A utopian desire called dystopia: Analysing transnational projections of anti-capitalist futures in four post-apocalyptic television series

Abstract

This article argues that the transnational appeal of post-apocalyptic narratives lies in the fact that, even as they depict new forms of domination, they also envision the end of a world in which one of capitalism’s defining ideology of homo economicus is non-existent and its concurrent malady, the axis of alienation and exploitation, has been extinguished. Accordingly, through analysis of four post-apocalyptic television series – Station Eleven (2022), The Last of Us (2023), The Collapse (2019), and Offworld (2022) – the article shows how these televisual texts articulate utopian possibilities emerging through the dystopian conditions generated by societal collapse.

Financial trader, turned-inequality activist Gary Stevenson in his bestseller autobiography The Trading Game recounts the existential angst that overcame him as he progressively came to grips with what being successful in his line of work really meant: ‘it was becoming a serious struggle just to shower every day. I had still made money though. I had always made money. That was easy. All you had to do was bet on disaster. The end of the economy. The end of the world’ (2024: 327). This scene, set up at the height of the global financial crisis in 2011, affirms what Naomi Klein – already in 2007 just before the meltdown of the global economy – had called ‘disaster capitalism’, whereby millions are made by ‘banking on an apocalyptic future’ and millionaires build their fortunes ‘based on the profitable prospect of a grim future’ (2007: 291). Both perspectives suppose a first analytical window to begin to understand the link between the concrete politics of apocalyptic thinking within late capitalism and its fictional expressions, as well as the ways audiences engage critically with the proliferation of end-of-the-world narratives that followed.

Stories about the world’s ending are in this article embedded in what Raymond Williams famously described as television’s ‘organized set of practices in the home’ (Williams, 1974: 92). Yet today, those practices are not organised around a single-family screen but unfold through the highly personalised, multi-platform environment of streaming. Accordingly, the production routines of television and the political structures it creates, its ‘flow’ – in Williams’ (1974) terminology – becomes freed from the restricted times and constricted space of the living room, making its presence noted in the daily routines of audiences (i.e. in their social media feeds, in their message groups, and in their open tabs in their computers at work or at home). Dystopia follows audiences potentially everywhere, ever more blurring the line between the fictionalised end of the world and the real feeling that world is actually ending. In such a context, the dystopic resonates with audiences’ lived experiences and thus becomes intimately attuned to the anxieties of our anticipated – and already unfolding – apocalyptic future. At the same time, following renowned media scholar John Fiske (2011), televisual apocalypse’s mass appeal, far from indicating the passive acceptance of capitalist destructive forces, signals a utopian potential for resistance directly against late capitalism’s death drive. Watching post-apocalyptic television can be a popular pleasure that points to a generalised utopian desire to see the world end as we currently know it. In other words, the televisual saturation of dystopia is a symptom that audiences have a utopian longing not so much for the end of the world but for the end of our current capitalist arrangement.

On the one hand, the proliferation of dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction neatly rhymes with a late capitalist imaginary that promotes political nihilism and favours existential inaction; if the world is ending, why bother fighting for a better one. This also crystallises one of the central arguments in Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism (2009): capitalism has so thoroughly shaped the collective imaginary that it has fused everyday life to its own alienating, dystopian horizon. As Fisher notes, we now live with ‘the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it’ (2009: 2). Capitalism’s ideological saturation has been so pervasive that it appears to have erased the utopian impulse from post-millennial cultural production. As Robert Tally argues,

by the late twentieth century, it seemed that utopia had no place in the world. In the era of globalization, any space ‘outside’ of the political economic system appears almost inconceivable, and radically alternative places and futures are almost invariably cast in dystopian terms’ (2013: 11).

If we understand utopia as a sociopolitical logic – ‘as an image to grasp, realized in a faith that it is really possible (the real-possibility of Marxism)’ (Miles, 2008: 100) – then the post-apocalyptic genre may function as dystopian proof that utopia (Marxist or otherwise) is no longer imaginable in the present.

Yet, on the other hand, Fisher’s Capitalist Realism (2009) ultimately offers the faintest glimmer of hope. Despite never denying capitalism’s dystopian reach, he concludes by suggesting that ideological ruptures are possible: ‘We are now in a political landscape littered with what Alex Williams called “ideological rubble”—it is year zero again, and a space has been cleared for a new anti-capitalism to emerge’ (2009: 84). Politically, this ‘starting from scratch’ speaks to anarchist visions of the future, rooted in the belief that a new world can only be constructed on the ashes of the old capitalist one (Van de Sande, 2015: 182). Culturally, the same proposition acquires an even more nuanced inflection. As Fisher notes elsewhere, ‘post-apocalyptic fictions… have often been pretexts for imagining utopia’ (2010: 15). In other words, post-apocalyptic utopic potentialities may not be fully captured by capitalism’s dystopian logic. One may not require the literal – or ideological – end of the world to glimpse utopian possibility. Rather, the post-apocalyptic imaginary may constitute a fictional space, privileged by the reach of new televisual online affordances, in which utopia becomes thinkable again, beyond the suffocating limits of contemporary capitalist realism.

