enough that I can ignore most of its flaws.

Fallout: The Series Season One review

 

*plays Atom Bomb by The Five Stars*

    I love Fallout to an unhealthy degree. Seriously, I had a Fallout wallet for years. My wife got me a Fallout themed Xbox as a birthday present. I've loved Fallout since Fallout 3, like many fans, but have also played the original Interplay games. I can tell you the secrets of the Vaults, who three fictional Presidents were, and why you should never eat Iguana on a Stick. So, I am THE target audience for Fallout: The Series. Mind you, I'm also going to be one of those annoyingly hard to please people that notices everything wrong too.

    So is it fantastic? Or an atomic bomb? Well, much like the games themselves, it has a little of both but is closer to Fallout: New Vegas versus Fallout 76. It is something that my wife, who is only familiar with Fallout through what she can see over my shoulder, enjoyed very much and probably benefited from someone to tell her little details about but is perfectly accessible to a newcomer. Indeed, what I think people are most likely to complain about is going to be from hardcore fans who are going to be upset about some lore changes-probably unreasonably so but fan is short for fanatic for a reason.

    The premise for the franchise is that it is an alternate 23rd century where the world was nuked two hundred years ago. Technology is more advanced in some ways with power armor and robots on one-hand but black and white televisions on the other. The nuclear war that happened has still not been recovered from, if such a thing were possible, and it remains a mixture of Mad Max and Sixties science fiction movies. This is already a thing super-Fallout fans will be annoyed by as some fans insist the Earth would rebuild and only Bethesda Games is keeping it stuck in ruins.

    The story follows three protagonists with the first being the Ghoul/Cooper (Walter Goggins), who is a survivor of the Great War and a former Hollywood cowboy. The years have not been kind to him and he's gone from being a singing good guy cowboy to a murderous Spaghetti Western one. The second is Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell), the daughter of Vault 33's Overseer (Kyle MacLachlan), who is setting up for her arranged marriage with a stranger from Vault 32. Finally, there is Maximus (Aaron Moten), who is a new recruit to the Brotherhood of Steel and a survivor of the sacking of Shady Sands.

    I'm disinclined to spoil any of this show because it's such a wonderful road trip that involves so many Easter Eggs, callbacks, plot twists, and surprises. We get a longstanding mystery from the franchise resolved as well as the plugging of a plot hole that has existed since Fallout 2 (why are Vault-Tec experimenting on people after the apocalypse when all of that data would be seemingly irrelevant?). We also get nods to all of the games ranging from the first ("Our water chip is busted") to New Vegas and the Commonwealth.

    The GOAT (Greatest of All Time) for this series is definitely Lucy and I hereby dub her "Vault Girl" as her official nickname for inclusion among such luminaries as the Vault Dweller, Courier, and Lone Wanderer. She is naive without being stupid, kind without being insipid, and believable in her journey to becoming a survivor. She never quite sheds her Good Karma Pacifist Run playthrough ideology and is all the more lovable for it. Cooper is almost as entertaining and utters an immortal line about how, no matter how important your goal is, you will always be sidetracked from it in the Wasteland. Maximus, by contrast, is...okay. This is no fault of the actor but he seems to be a lot more naive than Lucy in some ways with none of her excuse.

    The show manages to achieve a fun balance between world-building, characterization, plot, and humor. The humor, especially, works well by exploiting Fallout's peculiar tone of zany over-the-top violence with an alternate 1950s wholesomeness. Poor Lucy will be splattered with blood many times in this show and never quite lose her perky can-do attitude for example. She needs to definitely put a few more points into her Speech score, though. Fans of the Fallout soundtracks will note a lot of the songs get use in the show and it is all the better for it. They can also afford actual Johnny Cash tunes this time around too.

    The show makes the correct choice to embrace the absolute ridiculousness of Fallout's retro-future aesthetic with appearances by a Mr. Handy, the 1950s dinner decor of the Vaults, green DOS computers, and how the fact PipBoys geo-tracking works exactly like they do in the games. We don't see as many robots or mutants as we might have in the games but I suppose even the show's extensive budget had to draw the line somewhere.

    There's been some confusion over an error in the show's timeline, though. One that some fans believed resulted in New Vegas being rendered non-canonical. The developers have already come out and said this is not the case and the show makes many-many references to the game, so its extra strange but some people presumably need a reason to complain. Fans of NCR will also be upset with some of the developments in-universe but, well, War never changes. Oh and I was upset they didn't get Ron Pearlman to do a voice over. Those are my only complaints.

    I can't wait for Season Two.

Available here