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 critique. Though Money Heist‘s anti-Establishment themes inspired protesters and, more recently, found its way into the discourse around Charlie Kirk’s murder, its wild, lightning-paced plot probably has more to do with why it remains Netflix’s second-most-watched non-English series of all time. The creators’ new project follows a similar template. Nested within the larger story of Kimera, its mercurial mastermind, Minerva (Miren Ibarguren), and the self-enrichment scheme she eventually describes as “the biggest embezzlement scam in history” is a tempestuous soap opera involving two families who’ve purchased an indefinite underground vacation together and share a long, sad history.
In Pina and Martínez Lobato’s typical fleet fashion, the show compresses into its first six minutes the many extraordinary events of 22-year-old Max Varela’s (Pau Simón) life. An idyllic best-friendship turned romance with Ane, the similarly hyperprivileged daughter of family friends, turns tragic when an intoxicated Max kills her in a car crash. In prison for manslaughter, he discovers his money can’t keep him safe and, after enduring the kind of violence from which he’s always been shielded, works to defend himself and gain the respect of his fellow inmates. “I realized I was already dead,” he says, in a voiceover, of the learned helplessness that sprang from a life free of risk or responsibility. What follows is a rebirth, into the world everyone who wasn’t born rich inhabits—a world where survival is a struggle and actions have consequences.
His awakening makes this violent outsider an ideal hero for the bunker that his father, Rafa (Carlos Santos), whisks him off to immediately after his suspiciously early release. There he must coexist with billionaires and centimillionaires—Ane’s father, Guillermo (Joaquín Furriel), and younger sister, Asia (Alícia Falcó), among them—who have yet to absorb the lessons that were foisted upon Max in prison, while nursing well-founded suspicions about Minerva & Co. His storyline becomes a quest for truth within a shelter built on fantasies and populated by liars.
A collision of artificial realities
Billionaires’ Bunker is an uneven show—heady and addictive when the plot is flying but tedious and silly when, as often happens in the middle episodes of the season, the pace slows down enough to let us try to follow its logic. In these stretches, where characters painstakingly explain to one another their schemes or motivations or histories, the ratio of exposition to action can get frustratingly high. The family soap hits all the expected beats: suppressed passions, festering grudges, stunning confessions, blistering confrontations, sweaty sex scenes. And the more we learn about the Kimera hoax, the more far-fetched and overcomplicated it seems. (I’ll leave it to Reddit to untangle the nigh-on-nonsensical corporate boondoggle that ensues when Kimera’s friendly surveillance AI, Roxan, starts impersonating Guillermo to commandeer his business.)
These storylines do, at least, feel connected in the way that they advance Pina and Martínez Lobato’s argument about the uber-elite occupying an artificial reality of their own making. The lies begin as soon as Max encounters Guillermo, an arrogant nepo baby who blamed him for Ane’s death but now pretends to accept his apology. As the subterranean situation deteriorates, the deceptions Max’s and Ane’s parents have been weaving since their own teen years to protect their egos and easy lives unravel along with their lavish aboveground lifestyles. Guillermo, a philandering widower, tells Mimi (Agustina Bisio), the mistress he married after his wife’s death, that their wedding was a mistake. Max’s mother, Frida (Natalia Verbeke), confesses to Rafa that she never loved him. And as many viewers will have predicted long before it’s finally confirmed, Frida and Guillermo have been carrying on an affair for decades. Frida’s terminally ill mom, Victoria (Montse Guallar), escapes into a hedonistic haze of morphine, imperious behavior, and pansexual dalliances.
If the Kimera of it all feels flimsy—and Minerva comes off as too palpably unhinged in her pursuit of joining what she calls the “250 [Million] Club” for anyone to trust—the implication is that the company’s billionaire clients have so thoroughly insulated themselves from the truth that they are primed to accept its comforting fictions. Flashbacks fill in the backstory of how Minerva and her team perpetrated their scam. From the harrowing footage of a Kimera employee’s supposedly fatal recon mission to the wild night Guillermo’s right-hand man, Oswaldo (Enrique Arce), enjoys in Bangkok, it’s all produced like a Hollywood blockbuster. (How could they have predicted the future precisely enough to set up, months in advance, everything that would happen with Oswaldo in Thailand while Guillermo was in the bunker? Best not to ask too many questions.) There’s meta-commentary here about the ubiquity of stories like this one. The conspirators talk about how they’ll manipulate their marks the way, well, a TV writers’ room might tweak a season-long arc for maximum emotional impact.