This article therefore argues that the utopian impulse remains latent within the cultural imagination of dystopia. The four television series examined here – Station Eleven (2022), the first season of The Last of Us (2023), The Collapse (2019) (L/Effondrement in the original French title, remade for Mexican television in 2023 as El colapso), and Offworld (2022) (originally debuted in Spain with the title Apagón) – offer case studies not only for understanding how dystopian television can stage utopian possibility but also for examining why audiences gravitate toward post-apocalyptic narratives and, crucially, how such consumption might hold political relevance in a moment when the real world appears to be edging toward collapse.

Preamble: The post-apocalyptic death of homo economicus

At first glance, it is not obvious the post-apocalypse could be a site where utopian imagination is merely entertained. Dystopian-themed stories saturate the audiovisual landscape, often portraying the post-apocalypse as ‘a Hobbesian state of nature where the absence of explicit law leads not to harmonious relations between humans and nature but to a world of brute force and desperate self-interest’ (Rosenfeld, 2020: 65). The dystopic ethos in most of today’s post-apocalyptic cultural products simplifies the world to the negative image of utopia and reduces life after the apocalypse ‘down to a single principle—e.g., a boot stamping on a human face forever—[that] satirizes the Arcadia whose single governing principle is nature’ (Rosenfeld, 2020: 65). Nevertheless, the fact that dystopia seems to be everywhere does not necessarily mean that utopia is nowhere to be seen.

Many representations of the end of the world may show a type of anti-utopian moment that holds on to what is familiar, a type of nostalgia that could even rekindle common past forms of social subjugation, yet the post-apocalypse can be cathartic because there homo economicus (the main villain of capitalism) is killed against all odds. In this sense, notwithstanding the persistence of multiple systems of domination, the post-apocalypse becomes attractive so as to signal a different economic future. A form of labour that frees because it is meaningful at the most fundamental level, as it is closely tied to the preservation of one’s life. Accordingly, the audiovisual objects in this study are not just utopic interpretations of post-apocalyptic dystopia. In contrast to what is only implicit in most other post-apocalyptic cultural products, these television shows are exceptionally explicit examples of a desire for a truly meaningful life, imagining new futures where social relations are unmoored by class-based oppression outside the capitalist paradigm of homo economicus.

One can see many forms of domination in the many post-apocalyptic dystopias that pervade the screens of movie theatres and televisions everywhere. Yet that domination is not necessarily tied to a doomist impetus that works representatively to redeem capitalism and conform with the supposedly inescapable grasp it has on human imagination. Characters in post-apocalyptic fiction may live through Hobbesian scenarios that could in fact be interpreted as justifications of current sociopolitical hierarchies and neoliberal securitisation paradigms based on the veneer theory of society. The domination they experience, and its implicit justification, falls however under the scheme that sees politics and explains hierarchies through morality. Such is an ideological matrix that precedes capitalism by far. It does not say much and indeed could contradict capitalism’s political economy. In this sense, the many screenings of the post-apocalypse, even when they portray the most dystopic of the future worlds, are not symptoms of capitalism’s totalising absolute force that blocks and shuns the mere the imagination of alternative realities in fiction. A different case could be made, following Robert Tally (2023), that those post-apocalypse dystopias are the sign of postmodern times in the era of globalisation with its new post-national paradigm, whose representational scale requires new representational forms through which the fantastic maps an otherwise unimaginable global order. Dystopia and the post-apocalypse are in that sense tools with which to measure postmodern imagination, whereby contemporary dystopias render globalization’s invisible processes legible through familiar allegories of the dystopian state (Tally, 2023). As such, the tumultuous global order is more easily measured by the simplest stories of them all, the story of human survival in the face of existential threats. What is even more fascinating about some of those measurements seen in television is that these cultural products harbour and project an apparent shared desire (by their creators as well as their target audience) for the end of the world, where life is soothingly pared down and more manageable (Tally, 2023). That is a desire oftentimes for a romanticised simpler past, which offers a kind of existential comfort when compared to the precarity of a capitalist future – a precarious prospect exacerbated by the essential incompatibility of the financial structure of the ‘disaster capitalism complex’ and the ever-closer apocalyptic scenarios brought about by the climate crisis (Klein, 2007: 12).

