Fascination with the apocalypse: more and more series are depicting the end of the world.

Bodyguard Xavier Collins throws himself at the president as if making a perfect tackle. Carl Bradford, the highest authority in North America, falls to the ground from the shock of having escaped the clutches of an assassin, who had camouflaged himself in the crowd as a television reporter. Suddenly, he pulls out a pistol and fires. Xavier is shot for protecting Carl and then convalesces on a long leave: this is a pivotal scene in the series Paradise due to the intimacy that builds between the president and his preferred guard and because it is a preliminary link to the real murder that triggers the plot. On the afternoon of June 7, 2025, Colombian senator and presidential candidate Miguel Uribe Turbay speaks at an impromptu rally in a Bogotá park. "I'm going to reauthorize the carrying of weapons," Uribe says, among a few slogans. Suddenly, anonymous among the crowd, a tall, skinny young man, later revealed to be 14 years old, approached the politician's side. When he was a few meters away, the hitman fired several times, until Uribe fell to the ground from two bullets to the head. Miraculously, he didn't die: he continued to recover in the hospital.

The sheer destruction of fiction and reality, on both sides of the aisle, under disruptive events occurring in broad daylight and before everyone's eyes, seems to be one of the commonplaces of the present time. Threatened democracies, the savagery of social relations, accelerationism and the chaos of everyday life, climate change, wars, social fragmentation, appalling inequality, neo-fascism, and conspiracy theories. Books that speak of "the end of reality," "technology and barbarism," "spectral lives," "posthumanism," "transhumanism," "technocene," and the imminence of nuclear wars, which are not far off judging by the recent bombings between Israel and Iran. In times of confusion and uncertainty, when the world is no longer what it was, under a crisis of representation at all levels, fiction reflects the order of the day on screens: apocalypse and more apocalypse, the end of the world just around the corner.

“Fascination with the apocalypse, fascination with enjoying the inevitable end,” writes Slavoj Zizek in his latest book, Against Progress . He argues that while there is a perception of imminent danger in the world—due to environmental, technological, or geopolitical issues—this same apocalyptic atmosphere often serves as a way for capitalism to hide its contradictions, power relations, and the brutalities of the hegemonic model of progress. Argentine writer Michel Nieva explains this as the old promise that technology would bring social progress, even if the veil of domination is lifted through expanded violence and resource extraction. Other thinkers, such as Flavia Broffoni , speak of the extinction and collapse of civilization, among other definitions.

What is real and what isn't? What space and time shape human existence in a changing era plagued by calamities? Black Mirror, El Eternauta , Paradise , The Last of Us , and The Handmaid's Tale , among the most notable apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic series, blend science fiction, horror, cyberpunk, and dystopias from yesterday and today on the platforms, creating their own unique and parallel worlds.

There are several common threads: they're a ratings success, they incorporate elements of fantasy, crime fiction, and political thrillers, and among their intricate plots that force us to reexamine the twists and layers of the narrative, there are dictatorial governments and internal rebellions, conspiracies and secrets of power, strange natural phenomena, and anomalies in the coexistence between technology and humanity, capable of shifting from fascination to the thick fog of dysfunction. Series no longer predict or premonitorily anticipate events: it seems as if the scripts occur simultaneously with reality, in a parallel montage that feeds back in a disturbing and suspicious way.

The world of survivors and the bewilderment of entering an unknown future, with the invasion of forces that no one can decipher in the short term, is nothing new on the screen: just think of Lost and The Walking Dead to see a television tradition of zombies, cannibalism, catastrophes, nightmares, creatures, infected people, and agonies.

In The Last of Us, science and its predictions—and its flaws and its tests, as well as its role as an indispensable advisor—continue to appear when a fungus causes a pandemic and humans are transformed into violent creatures that act like zombies, with pathogenic fungi that could evolve and become more dangerous as global warming and ecological imbalances advance despite the salvation of a possible vaccine.

Positioned on the margins of science fiction as an anomalous genre within the Argentine tradition, El Eternauta was born from comics. While the characters cross Avenida General Paz wearing masks to avoid the radioactive snow—which resembles the notorious Chernobyl , when children play with the glittering dust that falls from the sky, unaware of the risks—and face an open battle against the "cascarudos" in locations throughout the Conurbano (urban suburbs). The Last of Us plays like a road movie, soundtracked by Gustavo Santaolalla, as Joel Miller and young Ellie travel the desolate roads of the United States.

In one, the streets are white, covered in snow; in the other, flooded with water. “The old works,” says El Eternauta , in a phrase that went viral and whose idiosyncrasy seemed to contrast with what critic Jorge Carrión said about how “TV series are the United States’ penultimate attempt to remain the center of global geopolitics.” And in The Last of Us , Joel has a certain attachment to analogue and old objects, and in the van he plays a Hank Williams cassette along scorched roads, with cars and buildings in ruins, while they go to meet the rebel group Las Luciérnagas and confront FEDRA, the military force that controls the quarantine zones, imposing martial law in the repression of any type of opposition.

