'Paradise' Undercut Its Most Promising Female Character With a Frustratingly Familiar Twist

This story contains heavy spoilers for Paradise season 2, episode 4, “A Holy Charge.” When Hulu's Paradise returned for its highly anticipated season 2 on February 23, instead of checking in with the lead character, Xavier (Sterling K. Brown), it opens with a departure episode about a woman named Annie Clay. Primarily set after the super volcano eruption that upends society in the series, the premiere titled “Graceland” follows the med school dropout turned Graceland tour guide (played by Shailene Woodley) as she finds the will to survive. It’s arguably the show’s best installment yet.

Thanks to Woodley's exquisite performance and the telling glimpses of her life before the apocalypse—her mother’s death, the panic attack that brings her career to an end, and the comfort she finds in teaching strangers about her mother’s favorite singer—we quickly come to care for her. It's all the more heartbreaking—and frustrating—then, when it's clear three episodes later that the character was introduced only to die.

When Annie and Xavier’s paths inevitably cross by the end of “Graceland,” it seems to signal a new future for her and an important allyship for both of them. Strong-willed and pragmatic, Annie could’ve seen Paradise’s mysteries with new eyes, and without the complacency of the average bunker dweller. However, no matter how well-written she appears to be, she was never meant to be the hero. Instead, she’s just the latest victim of a misogynistic plot device that has plagued female characters for decades.

The beginning of Annie’s plummet from compelling character to emotional-manipulation device comes via a plot twist near the end of “Graceland”: She’s heavily pregnant. A year before Xavier’s plane crashed, Annie met Link (Thomas Doherty), a charming biker who gate-crashed the museum two years after the eruption, in search of vintage car parts. Though she was initially guarded, Annie bonds with Link during his time at the mansion, and they sleep together before he leaves. Link, who’s determined to get to the mysterious Colorado bunker, asks Annie to join him, but she's too afraid to leave her familiar shelter. So by the time Xavier falls from the sky, Annie is very late in her pregnancy.

It makes little sense beyond melodrama. Shrewd Annie and mature-beyond-his-years Link are both extremely smart, careful people, and they didn’t once think of contraception? The odds of getting pregnant from one instance of unprotected sex range from 3 to 42 percent within a woman’s fertile window, but you wouldn’t know that if your sole source of sex ed is this exhausting postapocalyptic trope. (See A Quiet Place, The Walking Dead, Children of Men, etc.)

Though some viewers may have hoped that Annie and her baby would survive—after all, the concept of the entire show requires some suspension of disbelief—what we get is much more lurid. After Annie stitches Xavier back up in the March 2nd episode, “A Holy Charge,” the pair have two weeks together while he heals before setting out to find his wife, Teri (Enuka Okuma), in Atlanta, and eventually reach Colorado. But, to appear travel-ready, Annie had been hiding the severity of her condition, so it’s not long before she experiences preeclampsia and is pushed into early labor. In the 25 minutes of screen time before that labor begins, her interiority takes a back seat. The show doesn’t explore whether she regrets locking herself in Graceland, if her feelings for Link have evolved since their separation, or what she thinks about motherhood outside of their dystopian circumstances. Save for flashes that hint at her condition and urgency to leave, we only see her with Xavier, who centers himself in the moment, dadsplaining the joys and fears (and swaddling tips) of parenthood. Every conversation between them rehashes the same existential dilemma: Nihilist Annie can’t see the future as anything but bleak, but, to optimist Xavier, the baby inside her is a symbol of hope.

Before Annie ultimately dies in childbirth, she tasks a crying Xavier with “A Holy Charge”—delivering the baby to Link—in a prime example of fridging. The bane of every feminist fangirl, the trope coined by comics writer Gail Simone in 1999 is when a secondary character (usually female) dies or goes through grievous harm so a more significant character (typically male) can experience growth or change because of it. Not every instance of a male character’s sorrow over a female character’s death is fridging, but Annie’s death caps off the end of an episode that treats her like the trope’s most notorious examples. Her own character arc and potential are pushed aside so she can serve as a plot device and conduit for two men. Link—the specter in Xavier’s dreams whose past is tangled in the existence of the bunker itself—becomes the lynchpin holding the series together, giving it momentum. Annie’s discarded, and her only legacy is a letter to her child that echoes Xavier’s message.

Television has made major strides in its depiction of nuanced female characters, but even the best shows can’t avoid all pitfalls. Over the past few years, speculative-fiction shows like House of the Dragon, The Handmaid’s Tale, Yellowjackets, The Last of Us, and even Bridgerton season 4 have explored pregnancy trauma and traumatic childbirth in scenes more graphic than Annie’s. While some of these have been controversial, they’ve also treated the death of the mother with gravitas, not glossing over the cruelty and sorrow. Instead, “A Holy Charge” joins Squid Game season 3 as a recent show in which a mother's death is sidelined for the male hero to find a new purpose as her baby’s caretaker. Considering how reproductive harm is a longstanding sci-fi trope, it’s troubling to think that a portion of mainstream Hollywood could be regressing in their approach to these stories. It’s also telling that this episode’s flashback juxtaposes Annie’s childbirth with a bunch of men (and Julianne Nicholson’s Sinatra) more concerned about the bunker’s first newborn than the mother who carried him to term.

Beyond the simplistic writing and lost potential, the most frustrating thing about Paradise’s discarding of Annie is that we know the show can do better. The fourth episode of Paradise’s first season, “Agent Billy Pace,” also ends with a central character’s tragic death. Over the course of an hour, we learn the titular assassin’s (Jim Beavers) tragic backstory and empathize with him as quickly as with Annie. But we also get to see Billy grow: his redemption arc, his feelings for Jane, and how his friendship with Xavier and love for Xavier’s kids inspire him to be better. Billy gets to be a whole person, not a character in a fable. Annie and all the other female characters coming to TV deserve the same courtesy.