The desire for dystopia has a utopian strain despite and beyond the implicit reactionary politics embedded in post-apocalyptic nostalgia. Following one the threads in Jameson’s primary argument in Archaeologies of the Future – whereby utopian thinking is crucial for envisioning alternatives to capitalism and challenging the prevailing belief that no other socioeconomic system is possible – longing for a simpler life reveals the utopic logic of ‘an artisanal world against the scarcity of which the various commodities once more recover their true taste and reassert a use value to which the jaded sensibilities of the affluent society […] had become so insensitive’ (Jameson, 2020: 294–5). The utopic, in Jameson’s argument, is highlighted against the background of capitalist meaningless affluence. Such mindless materialism opens the door to rediscover utopia in dystopia, as there a radically different life can be imagined away from the obstacles of attaining material wealth in capitalism. Whereas, as Tally ultimately argues, post-apocalyptic fiction is the measure for ‘twenty-first-century-consumers’ complacency with respect to their pervasive sense of dread, their learning to live amid the disasters as a sort of “new normal” […] and their inability or unwillingness to imagine radical alternatives’ (2023: 40). There can be another final measurement for the contemporary post-apocalypse through which one reaches the alternative conclusion that such pervasive dread can also be understood as carrying a utopian desire in dystopia; a yearning for the post-apocalypse as a radical break from capitalism; a utopian alternative to the capitalist realist imagination of dystopia that paradoxically stays within the dystopic to imagine the utopic.

What is more, a different interpretation is also needed to explain the massive popularity of many of those post-apocalyptic narratives across nations beyond Tally’s ‘measurements’ of contemporary dystopia as a symptom of postmodernist and postcapitalist complacency with the status quo: ‘Once upon a time it was easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, but in many respects it today seems easier to imagine the end of the world than slightly better healthcare, increased wages, safer road and bridges, […] [etc.]’ (2023: 39). Contrary to what such interpretative framework could imply, the reason for the popularity of these shows could not simply be that people watch them because audiences within capitalist structures necessarily live in state of self-alienation and that is why they might like a product that reifies their oppression. That does not simply square off with the complexities involved in audiences’ viewing experiences or as Fiske put it:

popular pleasures offered by television can evade, resist, or scandalize ideology and social control […] and stem from the same unvoiced fear that the pleasures of the subordinate classes are necessarily disruptive because they lie outside the control of the bourgeoisie (2011: 312, 298).

Watching post-apocalyptic television can be considered one of those popular pleasures that empower viewers if only in a limited way. As such, one must contend with the popularity of dystopia beyond being a cultural product that merely possesses commodified entertainment value. In other words, as this article ultimately contends, the main reason for the transnational popularity of post-apocalyptic dystopia is that, despite showing many different forms of domination, these televisual visions of the post-apocalypse imagine the end of a world in which not only is homo economicus dead but one of the great maladies of capitalism has also ended: this is the old capitalist axis of alienation-exploitation. In fact, that axis is eradicated to the point of catharsis in the television shows here analysed. To that effect, the series Station Eleven and The Last of Us from the US, the French The Collapse, and the Spanish Offworld will serve as vignettes to exemplify how representations of the post-apocalypse can reconcile their anti-capitalist essence with their dystopic message and, in parallel, project onto their viewership what seems to be a reciprocal (and, in these cases, optimistic) desire to live now in Fisher’s ‘year zero’ after the end of capitalism.

Vignette one: The utopian principles of art for art’s sake in Station Eleven

When asked about the HBO adaptation of her novel Station Eleven, Emily St John Mandel pointed out that one key difference may be found in how the show was filmed at the peak of the COVID pandemic in 2020–21: ‘it was a very strange meta thing that they had to do: film a show about a pandemic during the pandemic’ (Bethune, 2022: 19). The television series is in that way seemingly conscious of the very thin line that divides the world before COVID ‘ended’ the world and the new emerging world shaped by the ever more palpable threat of its ending. Whereas Mandel’s novel is ‘a contemporary modification of the apocalypse which withholds revelation in favor of playing out scenarios of human survival in the ruins of the old world’ (Doyle, 2015: 100), the HBO show eminently ignores the survival aspect of the post-apocalypse for the most part. Instead, it focuses on a more existential idea: how two opposed sets of survivors understand the line that separates the world before the apocalypse from the one begotten after it in the face of thinking a new future society. In that way, there are two main storylines around the characters born before the pandemic – the so-called ‘pre-pans’ – and those others born after it – ‘the post-pans.’ The first group advances the story of a theatre troupe, The Travelling Symphony, and its star actress Kirsten (Mackenzie Davis) in their tour of the Great Lakes region performing Shakespeare for everyone for free. The second set of characters is composed by The Prophet (Daniel Zovatto) and his cult of ‘post-pan’ children. Their beliefs are rooted in a post-apocalyptic graphic novel entitled ‘Station Eleven’ that they follow like a secular scripture and whose philosophy is driven by one of the comic’s tag lines: ‘there’s no before’. They is a nomadic cult that goes around kidnapping other children for their millenarian cause, severing them from their parents and their communities with the objective of destroying any hope of generational continuity. Their ultimate purpose is to create a ‘purer’ social order by eradicating any sign of progress made by those connected to the world before the apocalypse. Despite the deep darkness of that part of the show’s plot, The Prophet’s storyline works in reality as a rhetorical device that stays in the background. In contrast, the show’s protagonists, Kirsten and The Travelling Symphony with their motto ‘survival is insufficient’, end up dictating the entire series’ message. That interpretation is corroborated by both the cast and the showrunner and creator, Patrick Sommerville when, in a behind-the-scenes clip, they discuss what Station Eleven is about:

Mackenzie Davis (Kirsten): I think in the DNA of Station Eleven was the idea that life after civilization was not lesser than life before.

