Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | TV | March 4, 2026
I’ve watched 11 seasons of The Walking Dead plus maybe half a dozen seasons of its spin-offs, and if there’s one thing that long-running AMC franchise drilled into my head about dystopias, it’s to never trust anyone. That lesson emerged somewhere around season three, when The Governor first appeared and confirmed what the show had been quietly arguing all along: there is no such thing as a good dystopian community. They’re all cults. There’s always something rotten at the foundation. Something corrupt. Something that will eventually make you wish the zombies had taken you.
That instinct even bleeds into the first season of Paradise — though the show is more generous with its ambiguity. Sinatra may yet be misunderstood. She could be working for the greater good, and I mean that sincerely, not the way Negan meant it. She may actually be trying to save what’s left of humanity rather than simply consolidate power over it.
But that is still ahead of us. The first four episodes of the second season have largely abandoned the Colorado mountain bunker in favor of Shailene Woodley’s Annie Clay, who survived the early years of the apocalypse by doing the one thing dystopian fiction always recommends: locking herself in the basement of Graceland and refusing to come out. Yes, the Graceland.
Here’s the thing about Paradise, though: it was created by Dan Fogelman, the man behind This Is Us, which means it is constitutionally incapable of agreeing with The Walking Dead’s thesis. In Fogelman’s universe, humanity isn’t the threat — humanity is the whole point. Throw Sterling K. Brown into that equation, and what you get is a dystopian drama that will hollow you out and then carefully, deliberately refill you with something that feels uncomfortably like hope. And then hollow you out again. Because Dan Fogelman is an asshole.
This week’s fourth episode was the perfect example of that particular brand of emotional warfare. A very pregnant Annie agrees to travel to Atlanta to help Xavier locate his wife — a journey that exists because Annie once made the catastrophic mistake of opening her door. She’d been alone in Graceland, distrustful of everyone, safe in her isolation, when a group of survivors appeared and turned out to be decent human beings. She met Link (Thomas Doherty). She let her guard down for one night. She stayed behind when he left for Colorado, retreating back into the fortress of her own distrust, and discovered some months later that distrust has consequences.
She was going to raise Link’s baby alone. That was the plan. Then Xavier’s plane went down near Graceland — just across the river in Arkansas — and she pulled him out of the wreckage, and somewhere between saving his life and the road to Atlanta, she let another person in.
She went into labor on that road. And when Xavier wanted to ask strangers for help, Annie’s every instinct — forged by years of solitude and, one suspects, an ill-advised Walking Dead binge before the ash clouds rolled in — screamed at her to refuse. Those strangers would take the baby. They would take her. This is how it always goes.
Except it isn’t. Not here. Xavier asked, and those strangers came, and they helped because that is what people do when they are not being incentivized by social media to perform cruelty for an audience. They delivered Annie’s baby. They were kind. They were, against every expectation this genre has spent decades cultivating, simply good.
And then Annie died. Because Dan Fogelman is an asshole.
Before she went, she placed her baby in Xavier’s arms, asked him to find the father, and wrote a letter to a child who would never know her. Because Dan Fogelman is an asshole. Xavier strapped that baby to his chest, got on a horse, and rode to Atlanta to find his wife — and found only that she had died not long before he arrived. Because Dan Fogelman is an asshole.
The Walking Dead spent over a decade being suspicious of humanity. But at least it never kicked me in the emotional gut three times in a single episode. Who’d have thought to inject not just hope but … profound kindness into the apocalypse. Dan Fogelman. That’s who. Because he’s an asshole.
