I love me some Sterling K. Brown any way you slice it. He is an excellent actor.  He seems like a good person with honorable intentions in his life.  Let alone he has a nice hard body that is put together in a way that is pleasing to the eye.

I just watched the first two episodes of the second season of Paradise starring Sterling K. Brown as Xavier and featuring a very diverse cast.  In Season 2, Episode 1,  Annie Clay (played by Shailene Woodley) holds up in Graceland while the world is being destroyed.  The environment is toxic. Resources are scarce to non-existent, and she stays inside and alone for a long time.   After two years, the sun begins to shine again, and a group of men break into Graceland with guns drawn.  One of them pulls her by her ankles from beneath the bed where she was hiding. She spits in the face of one man and struggles before hitting a man over the head with a pan. Shortly thereafter, Annie stays in a room until the smell of food coaxes her out.  Once out, she joins the group and gradually lets her guard down.  Annie eats with them, laughs with them, and talks with them about their plans to go to Colorado to restart the world.  She even has sex with the she spat on and hit with the pan.  When the men leave with the resources they came for, Annie chooses to stay behind.

SPOILER ALERT: A few months later, Annie -now several months pregnant- sees a plane crash and ventures out to see what happened.  She finds Xavier unconscious with a stab wound in his abdomen.  She brings him back to Graceland injured and barely conscious and tends to his wounds.  When Annie learns that Xavier is on his way to Atlanta to find his wife, she tells him no. He’s not. She declares that the two of them are going to go to Colorado to find the father of her unborn child. Then she walks out of the room and leaves Xavier handcuffed to the furniture without a chance to respond.  Wait Whaaat??!?? 

DIGRESSION:  When the shit hits the fan earlier in the episode, and everyone is confused and running, Annie, the white tour guide/leader/savior knows the answers and tells everyone else what to do. Gail Edwards, the black female security guard/friend (played by Kayla Njeri) also holds up in Graceland, and Annie cares for the woman after she gets hurt.  Annie uses her first year medical resident background until -you know it- until the woman dies.  Expected. No problem.   

So Annie cares for the black woman like a sister.  She feels safe and is friendly with a group of strange, mostly white men who break into her house, but she puts the strange, seriously injured black man who she rescues in handcuffs? Where’d she get the handcuffs from anyway?  She sleeps with the white man and ties up the black man?  The man who was barely capable of taking care of himself let alone being capable of being a threat to this white woman.  Really???  Still???

Neither one of those characters are in S2,E3, but Xavier’s daughter, Presley is.  Presley. Graceland. Can’t wait for this thread to come together.