Himesh Patel (Jeevan): It doesn’t necessarily linger on that part where most of the suffering is happening. […] People have rebuilt the world and managed to move forward.

Danielle Deadwyler (Miranda): It’s a creation story. It’s about the unionization of people through love. […].

Patrick Sommerville: The threats that are out there don’t have to do with humans turning on other humans. Maybe it wouldn’t turn into a nightmare. Maybe anything was possible. […] What we wanted to see is what people were doing later to find a way of surviving through music and art (HBO Max, 2021).

Art in Station Eleven is not only a symbol or a metaphor for how to build a better society. Art keeps all those characters alive in a very literal sense. That is, for instance, The Prophet leaves behind his destructive beliefs and dismantles his cult through performing Hamlet with Kirsten, which allows him to forgive his neglected parents and find closure to his traumatic past. Equally, art is also a metaphoric tool that visualises a society freed from capitalist values. Through art the tandem alienation-exploitation – intrinsic to capitalist forms of value extraction through waged labour – is emptied of meaning, as survival occurs through unpaid work. Performing Shakespeare in Station Eleven is not a currency that the characters trade in exchange of shelter and food. Their performances are exempt of that old capitalist logic and only obey the mandate of ‘pure’ artistic principles (against The Prophet’s twisted ideas of generational purity).

Art is a utopian impulse that empties the post-apocalypse of any of its many dystopian potentialities. It thus becomes a political symbol working in the opposite direction from neoliberal capitalist logic in that it inherently shuns the commodification of human life and rejects the dystopian hyper-individualistic tendencies that capitalism, at a structural level, assumes is the core of human existence. Art in Station Eleven visualises an anti-capitalist reality – albeit not unproblematically – that represents the end of the world as the end of capitalist duties in lieu of a new anti-productivist ethos symbolically anchored in the modernist ideal of art for art’s sake. Interestingly, the television series develops such utopian view of art through the regressive (if not reactionary) anti-civilisational discourse of a return to a simpler life. As opposed to the original novel’s technological nostalgia, the show crafts its political message of embracing the utopic ideals of art for art’s sake through the explicit rejection of technology, which is made analogous to capitalist progress. The post-apocalyptic world is reduced to a convenient political simplicity, as it imagines that with the vanishing of pre-collapse technologies and the utopic principles of ‘pure’ art put instead (with Shakespeare as its masthead), ‘economic inequality and racism have also been displaced’ (Leggatt, 2018: 3). Such a narrative allows for an interpretation of the end of times that exclusively focuses on individual traumas, leaving everyone involved off the hook, permitting a kind of ironic distance towards the myth of civilisational progress shown on screen (i.e. an implicit wink to the viewers to just wait for the apocalypse to do away with all of their individual troubles). The show emphasises the act of dealing with trauma as a way of resolving social conflict. Yet the traumatic events are themselves denied by design, since the apocalypse is shown as the secularised version of a biblical plague whose traumatic consequences the characters can only adapt to in their own dis/functional ways. In this sense, Station Eleven seems to be offering a type of self-help, wrapped in therapy speak, approach to dealing with socio-political problems (which itself is a neoliberal attitude to social problems). At the same time, one cannot deny Sommerville’s television adaptation is intentionally tapping into desires of dealing with twenty-first century global capitalist angst by visualising the death of late-capitalist spirit of cut-throat competition and mindless consumerism. Moreover, the breakdown of capitalism in the series means to offer a hopeful alternative to such ethos whereby the Travelling Symphony’s art for art’s sake becomes the foundation of a new social equilibrium for a new post-apocalyptic timeline, for a new type of civilisational progress more humane and joyful, less transactionally determined.

