Fallout’s society includes vault-dwellers (shown here) and those stuck topside
Lorenzo Sisti/Prime
This is the year of the bunker – at least, it is on TV.
We kicked off in January, just as season two of Fallout (Amazon Prime Video) was getting going. It is a lively alternate history, set hundreds of years after the US was nuked, with a privileged few now living in subterranean “vaults”, while the rest inhabit a topside wasteland of monsters and mercenaries. Vault-dweller Lucy is looking for her villainous father Hank, accompanied by The Ghoul, an irradiated gunslinger with no nose but buckets of gruff charm.
Then came Paradise (Disney+), returning for its second season this month. The cataclysm here is a volcano-induced mega-tsunami that has ended civilisation, causing the US elite to retreat beneath a mountain in Colorado. Having tracked down the killer of US President Cal Bradford, secret service agent Xavier Collins has heard of survivors and sets off to find his wife Terri, while political machinations continue inside the Colarado bunker.
And later this year, season three of Silo (Apple TV) will arrive. Our third apocalypse was caused by our planet’s noxious atmosphere, which rendered Earth’s surface uninhabitable. Residents of the “silo” are trapped in a gloomy, highly stratified society without knowledge of their history, records having been destroyed 140 years earlier. Only the black-market trade in “relics” from the before 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 might not be so toxic after all.
“
Whichever flavour of bunker fiction you favour, all roads lead to a hole in the ground
“
There are even more fictional bunkers to wall yourself away in, should you choose to, like those in disaster flick Greenland 2: Migration, or the musical The End. It is also no coincidence that the novel I Who Have Never Known Men, written in 1995 and set in an underground prison, went viral on TikTok in 2024.
While this genre is hardly new – it goes back at least as far as Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt from 1913 – its current popularity speaks to a widespread anxiety about our world that isn’t hard to understand. It is a place where responsibility is increasingly privatised, where you are either smart, rich or lucky enough to find safety or be left to perish, where the impulse to burrow away from outsiders is often encouraged. We have all heard the rumours of real-life celebrities buying doomsday boltholes.
What’s clear is that whichever flavour of bunker fiction you favour – the irreverence and ultraviolence of Fallout, the slick murder-mystery of Paradise, the maudlin intrigue of Silo – all roads lead to a hole in the ground. We are fixated on visions of the world ending, with the future shrinking to a vanishing point.
There are two ways to see this. One view is that we have given up on making society better – having lost the war against our inherently selfish natures. Our only solace is to take turns picturing the precise nature of our end and to imagine endlessly replaying the old order via the privileged few in a bunker.
The other view – and the one I prefer – is that we are reckoning with the necessity for comprehensive change: nothing short of a cleansing fire will do. The characters we love in bunker fiction wouldn’t exist without such events. Having found characters to love in Fallout, Paradise and Silo, I want to think that bunker fiction reflects some real-life 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 prepper mindset can seem fatalistic, but in this fascinating non-fiction guide to end times culture, Garrett reveals a more nuanced picture.
Bethan Ackerley is a subeditor at New Scientist. She loves sci-fi, sitcoms and anything spooky. Follow her on X @inkerley
Topics:
