copyright 2025, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media,
Jump Cut, No. 63, summer 2025

Climate catastrophe and (post) apocalyptic TV:
Don’t worry, be glum.

By Dennis Broe

Teaser: triple apocalypses.

Wildfires in Los Angeles have laid waste to both the more affluent homes in the Pacific Palisades and its nearby canyons while utterly ravaging the African-American community of Altadena where evacuation warnings were delayed and all of the 18 deaths from the most powerful fire occurred.  On the East Coast the soot from the recent Canadian wildfires was so thick that in New York and Washington school sessions were cancelled and messengers, compelled to keep working, resurrected N95 masks from the COVID apocalypse in order to breathe. Meanwhile in Europe the floods from the sabotage of the Russian-controlled dam in the Ukraine may result in 20,000 hectares of land used to grow grain in the breadbasket of the world remaining infertile for five years (Barroux and Sillah) while that same act also endangered the cooling process in the Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, the largest in Europe. To add to these conditions there is a new lack of concern for the coming apocalypse, even as it grows ever nearer.

Pilot

Fredric Jameson’s famous dictum, “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,”[1] [open notes in new window] has been taken up wholeheartedly by the makers of corporate television. In numerous series stretching across different genres and now accounting for its own genre—Post-Apocalyptic TV—broadcast, cable and streaming TV (and of course numerous films) have concocted a plethora of “endings” to the world as we know it. These have the effect of failing to challenge the climate apocalypse as the catastrophe calls for immediate action in the present to keep the worst from happening. In so doing, the makers of corporate TV, largely U.S. but then picked up across the globe using the U.S. prototypes, have found a new way forward. They still have a persistent refusal to challenge the fossil fuel industry but with a more sophisticated approach to the now mostly discredited “climate denial” narrative initiated by that industry (Dembicki). [2] That is, if the catastrophe is unavoidable, we may as well begin planning for the post-Apocalyptic future.

In the industry these are referred to as Dystopian Series but that is similar to calling climate destruction “climate change.” It’s a carbon neutral way of labelling the problem without discussing it. Here I highlight the shift from Apocalyptic Series, which focus on the moment of earth’s end times, and might be politically more useful, to “Post-Apocalyptic” Series, where the end and point of destruction has already come and gone and the series is about coping with the aftermath in the best way possible. That is, the genre for the most part—as David Harvey utilizes these terms borrowed from Marx’s Grundrisse—“presupposes” the end as inevitable at this stage and instead “posits” how to survive after the end, once the end times presupposition is established.

Material reasons for preoccupation with apocalypse at this conjuncture are the destruction of the earth, escalating danger of nuclear war and decline of the West. And all of these factors are accompanied by a resolute repression in the corporate media which either refuses to engage or downplays the implications of these conditions.

However, dialectically, this ideological elision also allows for an opening. Whereas, in series based in the present, political content is mostly abandoned or repressed, these series, once the idea that the end time is not neigh but here, may allow a freedom for both pursuing a deep critique of the contemporary order and a positing of alternative orders.

In Season 11 of The Walking Dead (AMC, US, 2010-2022), the originator and dean of this genre, the present’s problems resurface. In the series’ story arc, the neoliberal “perfect world” of The Commonwealth conceals a vicious and violent inner core, a repressive deep state needed to maintain a surface air of gentility. The Last of Us (HBO, US, 2023-) presupposes at its outset a fascist government, the end point of today’s neoliberal experiments. However, in the course of the two lead characters’ cross-country travels, the script posits the creation of a communal compound which is the opposite of this order and which opposes it. The Le Pen threat of a far-right breakdown of the social order is nearly explicitly elaborated in season’s one and two of the most prescient of The Walking Dead spinoffs, Daryl Dixon (AMC, 2023). The redneck motorcyclist with a heart of gold finds himself in a France overrun by a Le Pen wannabee whose rhetoric is eerily similar to her real-world counterpart, suggesting metaphorically that the French turn to Le Pen is a result of their no longer believing in Macron as a bulwark against fascism since he has used undemocratic techniques himself.

Finally, class antagonism in Snowpiercer (TNT, US, 2020-2024), indicates that the post-Apocalyptic world cannot escape the present’s problems, perhaps negating or qualifying the effectiveness of this flight into fantasy. The narrative also suggests, in the most radical positing of the genre, that a world shorn of capitalists can negotiate its own resurrection.