Briohny Doyle points out accordingly that ‘the explorations of the post-apocalyptic imagination are properly explorations of the various breakdowns of capitalism itself’ (2015: 101). Station Eleven presents its viewership with the sudden breakdown of capitalism, which is in and of itself a critical desideratum against capitalism’s overdetermined ways of living. Nevertheless, as hinted previously, it is problematic to read Station Eleven’s basic plotline as fully embedded within ‘the critical temporalities of the contemporary post-apocalyptic novel […] [that] invite us to conceive history beyond the determinism of the sense of an ending’ and thus leaving behind the idea that there is no alternative to capitalism (De Cristofaro, 2018: 23). Be that as it may, the key argument in this section is not so much about the determining force or lack thereof in relation to a critical representation of the breakdown of the capitalist temporality, but about the shape and form that critique takes. It is about how that critique in Station Eleven uses art to disavow the eschatological mandate of capitalist ideology. On the one hand, this show advocates for a somewhat naive ending to the alienation-exploitation tandem through its anti-productivist ethos of art for art’s sake. Such naivete is exacerbated when projected onto the audience, because thinking of alienation and exploitation just as at the level of interpersonal economics (i.e. individual productivism/consumerism) and not as primarily a racial, colonial system of oppression, at minimum, risks falling into what Stuart Jeffries contends is the failed symbolic liberation of postmodern art ‘as the revolution we need to restore our utopian hopes by means of a liberating free-for all […]’ whereby a liberating artistic utopia lives harmoniously and in alignment with ‘the new neoliberal orthodoxy of minimal state and personal responsibility […]’ (2022: 7;11). On the other hand, albeit in a more implicit manner, Station Eleven is rejecting the principle that fuels capitalism’s raison d'être: the necessity of producing endless economic growth regardless of human and planetary boundaries.

Vignette two: The Collapse and endless growth

The French miniseries The Collapse is explicit in the way that advocates for a degrowth paradigm. Degrowth is the opposite of endless growth and, as renowned ecological economist Giorgos Kallis explains, is first and foremost:

[…] a critique of the ecological consequences of economic growth. The faster we produce and consume goods, the more we transform and damage the environment. There is no way to both have your cake and eat it, here. If humanity is not to destroy the planet’s life support systems, the global economy should slow down. We should extract, produce and consume less, and we should do it all differently. Growth economies collapse without growth. To prosper without growth we have to establish a radically different economic system and way of living (2018: 1).

The Collapse is a fictional essay of what would happen if humanity would opt for having ‘your cake and eat it’. There, the audience is shown the collapse of the capitalist growth economy in eight short independent episodes. They are eight different stories all centred around the lives of people dealing with the total collapse of the current industrial grid (there is no electricity, no fuel, no government, no economy). The last episode goes back to the moments before the world ended. There, a frustrated scientist is trying to warn everyone from his chair in a television talk show, railing against endless growth and against all the other panelists in the studio:

There’s not such a thing as green growth. […] You’re supporting a deadly system whose only purpose is to serve the privileges of a caste, a dominating caste, and not class, that is blinded by their quest for profit. […] We either keep growing and it all collapses, or we stop it. We’ll soon experience the collapse of our civilization. […] Disaster is coming, and it’s going to devastate everything’ (The Collapse, S1 E8).

This character works as a prophet of the apocalypse. Yet, when taking into account this scene in the context of the entire series, he does not exactly function like most other fictional prophets (i.e. as harbingers of disaster, catastrophe, and dystopia) but, in the words of Kirsten Moana Thompson, he is the messenger of ‘revelation, triumph, order and […] the belief, visualized in many doomsday scenarios, that the average apocalypse isn’t all bad—at the very least, it can teach us a lesson, so long as we’re able to read the signs’ (2007: 3–4). As such, contrary to what one could interpret from his words in the earlier quote, the scene and the whole episode is meant to highlight the scientist’s prescient advice in contrast to the panelists’ obliviousness.

After watching seven episodes portraying the full collapse of the growth economy, the viewer would likely see episode 8 and the scientist’s words as a moral tale concerning the impending need ‘to establish a radically different economic system and way of living’ – as Kallis argued earlier (2018: 1). That becomes more evident as the scientist’s harangue against growth is accompanied by a revealing solution: that of ‘survivalism’ as ‘a way to collectively get out of the system we live in’ (The Collapse, S1 E8). This is a revelation meant to show not just a way to deal with the collapse but a way to imagine a new society anchored in anti-capitalist sustainability, as this character keeps arguing, through the creation of ‘assistance networks in your city, your village, or region […] to recover some autonomy. […] to get out of the system as we know it’ (The Collapse, S1 E8). More importantly, his final argument is not that we ‘prevent the collapse, but [that] we can survive it’ (The Collapse, S1 E8). As he finishes, the audience in the studio starts clapping in approval, at which point the show host announces a commercial break and asks him to leave the studio. The episode ends abruptly shortly after, leaving the viewer with the gloomy sensation that something familiar has been witnessed; that prophets like this are living outside the fiction of The Collapse. Along with the rest of episodes, where a Hobbesian dystopia is all that the viewer is presented with, the final scene is not simply a criticism of the current economic growth paradigm but also a call to imagine a world without capitalism’s need for endless growth. That is, the last episode works to reframe all the previous episodes and thus wake up the viewers to think on the dystopian future the growth economy has in store for them. In that way, as one finishes the series, a familiar message (that was previously absent) suddenly appears: capitalism is incompatible with human survival. This last episode triggers a utopic imagination in that it prompts the viewer to imagine an alternative to the seven episodes that came before, one in which the collapse could have been survived.

