Fallout society includes the vault dwellers (shown here) and those stuck above
Lorenzo Sisti/Prime
This is the year of the bunker – at least it is on TV.
We started in January, just like the second season Fallout (Amazon Prime Video) took off. It’s a living alternate history, set hundreds of years after the US was forced out, with a privileged few now living in underground “warehouses” while the rest inhabit a wasteland of monsters and mercenaries. Vault-dweller Lucy searches for her villainous father Hank, accompanied by the Ghoul, an irradiated gunslinger with no nose but buckets of gruff charm.
Then he came Paradise (Disney+), which returns for its second season this month. The cataclysm here is a volcano-induced mega-tsunami that ended civilization and caused America’s elite to retreat under a mountain in Colorado. After tracking down the assassin of US President Cal Bradford, Secret Service agent Xavier Collins hears of survivors and sets out to find his wife, Terri, while political machinations continue inside the Colarado bunker.
And three later this season Silo (Apple TV) will arrive. Our third apocalypse was caused by our planet’s noxious atmosphere, which rendered the Earth’s surface uninhabitable. The inhabitants of the “silo” are trapped in a grim, highly stratified society with no knowledge of their history, the records of which were destroyed 140 years ago. Only the black market trade in “relics” from earlier times hints at what once was. But when engineer Juliette finds evidence of a conspiracy at the heart of the silo’s leadership, she begins to suspect that the surface may not be so toxic after all.
“
Whichever version of bunker fiction you prefer, all roads lead to a hole in the ground
“
There are even more fictional bunkers that you can wall yourself in if you choose, like the ones in a disaster movie Greenland 2: Migrationor a musical The End. It is also no coincidence that the novel I who never knew a manwritten in 1995 and set in an underground prison, went viral on TikTok in 2024.
While the genre is hardly new – it goes back at least as far as Arthur Conan Doyle Poison belt from 1913 – its current popularity speaks to a widespread anxiety about our world that is not hard to understand. It is a place where responsibility is increasingly privatized, where you are either smart, rich or lucky enough to find safety or left to your own devices, where the desire to bury yourself away from strangers is often encouraged. We’ve all heard rumors of real-life celebrities buying doomsday holes.
Obviously, depending on what flavor of bunker fiction you prefer – irreverence and ultra-violence Falloutneat murder mystery Paradisecrazy intrigues Silo – all roads lead to a hole in the ground. We are fixated on visions of the end of the world, with the future shrinking to a vanishing point.
There are two ways to see it. One view is that we have given up on improving society – we have lost the war against our essentially selfish nature. Our only consolation is to alternate between imagining the exact nature of our end and imagining the endless replay of the old order through the privileged few in the bunker.
The second view – and the one I prefer – is that we count on the necessity of a comprehensive change: nothing short of a purifying fire will do. The characters we love in bunker fiction wouldn’t exist without such events. After finding the characters you like Fallout, Paradise and SiloI want to think that bunker fiction reflects some real hope.
TV
Fallout: Season 2
Amazon Prime Video
Paradise: Season 2
Disney+
Silo: Season 3
Apple TV
Book
Bunker
Bradley Garrett, Penguin Books
The doomsday mindset may seem fatalistic, but in this fascinating non-fiction guide to end-times culture, Garrett reveals a more nuanced picture.
Bethan Ackerley is a subeditor in The new scientist. He loves sci-fi, sitcoms and anything creepy. Follow her on X @inkerley
topics:
Leave a Reply