Oil I want is you

“The best thing about the Earth is, if you poke holes in it, oil and gas comes out.”
—Republican U.S. Congressman Steve Stockman, 2013, qtd. in Klein.

If you think of the often feminization of the earth, Mother Earth etc., this quotation is a statement rich in meaning, promoting both ecocide and misogyny.

We are all witnessing the increasing failure to confront climate catastrophe and to rein in the fossil fuel industry. The last two global climate conferences have been held in oil capitals—2023’s in Dubai, chaired by the head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company which is invested billions in pumping more oil the next year (Bearak); and 2024’s in Baku, one of the global centers of oil production. Both events have been met with calls to boycott the conference.

In addition, the United States, now with the re-ascension of Trump, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, is retreating not to climate denial but to climate indifference. The tariffs that the United States and the European Union have levied on Chinese electric cars, the cheapest and most efficient in the world, have already had the effect of slowing Western production of these vehicles. The Biden/Trump regime is also synonymous with slapping tariffs on solar panels and lithium batteries used to power the electric vehicles. In fact, the Biden administration, in a blatant disregard for the health of the planet, announced it was applying these tariffs the day after a 2024 climate conference concluded.[3]

With this capitulation, depictions of end times have increased. At a recent Series Mania, the largest television festival in the world held in Lille, France, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic series had, along with +MeToofemale liberation series, become the dominant genre, accounting for 13 percent of the total of 55 series. These ranged from the apocalyptic tone of the endpoint of Western science in Lars Von Trier’s return to The Kingdom (DR, DK, 1994, 1997, 2022)to South Korean high-school teens training for an alien threat that hovers over their heads in Duty After School (TVING, KR, 2023). The Spanish series Apagon (Moviestar Plus+, ES, 2022)has a solar tempest strike the earth and The Fortress (Viaplay, NO, 2023) recounts how Norway, in Trump-style, walls itself off from the world and then must confront a deadly virus. Finally The Swarm (ZDF, DE, 2023), a global series financed by several European public television networks, depicts the ocean setting out to wreak its revenge on a humanity bent on destroying it.

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has set the Doomsday Clock at 90 seconds to midnight, as planetary destruction looms. This grim future reality though is belied by a most abundant present for oil and gas companies whose profits have never been greater. Largely as a result of the energy crisis because of the war in the Ukraine, the profits of the five largest producers of oil and gas, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, BP and Total, were $195 billion in 2022, almost 120 percent more than the previous year and at the highest level in the industry’s history (Global Witness). Even the U.S. President Biden accused these companies of “war profiteering.” Only five percent of their profits went to developing clean energy, with the majority going, as Chevron claimed, to “returning cash to shareholders, investing capital efficiently, and paying down debt” (Ibid.)

In addition, the Ukraine war has occasioned a return to the most dangerous and polluting methods of extraction, including in the West deepwater drilling and a return of coal in the U.S. and across the world. Nuclear power plants are announced in Malaysia, Indonesia and The Philippines, and France threatens to bring 6 to 14 new plants on line, regardless of the nuclear waste these plants will generate. In the United States, now become the largest supplier of natural gas, this has meant returning to and reopening the previously unprofitable industry of fracking and for that, the new narrative is that this process, which destroys drinking water and leaks methane in a way comparable to coal mining, has “saved American democracy.” The day the war against Ukraine began the Bloomberg News Agency ran a story headlined, “Fracking: A Powerful Weapon Against Russia,” trumpeting the return of an industry that had almost gone bankrupt.

The carbon imprint of replacing Russian oil and natural gas with U.S. fracked gas, with its increased transport distance, is two times greater than before. Add to that the imprint of U.S. hydraulic fracking, and the carbon imprint is almost three times greater (Reymond and Rimbert). In addition, the war has also seen the blowing up of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 Russian pipelines, with the culprit still an object of surmise but with much of the evidence, as marshalled by the U.S. Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, leaning toward the United States and Norway, oil producers who have been the major benefactors of the sabotage. The 40,000 tons of methane emitted from the cloud that passed across Europe was described as “the highest release of methane gas ever on the planet (Reuters).”