Ultimately, what the series is proposing is a call to survive capitalism’s inevitable collapse. To that effect, capitalist growth (as represented in this show) cannot be so much opposed as it can only be survived. Such an interpretation relates to how capitalism is tragically coupled with the apocalypse, since it is inevitably married to endless growth in its exploitation of what Jason Moore terms as ‘Cheap Natures’ (2017: 595). Accordingly, capitalism is formed in the inseparable alliance of power (i.e. imperial expansion and conquest since 1492), capital (i.e. when surplus value is extracted as the result of accumulating power by conquest and colonisation), and nature (i.e. when natural and human resources become commodities to gain capital and power). Capitalism thinks of these three items (capital, power, and nature) as ontologically indivisible. Nature is permanently to sustain the endless growth of both capital and power and, thus, capitalism becomes inescapably colonising of both humans and the natural resources they depend on to merely exist. In other words, the very existence of capitalism depends on endless growth through the cheapening of natures; that is including human nature. As Moore puts it: ‘That so many humans could be reassigned to the domain of the not-human (or not-quite human) allowed capitals and empires to treat them cheaply—even as this cheapening was fiercely resisted’ (2017: 600). This cheapening of nature is in that way plural: on the one hand, it reduces the costs of labour (as human capital and natural resources are treated equally cheaply) and, on the other, renders them unworthy of dignity and respect. The first part of this equation (cost reduction) is the substance of exploitation. The second one (stripping nature’s nature and human nature of worthiness) is at the heart of alienation and of class-based hierarchies. If capitalism is not simply a question of economics but, following Moore’s argument, ‘a system of power, profit, and re/production in the web of life […] [whose] vigorous accumulation depends on the existence —and active production— of human and extra-human natures, whose costs of reproduction are kept “off the books”’ (2017: 606). The Collapse brings those costs back ‘on books’ and it does so in a paradoxical manner. The last episode confirms that the collapse brought forth by capitalism’s endless growth won’t be prevented – because capitalism has a totalising ontology, in its continuous exploitation of natures for its/our existence, leaving no room for alternative logics within the capitalist system. In parallel, the show’s last message is also asking those same viewers to imagine a scenario that runs against the previous seven episodes; one in which we conceive degrowth as the necessary condition to survive the capitalist end of the world. In that way, the last episode serves to put in perspective the previous shown dystopias while planting the seeds in the viewers for the creation of a different logic beyond the cheapening of natures as well as one fundamentally exempted of the alienation-exploitation capitalist axis. And that is an alternative framework that understands dystopia as the only possibility for utopia.

Vignette three: Anti-capitalist feelings from The Walking Dead to The Last of Us

After reading this section’s subheading, one may firstly wonder how – of all possible post-apocalyptic television shows – The Walking Dead (2010–21) could be remotely linked with anti-capitalism. In fact, the show has been reasonably analysed by some scholars as a homo homini lupus dystopia, which ‘repeatedly probes the Darwinian proposition that only those individuals who are strong or smart are able to overcome when they are attacked by zombies—or by other humans’ (Wright, 2017: 149–50). So much so that others have even argued ‘Hobbesian philosophy infuses The Walking Dead’ (Kasper and Kozma, 2019: 547). Nevertheless, this television series is key to this article’s argumentation not for what it politically may say (i.e. its political message) but for what it arguably makes its viewership feel (i.e. its emotional message). And the main pillar of that argument rests on how The Walking Dead centres, above all other character typologies, on the survivor, which is in turn to create a politics that equates survival with care and ‘offers an alternative approach to acting on the material conditions of life contrary to the renewal of a mastery over nature’ (Beuret and Brown, 2017: 336). As such, even if only at the level of its narrative structure outside its textual specificity, The Walking Dead presents a fictional universe where natures are not to be ‘cheapened’ (as Moore would put it) but only survived. The show projects a political subjectivity that could be very well interpreted as socially conservative (Nuckolls, 2014), or even fascist (Gencarella, 2016). In parallel, it nonetheless enforces a ‘structure of feeling’ based on ‘the importance of relatedness, codependence and the development of a collective politics’ (Harper et al., 2017: 715). The Walking Dead (as most other post-apocalyptic shows) proposes the viewer to explore a new emotional structure – following Raymond Williams’ conceptualisation (1977) – in which life is not fundamentally ruled by the burden of capitalist relations; that is, by the implementation of a labour paradigm based on alienation-exploitation through meaningless value extraction. On the contrary, all characters’ lives and labour in The Walking Dead always have a meaningful goal: survival. For instance, the governor in season 3 may be a brutal dictator who executes every outsider that defies his little fiefdom, but his evil motive is that of power preservation within his community, not the systematic exploitation of others’ labour to accumulate capital for his own group. Labour there has a clear-cut meaning: survival at all costs. This labour is in that way fundamentally detached from exploitation and alienation as we know it in today’s capitalist system. This does not mean such post-apocalyptic worlds are somehow metaphorically desirable. Desire here works in a more subtle (sometimes subliminal) manner. What is attractive is not the post-apocalypse per se, but what the apocalypse does away with: the feeling of being burdened by the present economic arrangement. In the post-apocalypse, labour begets survival, and survival is the only possible currency. Bartering, stocking, hoarding resources, taking advantage of weaker individuals, and even killing, all are done in the name of survival. Survival brings audiences (sometimes in very reactionary ways) back to a future of idealised simplicity when life is exclusively about living. In such nostalgic future – many post-apocalyptic shows imagine – natures could not be cheapened because they are free. The Walking Dead is thus paradigmatic in that it gives its viewership the very anti-capitalist feeling of not seeing lives governed by capitalism, only by ‘pure’ survival.

