This article discusses, in depth, the season finale of the Netflix series Billionaires’ Bunker.
Surviving the apocalypse has become the ultimate luxury. As new reports surface, every few months, of the world’s wealthiest people building themselves underground fortresses in anticipation of an extinction event they feel increasingly sure is imminent, art has been imitating life. From the Hulu hit Paradise to Succession creator Jesse Armstrong’s HBO movie Mountainhead to The Act of Killing filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer’s narrative debut The End, the past year has seen a surge in speculative fictions about super-rich characters who hunker down in expensive isolation as the world burns. Or floods. Or succumbs to a deadly virus.
Billionaires’ Bunker (less provocative original title: El refugio atómico, or The fallout shelter), the latest Spanish-language Netflix series from Money Heist creators Álex Pina and Esther Martínez Lobato, both continues that trend and subverts it. When the eight-episode season begins, as geopolitical tensions flare ominously, employees of a venture called Kimera Underground Park are ushering dozens of clients who’ve paid tens of millions of dollars to ensure their families’ safety to bunkers 1,000 feet below Earth’s surface. Everyone is still settling in for what they expect will be a brief precautionary stay when the unthinkable happens: nuclear doomsday.
But in the final moments of the premiere, Pina and Martínez Lobato execute a diabolical twist. There was no apocalypse. It was all an insanely elaborate hoax, orchestrated by Kimera for reasons that viewers will gradually discover. As clients continue to labor under the impression that they’re among the last surviving humans, Billionaires’ Bunker becomes a sly allegory for the artificial nature of lives buffered by extreme wealth—one that pays off in an exhilarating finale.
Not that the show is entirely, or even predominantly, a work of high-minded political…