Since the onset of the war, Western governments have caved in to the demands of an ever more dominant and omnipotent fossil fuel industry with U.S. President Biden having implemented all the policy requests of a secretive fossil fuel lobby group. In this context, a former president, George W. Bush, in a secret meeting never made public, had signed on to his Vice President Dick Cheney’s Haliburton agenda. Subsequently, Trump, more brazenly, has named the head of Exxon as his secretary of state. In a similar way, European leaders met more than 100 times with the fossil fuel industry since the Ukraine war began, while industry lobbyists at 2002’s U.N. climate conference far outnumbered “climate vulnerable African countries and Indigenous communities” (Global Witness).

The effects of this onslaught have already appeared in the United States in rising coastal sea levels in the East amid worse hurricanes and storms, Midwestern mega rains and droughts destroying crops and homes, and worsening and more destructive forest fires in the West. The apocalyptic effect by the end of this century if this destruction is not halted will be the drowning of island nations, inundating of coastal areas from Ecuador to Brazil to the Netherlands as well as huge swaths of South and Southeast Asia, and the potential extinction of major cities, such as New York, Los Angeles, Vancouver, London, Mumbai and Shanghai (Klein). 

All of this is linked to the failure to confront the fossil fuel industry. As Naomi Klein says,

“We have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism. The actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe…[threaten] an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets.”

In terms of the apocalyptic imagination the result is “the acute and painful realization” that our “leaders are not looking after us . . . we are not cared for at the level of our very survival.”

Other apocalypses

Two other forms of destruction ever more on the horizon but also essentially going largely undiscussed and unheeded are the (renewed) threat of nuclear war in the face of the ever-escalating war in Ukraine and what we might, after Paul Gilroy, call Imperial Malaise (Dworkin). The decline of the West is being hastened by the conflict between the West and the rest of the world with their rise and resistance prompted also by the war and amid the following developments:

• Russia has announced stationing nuclear weapons in nearby Belarus as the NATO countries continue the path of escalation.
• The United States is sending long-range missiles to target deep into Russia,
• The British supply depleted uranium weapons which will leave radiation traces on both Ukrainian users and Russian targets while destroying swathes of the environment.
• Germany is sending Leopard tanks east in an ominous suggestion of World War II; and
• Poland now demands to be armed with U.S. nuclear weapons.

In the midst of this, the U.S. Secretary of State Blinkin declares that the U.S. will support no peace talks and will not end the war. So the threat of a full-scale nuclear war increases daily. In a news conference when the lame duck President Biden was asked by a journalist about hope for a ceasefire in another potentially nuclear hotspot, the Middle East, instead of answering, Biden essentially told the journalist if she kept up this line of questioning a camera could fall on her head.[4] The nuclear threat, mostly unacknowledged in the corporate press, also feeds the feeling of hopelessness and a sense the world may be coming to an end.

The failure of the West, led by the United States, to enlist the rest of the world in its campaign against Russia, with fully 87 percent of the world refusing to go along with U.S. sanctions (Norton), has hastened its already accelerating decline. The center of economic activity has shifted eastward to Asia and to the economically expanding now 10-member BRICS countries, which boast the largest grouping of the world’s population and the world’s wealth.  

As a result, a cumulative economic apocalypse has seen income disparity worsen, for example, to the point where the creators of these television series, Hollywood writers, claim as a primary reason for their 2023 strike that they can no longer support themselves on their salaries while profits within the streaming industry soar. In France, inflation from price gauging and the war, the raising of the retirement age and the cancelling of job security are expressed in a bit of graffiti on the left bank that simply states, “Gréve ou Creve,” Strike or Die. Finally, there is the crisis of the drug epidemic, a way of coping with this destruction that has passed from heroin to Purdue-Pharma-distributed oxycontin to fentanyl, seven times more potent and addictive than heroin—all three discovered and originally manufactured in Big Pharma laboratories—making the streets of Los Angeles unsafe.[5] It’s no wonder that one of the contemporary Hollywood apocalyptic series From has everyone locked in their homes at night, with living dead, flesh-eating zombies ready to devour anyone who lets their guard down and goes outside.

Part of the Imperial “malaise” comes from the refusal to cut back or even question the use of technological devices (smartphones, smart cars, and the newest toys provided by AI, all of which carry a heavy carbon imprint) which are used to convince Western audiences that they are still in a (long since surpassed) era of abundance, of course belied by shrinking salaries and social services. The full weight of these various apocalypses is never narrated in the continuing onslaught of corporate media where we are told that despite it all, the system is coping, doing its best and is still the hope for humanity.