The first season of The Last of Us is another zombie-like show that focuses, similarly to The Walking Dead, on how to survive the apocalypse at all costs. That is visualised mostly through the narrative of Joel (Pedro Pascal), a cynical renegade in search of his lost brother who seems to have lost any hope or faith in what is left of society or in humanity for that matter. Of equal importance in The Last of Us is the storyline around Ellie (Bella Ramsey), who is supposed to (literally) embody the miracle cure that would restore life before the end of the world. The fundamental narrative development in the series is grounded in the tension between Joel’s quest for his own individual needs and the imposition that befalls upon him to help Ellie survive, whose apparent immunity would serve to find a vaccine for the Cordyceps pandemic that has turned most of humanity into zombie-like creatures. What is particularly significant about this conflict is that the pursuit of a cure – which would entail a return to pre-apocalyptic conditions – is symbolically rejected in favour of a form of humanistic survival within the constraints of a zombie dystopia. Such a choice is most clearly exemplified by the role that the Jackson Community plays as an explicit anti-capitalist symbol. Seen for the first time in episode 6, this community visualises best the utopian impulse that arguably lies behind every dystopic destruction of capitalism within visualisations of the post-apocalypse. To that effect, the dialogue from the scene where Joel and Ellie are given a tour of the community for the first time is emblematic:

Elle: So... You are like… in charge.

Maria: No one person is in charge. I’m on the council democratically elected […]

Tommy: Everything you see in our town, greenhouses, livestock, all shared equally, collective ownership.

Joel: So... Communism.

Tommy: Nah... It ain’t like that.

Maria: It is that. Literally. This is a commune. We are communists (The Last of Us, S1 E6).

This scene is fundamental in two ways. At one level, the commune is an exceptional portrayal of ‘communism’ in a US mainstream television product, as it is detached from any negative connotation whatsoever – so much so that, within the series’ main plot, these communists are represented as practicing true communism in opposition to the Fireflies, the rebel/terrorist group marked with the visual traits of a Che Guevara caricature. At another level, this commune serves as symbolic contrast of a world still full of capitalism, since in The Last of Us the great majority of people outside the commune live in quarantine zones ruled by the military dictatorship of FEDRA (which the Fireflies are rebelling against). The quarantine zone represents a continuation of the worst features of capitalist society before the apocalypse (full of precarious labour, scarcity, extreme inequality, etc.). On the contrary, in the commune audiences see themselves in a future that could be hard, dangerous, and treacherous, but one in which their lives are not ruled by value extraction. There, all labour is unpaid but is meaningful and, at the same time, is ideologically and materially insulated from the brutality of raw survivalism. In that way, the conception of labour in the commune is meaningful much beyond the idea of meaningful survival expressed in shows like The Walking Dead.

Just like the Travelling Symphony’s motto in Station Eleven, in The Last of Us survival is also insufficient. As seen in the last episode, when Joel chooses the survival of Ellie (who needed to be sacrificed to extract the cure out of her body) over the hypothetical revival of a pre-apocalyptic humanity, they both decide to go back to the Jackson Community. Although their actual return to the commune is never shown in the first season, the viewers are compelled to imagine not only a world without capitalism but also one full of ‘communism’ or, more exactly, a world ruled by anti-capitalist principles. That is when this television series becomes fully relevant, as it represents a world ecology based on anti-capitalist socialisation and not simply anti-capitalist survival. Thus, when Joel rejects the possibility of returning to life before the apocalypse, the show compels the audience to empathise with his refusal of going back to a world ruled by the axis alienation (of people and their labour) and exploitation (of natural resources and all other living beings). Instead, Joel and the viewership ‘choose’ the post-apocalypse in the hope that, there, human existence could be governed by both meaningful survival and meaningful socialisation. In that sense, while The Walking Dead presents its audience with a world ecology in which surviving is done by the fittest in the name of preserving the feeling of belonging to an exclusive community away from meaningless capitalist relations, in The Last of Us surviving is done by the fittest mode of socialisation in the name of an ideal inclusive community that best serves everyone and their common good. And there the feeling becomes one of hope, as explicitly rooted in the visualisation of an anti-capitalist future.