“Killing former humans sometimes touches my heart,” says Joel Miller, faced with an ethical dilemma regarding mutants. The parallel with The Handmaid's Tale , set in a time of renewed obscurantism, isn't far-fetched, with a dystopian future originating in a United States ruled by a fundamentalist Christian tyranny, which took control through arms after a severe environmental crisis led to a decline in human fertility.

The extraordinary drift of June Osborne, one of the most captivating female characters and leaders of recent times, with Evil as an overwhelming force embodied in the dictatorship of Gilead, is represented in a resistance that, between red uniforms and white caps, goes through various stages, from plots to external fronts, from the messianic to post-apocalyptic territories, where all power, no matter how absolute it claims to be, is incapable of encompassing everything.

Brain-driven machines and epidemics everywhere, interplanetary wars, oppressive and suffocating atmospheres, worlds dominated by megacorporations, struggles for survival. Apocalyptic series showcase conflicts and tensions where it seems everything could go to hell at any moment, with fears and anxieties such as the creation of a general artificial intelligence superior to humanity's intelligence, and conspiracy narratives and hate speech abounding in the digital magma.

Without zombies, armed guards, or assassinations, in the final season of Black Mirror, the disturbance is, in fact, a sign of social relations. The apocalyptic is intertwined with the intersection of new monitoring systems, virtual dimensions, gadgets, and buttons galore, of "parallel" realities, distorted bodies and consciousnesses that seem to threaten what was, until then, believed to be the normality of everyday life or human behavior.

As in the episode "Bête Noire," the climax of the slow unraveling of a woman named Maria when a former schoolmate bursts into her workplace applying for a vacant position at Ditta, a food company. Named Verity, she wins the job, and from then on, Maria enters a crisis that spreads to all her areas, when Verity, the "computer nerd," as she had been nicknamed for her strange behavior at school, wins the sympathy of the employees and begins to cause disturbing situations with a paranormal power capable of altering reality.

Indeed, behind the appearance of her genius, which surpasses all limits when she becomes the “empress of the universe”, Verity hides a revenge for the bullying she received as a child with a rumor that María herself had started with a joke about a teacher, and which then spread to the point of no return, almost like a tribute to Carrie , Stephen King's creature.

“Sometimes, making a scene is all you have to do,” says a character in Paradise , amid thermonuclear weapons, electromagnetic pulses, secret services, control towers, catastrophic events, missions by a select few scientists, a giant dome covering an underground city à la Under the Dome —another reference to King—and a killer lurking in the shadows of the collective martyr. The fetishization of technology, the fragility of life, and the ominous manifest themselves in isolated cities, with offenses and betrayals lurking, mysterious illnesses, and devastating plots at the height of power, where, in their chapter-by-chapter overview, the series concentrates a great capacity to open the lens of the temporal, the micropolitical, the historical, and the phenomenological.

Paradise , the drama created by Dan Fogelman –the same one from This Is Us– was renewed for a second season and is expected to premiere in 2026; after the seventh season with its six episodes that work independently, a new Black Mirror has not yet been confirmed, despite pressure from its fans; the third season of The Last of Us could arrive at the end of 2026 and one of its creators, Craig Mazin –who had dazzled with the also apocalyptic Chernobyl– , raises the possibility of extending the series based on the complexity of the original video games.

And while El Eternauta confirmed the second season, with the final episode of The Handmaid's Tale released at the end of May, the colossal adaptation of Margaret Atwood 's novel—which acknowledged having been influenced by the Argentine dictatorship, the disappeared detainees, and the appropriation of babies—was concluded. It remained on screen for six seasons and a total of 66 episodes.

“The end of the world never comes. Never. It's the least fulfilled promise in history,” writes Marcelo Filzmoser in his novel Mudanza s. Zizek warns of the risk of being trapped in a dynamic of “false alarm” or “announced catastrophe,” where the urgency of collapse coexists with a certain normalization of the crisis. And in the reissue of Pure Lies by Juan Forn , he says: “What other novelty should I adapt to as best I can? What was left of the world I had left when I went to sleep?” The future arrived a while ago, and apocalyptic series, in the boom of 2.0 destruction, seem to age rapidly in the first decades of the new millennium.

However, real and artificial power, resilience in the face of adversity, with humanity decimated and in alarming crisis, and, against all odds, the persistence of sensitivity, solidarity, and resilience that never disappear, no matter the apocalypse, continue to captivate a large audience in fictions both close and far from the world today.