The cognitive dissonance and distance between what is said and what the collective unconscious knows to be true but which must remain unsaid is also responsible for the dominance of the terrifying images of post-apocalyptic television (as well as for the ongoing desertion of audiences from mainstream news channels such as MSNBC and CNBC, now both being spun off from their parent company Comcast because unprofitable.)[6]  How can it be, for example, that a country which holds itself up as a shining beacon to the world, sometimes called “the indispensable nation,” supplies B-16 bombers to Ukraine at $550 million per plane but forces its homeless in Los Angeles, epicenter of a national housing crisis, to sleep at night on public buses?

From disaster to dystopia to post-apocalypse

It is worth recalling that the Post-Apocalyptic television genre that culminates in the present began in literature as one describing utopia with Thomas More setting its prototype in a book by the same name and that utopia’s latter day “presiding theorist” was Ernst Bloch, whose three-volume archeology of The Principle of Hope was written in the darkest days of World War II.

Such a text in which “political institutions, social norms, economic systems, and ways of life [that] are superior” to the present could serve to call attention to the injustices and oppressions of that present. With Bloch comes the idea that “imagination is forward-directed, a call to action (Paik).” Now, as Fredric Jameson (2004) says, “the waning of the utopian idea is a fundamental historical and political symptom.” A similar trajectory in terms of affect regarding climate change parallels changes in this genre.

In the ‘70s came the disaster films, limited but horrible images of natural or human constructed devastation, including Earthquake (Mark Robson, U.S., 1974), The Poseidon Adventure (Ronald Neame, U.S., 1972)dealing with a tsunami, and The Towering Inferno (John Guillermin, 1974)apocalypse but in a single building and with lots of stars, mostly A list but some B list. This happened as fossil fuel companies were commissioning  and then suppressing studies that showed that their continued drilling could cause planetary destruction.

As the consciousness of this potential devastation began to grow, public opinion went through first a questioning and then a period of greenwashing, where it appeared that technical solutions within global capitalism could alleviate the problem. In this era, roughly the 1990s to the early 2000s, the apocalyptic impulse tended to decrease, with fear allayed, and with occasional dystopic series where the world, ala 9/11, is threatened but where, for example, those fleeing the earth in Battlestar Galactica (Sci Fi, US, 2004-9)still retain the image of an abundant earth on which to return. Conversely, the Netflix film Don’t Look Up (2021), a scant decade later, in an answer to Battlestar Galactica, has the elites who fled the earth in a space shuttle land on what at first looks like an even more verdant version of their home planet before the nuclear catastrophe, only to have a pterodactyl-like predator sweep away one of the landing party.

With the dawning in the last decade of the full weight of climate catastrophe and the rapid acceleration of these crises over even the last few years, there’s been a tendency toward throwing up one’s hands and deciding there is nothing to be done but submit passively. In this cultural climate, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic series, many of which simply see the end as inevitable, have increased in tempo as the apocalyptic imaginary has also penetrated other genres. These series depict several “endings” of the world where the script deals with the adaptive strategies of those who survive with little left to them but their own resourcefulness—The Leftovers (HBO, US. 2014-17), Jericho (CBS, US, 2006-8), The Rain (Netflix, DK, 2018-20), War of the Worlds (Canal+, UK, 2019-22), Silo (Apple TV+. US, 2023-). However, capitalism, and its part in global war, climate destruction, and a relentlessly unequal economy, are barely cited as culpable in this situation. The genre itself is a combination of science fiction, fantasy and horror, with the latter, in this later stage of planetary destruction, now coming to dominate.

A post-apocalyptic imagination is also projected into the past. AT&T/HBO’s Game of Thrones (US, 2011-2019) and House of the Dragon (US, 2022-) languish in a primitive dog-eat-dog world that could be read as “post-Neoliberal” where all the boundaries and protections of the state have been overturned. Other series take up the near future. For example, there’s a splitting of an employee’s consciousness between work and leisure in Apple’s Severance (Apple TV+, US, 2022-)that in effect denies the real-world struggle of Apple workers to organize in a series that is not green- but “work washing.” In these series, what was once an archelogy of hope has transmuted into an archeology of despair, with the affect mobilized being a later stage of what Jameson identifies as the chief post-modern emotion, irony. That irony is delivered in the form of Elvis Costello’s “I used to be disgusted but now I try to be amused” where “what hurts” is transformed into “what smirks.” Being above the fray and superior to it short-circuits any attempt at activism, but increasingly the smirk, the attitude du jour still of much of the intelligentsia, cannot conceal the hurt.  