Vignette four: Choosing utopia in Offworld

So far, three different types of anti-capitalist futures have been presented, whose utopic condition of possibility is (paradoxically enough) the dystopic landscape brought forth by the post-apocalypse. As such, Station Eleven configured the days after the world ended through an anti-productivist logic based on the modernist ideal of art for art’s sake; The Collapse advocated for a degrowth paradigm radically separated from principles of capitalist consumption; and in The Last of Us viewers saw for the first time in a long while the explicit defense of communist collectivism as a way of organising society. The Spanish miniseries Offworld assembles all of the aspects seen in those other shows adding one new critical component: utopia not so much as the inevitable consequence of breaking with capitalism thanks to the apocalypse but as the product of a conscious choice. While apocalypse dystopia is in Offworld temporal, its utopic consequences are not, reinforcing this article’s final argument that the utopic necessitates the dystopic to part ways with capitalist modes of living.

In Offworld, the electric grid appears to be permanently damaged (very similar to what takes place in The Collapse). There, we see a number of characters surviving and fighting to survive in different social arrangements (exclusivist and inclusivist communes, loners living off the grid, nomadic tribes, etc.). Yet what makes this show particularly interesting is its very last episode, which is thematically connected with the first to emphasise the show’s overall message. The last episode – significantly titled ‘equilibrium’ – focuses on Alicia (María Vázquez), the city owner of a family farmhouse and wife of the director of national energy resources (the first episode’s protagonist), as she returns to her farm in the countryside in search of refuge, advised in advance by her husband Julián (Luís Callejo), who obviously has more information than anyone else due to his privileged position in government. When she arrives, she realises a group of immigrant workers have taken control of the farm. After a period of tension, she is accepted and works alongside them in total harmony (much like in the commune in The Last of Us). Problems begin again when her husband shows up and cannot understand why or how she has accepted living in such a way: ‘they could work for us in exchange for staying here’ – he says to her when they are left alone for the first time after his arrival; to which she replies: ‘You are an idiot. The world has ended’ (Offworld, S1 E5). The world seemed to have indeed ended, so much so that the husband is forced by the circumstances to change his mind and joins the farm commune. But there is a twist at the end of the episode. Suddenly, the husband realises that his dead phone is on. As text messages keep piling up on the screen, to the viewers’ surprise, he throws away the phone and goes back to the fields with rest as if nothing had happened. This last symbolic gesture is the culmination of Offworld’s overall message in favour of non-materialistic, ‘pure’ human(istic) relations (very similar to Station Eleven’s ethos in defense of artistic idleness as the ultimate saviour of humanity). That last scene in the series follows many other instances in which characters find a different conception of happiness outside the trope that equates capitalistic material ownership with a ‘good life’ – for instance, episode 4 portrays the daily routine of a nomadic shepherd in the forest living off the land, unaffected by the collapse of industrial civilisation until a group of desperate and lost city dwellers try to rob him of the little possessions he had with fatal consequences for the latter. The series makes the case for human sufficiency away from the capitalist system by representing life in the post-apocalypse as a matter of choice. That is, a question of choosing beyond and above capitalism’s scarcity mindset and what Lisa Garforth in her study of green utopias refers to as resolving ‘the contradiction between human wants and their satisfaction […] [re]imagining universal restraint and the substitution of nonmaterial for material satisfactions’ (2005: 395). As such, Offworld reframes the utopian desire for dystopia seen in post-apocalyptic television by asking its viewership to think of the radical break with capitalism as a choice. Behind such election lies a question latent in all post-apocalyptic television: What if the post-apocalypse is preferable to the current apocalyptic life within capitalism? What if what lies behind the threat of dystopia after the end of capitalism is but a utopian future? Entertaining such possibility ultimately informs this article’s overall argument that viewers of this type of shows may be desiring dystopia in the hope that utopia awaits once capitalism is gone.

Conclusion

Across contemporary post-apocalyptic television, this article has argued that dystopia functions less as nihilistic spectacle than as a cultural apparatus for thinking beyond late capitalism. While in the ubiquitous, personalised environment of television streaming, the apocalypse accompanies audiences across daily routines, tightening the felt proximity between fictional endings and lived precarity. Against readings that treat dystopian saturation as evidence of ideological foreclosure, this article suggests that the transnational popularity of the dystopic can register resistance as well as a latent utopian desire: not for world-ending per se, but for the end of capitalism’s world arrangement of a life ruled by the alienation–exploitation axis and the ideology of homo economicus. The four televisual case studies analysed here specify distinct utopian impulses within similar dystopian post-apocalyptic frameworks – anti-productivist art in Station Eleven, degrowth and survival networks in The Collapse, collectivist socialisation in The Last of Us, and, crucially, utopia as conscious choice in Offworld. Post-apocalyptic imaginaries thus emerge as privileged spaces for rehearsing anti-capitalist futures and for rendering alternatives thinkable again within, and against, the pressures of contemporary collapse.