Max’s emergence into the light
It makes sense that Max proves harder to fool than his peers. Prison gave him a B.S. detector; he senses that Roxan is more than just a digital servant and that the carceral aspects of his new home are no mere security measure. His run-ins with Kimera staff only make him more suspicious. Early in the finale, he discovers that his family, too, is a carefully maintained mirage. Frida confesses to her 28-year affair with Guillermo. She didn’t visit her son in prison, she tells him, because she couldn’t bear the pain Max had caused the love of her life by killing his daughter. Though of course she also cares for Max, “I might just be more romantic than I am maternal,” she says. “I’ve spent my whole life pretending. But since I came in here… I’ve been uncorked like a bottle of champagne. Now I only want to tell the truth.” Max replies that she’s even more fake and selfish (not to mention “less charming”!) than the mother she despises.
“Nothing in my life is as it seems,” he laments to Asia after storming off. Initially outraged to see her sister’s killer in the bunker, Asia has since acknowledged—after days of secretly mooning over videos of Max on Ane’s old cellphone—that she’s been lying to herself for years. Actually, she was in love with Max all along. And now she, the cerebral medical student, is the only person around—for all he knows, the only person on the planet—who shares his longing for the truth. “It’s the rewind theory, where you look back and realize that things aren’t the way you thought they were,” she says. “Because you didn’t want to see them,” but “you need to see things as they are… You have to choose to live in a story you tell yourself or in the real world.” Her words throw Max into a reverie, reliving his past in light of his parents’ lies.
“Let’s live in the real world,” he declares. This is no empty vow. The first thing he does is bluntly inform Rafa about Frida and Guillermo. Then Max and Asia enact a plan to get Max up to the surface so he can brave what they’ve been told is an irradiated hellscape in search of the dialysis machine that a critically ill Mimi, diagnosed by Asia with hepatic encephalopathy after collapsing in Episode 6, needs to survive. Just as he’s escaping, Asia is summoned to revive the now-unconscious patient. Alas, her morphine-fueled partying with Victoria has rendered her beyond help; joining the Varela matriarch in Victoria’s refusal to confront her own death has cost Mimi, whose condition means she’s unable to filter toxic substances, her life. But when Asia informs Max, via earpiece, that it’s too late to save Mimi, he decides to leave the bunker anyway. “I’m going out. Not for that machine. Or for Mimi. I’m doing it for me,” he says. “There’s more hope for me outside than in this bunker.” Before he does, Asia confesses her love for him. He reciprocates, promising to come back for her if he lives.
In the final shot of the season, Max steps out of the bunker. Because it’s a closeup of brilliant daylight hitting his face, we can’t see what he sees—although, given what we’ve seen of Oswaldo in Thailand, we know there has been no actual nuclear armageddon in the days since Minerva staged a pretend one. (That would’ve been a fun twist, though.) What matters is that Max believed he could be dooming himself and, instead of trusting the orange-suited staff to protect him, took the risk, just to find out the truth. Now, he presumably realizes the apocalypse was just one more sham layered over the lies Kimera’s clients carried in with them. If prison enabled a rebirth, and his descent into the bunker was also a burial, then this is his resurrection.
Billionaires’ Bunker is, in many ways, a playful show. A finale that also features Oswaldo rocking out in a fake Bangkok nightclub to “American Idiot” is not a finale that can be accused of taking itself too seriously. But there’s profundity, too, in its illustration of just how selfish a person must be to secretively purchase a personal escape hatch from the annihilation of humanity—and how much they must deceive themselves in order to believe their wealth merits such salvation.
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