Summary
The ending of Billionaires’ Bunker leaves everything unresolved, which is probably the point, since Max’s “escape” is ultimately freedom from the prison of his own privilege.
There has long been a cliché about rich people and buying immortality. Popular tropes involve cryogenic freezing, downloading consciousnesses into AIs, and so on, and so forth. Alex Pina’s Billionaires’ Bunker isn’t quite as sci-fi as that, but surviving an apocalypse, theoretical or otherwise, is a version of the same thing. And if the ending of this show is anything to go by, while money can buy you a lot, it certainly can’t buy you everything.
It takes too long to get to that ending. By the time we arrive at Episode 8, the finale, there’s a tremendous amount to pay off, since this is the kind of show built on a pretty significant early twist that substantially upends the initial premise. We’ll go through that premise, and that twist, and then unpack what it all means by the end, since that’s our job. But know this: When it comes to the end of the world, the last people you can rely on are the rich, even though it might be them bringing it about in the first place.
Bunkering Down
The bunker of the title belongs to Kimera, funded by tens of millions of dollars of investment from uber-wealthy patrons who require a place to hide in the event of a world-ending calamity. Needless to say, one of those arrives right as the series begins – a geopolitical squabble that erupts into nuclear doomsday, trapping the clients and their families 1000ft underground.
But not really. Well, the being trapped bit is accurate, but the apocalypse is all a charade cooked up by Kimera, for initially obscure reasons. The project’s mastermind, Minerva, is clearly up to something, though, and it’s this push and pull between the bunker hoax and its specific motivations that backdrops an emerging soapy family drama, as two mega-wealthy families who share a traumatic history are forced to also share more space and resources than they feel comfortable with.
Our ostensible POV character is Max, who is fresh out of prison – where he became a kind of prizefighter by necessity, divorced from the privilege his family money had always afforded him – for killing his fiancée, Ane, while driving under the influence. He’s taken to the bunker by his father, Rafa, who has secured his release to “save” him from the coming apocalypse. But this involves having him live with Ane’s father, Guillermo, and her younger sister Asia, in Kimera’s mystery-shrouded simulacrum.
Trouble in Paradise
Since Billionaires’ Bunker reveals its key gambit to the audience right from the off, most of the overlong runtime is spent on the characters trying to figure out things we’re already privy to, which doesn’t exactly help the pacing. As a result, we’re forced into watching a soapy family drama while Minerva tries to keep the real truth quiet and also enact a plan to defraud Guillermo through his business partner, Oswaldo.
Max is our POV character on account of being the most inherently mistrustful and, of course, the one who has already seen the limits of what even substantial wealth can achieve. But we’re treated to the most intimate secrets of his entire family, including how his dad testified against him despite having been the one to advise him to flee on the night Ane died, how mother Frida never actually loved his father and has been carrying on with Guillermo, and indeed Guillermo himself, who married his mistress in a haze of grief after the death of his wife, never having really loved her either.
While Max is gradually learning how messed up his family is and becoming more suspicious of Kimera, its security personnel, and its AI, Roxan, he also starts falling for Asia, Ane’s medical student sister, who initially pretends to hate him but who has – all together now – been in love with him all along. She’s also one of the few other people in the facility who seems interested in knowing the truth about it, reinforcing the show’s underlying idea that the uber-rich aren’t just the only people who can afford the end of the world, but the most likely to believe it’s happening when it isn’t, just to reinforce their own privilege.
Billionaires’ Bunker Still | Image via Netflix
Surface Level
The driving narrative force of Billionaires’ Bunker’s ending is whether Max will make it to the surface, which he resolves to do after Asia diagnoses her step-mother, Mimi, with hepatic encephalopathy. Max’s plan is to retrieve a life-saving dialysis machine and simultaneously slip the shackles of Kimera’s underground prison. Even after learning that Mimi can’t be saved, he decides to leave anyway, promising to come back for Asia if he lives, which they both worry he might not, since the official line is that the world has become irradiated beyond the point of liveable (I’m getting shades of Hulu’s Paradise here, not sure about anyone else.)
Of course, it’s difficult to feel much tension around this since we know the Earth is fine; it’s only Max who doesn’t. I suspect the reason why Billionaires’ Bunker decides to use him squinting into the bright light of freedom as its final image is that there isn’t really anything to show after that. We know what he’s going to see.
Ultimately, though, what he sees isn’t really the point. The point is that he left, despite having the choice not to; to have remained in the cosy embrace of his family’s money and privilege. But for the second time in his life, the illusion that privilege affords him has been shattered. As was the case when his own father betrayed him to ensure he went to prison, his family’s historic lies polluted their potential paradise, leaving him with no option other than to escape it. Even if the apocalypse had been genuine, the salvation offered by Kimera wouldn’t have been.