An exception to these late-stage post-apocalyptic series is The Swarm (ZDF, DE, 2023).Instead of the post-apocalyptic series, The Swarm takes place in the “near” present as the ocean is ruined and where  the characters are mobilizing its defense—that is, at the onset rather than after the apocalypse. This narrative can be read as a call to action before the oceans are destroyed from the heart of what still remains of European Social Democracy. And its production is multinational, financed by public television stations in Germany, France, Italy, Austria and Switzerland as well as private streamers in Scandinavia and Japan.

These series are replete with sentiments echoing this resignation from the Last of Us’ timid claim that as long as “there is one person worth saving” it is possible to “live a fulfilling life” or Station 11’s (HBO Max, US, 2021-2) reckoning by the actress who survives a holocaust and finds a memoir of the time before: “I don’t care that the world was ending because it was the world.” Such views are endorsed in the press, for example as The New York Times' lead television reviewer James Poniewozik describes the latter series glibly as “the most uplifting show about life at the end of the world you are likely to see.” The critic praises Station 11 as a series that celebrates humanity’s drive to create,. Such neo-liberal mumbo jumbo about the indomitability of the human spirit conceals the fact that creation here is refashioned as a device not to save humanity but to divert it. Poniewozik concludes that this show is for you “if you want catharsis and a surprising laugh,” with the implication being that if you’re concerned with actually changing the world or forestalling the disaster this (and much of what passes for disaster series) is not a show for you.

Apocalyptic alternatives

The Walking Dead and its critique of the neoliberal order

“If we…strip away the abundance and expansionism of the liberal capitalist order, we find waiting beneath the disguise of peaceful competition and meritocratic incentive the cruelty and repression to which modern liberalism has become oblivious” (Paik).

Oddly, this statement could be the tag line for Season 11, the final season, of The Walking Dead. In it, the survivors take on their most deceptive opponent, The Commonwealth, a seemingly utopian community blessed with abundance and locked behind sturdy gates that walls its residents off from both the zombies and the viciousness of the bands that contend with them. Pamela Milton, this blonde aging leader who looks and even talks like Hilary Clinton, proclaims she only wants what is best for her people. Above ground, the mood is calm and tranquil but below ground the prisons hold those who resist the Commonwealth’s abundance. Pamela tells an underling, “Not that it isn’t, but it can’t feel like a police state,” in perhaps a nod to contemporary U.S. patrolling of black and Hispanic neighborhoods. The Walking Dead survivors find that beneath this utopian veneer of a new world lurks the same old class distinctions; two of the survivors sent to a labor camp are told that their work “will benefit those better than you.” Pamela’s son, a privileged Hunter Biden/Eric Trump type, betrays the truth of the place: “The reality is the poor stay poor so the rich can do whatever we want.” All of which is reminiscent of Clinton’s characterization of the working class as “deplorables” in the 2016 election.

The Commonwealth’s “foreign policy” is one of dominance not benevolence as its security forces attempt to turn the other camps outside their purview into outposts or labor camps operating for the good of the Commonwealth, here reminding us of Clinton’s destroying Libya, the oil-rich African country with the most developed health care system and the highest literacy on the continent, and then boasting about it. Anecdote: the weekend before the bombs started to fall, the Financial Times ran a detailed map of where oil was drilled, refined and shipped in Libya to remind NATO to bomb schools and hospitals but take care to leave the oil routes alone. Ten days before NATO took over what had been more sporadic bombing, the FT ran a story about Western companies fearful that the leader Gaddafi would nationalize the oil (Pfeifer and Blas).

Finally, Milton reveals her true self as she exiles her people outside the gates of the Commonwealth as the zombies approach. She does this to save a small cohort of her and her associates. The final shot of her, after her rule is overturned, is in prison. That shot compares her—though she still has an aura of reasonableness—to the imprisoning of the most vicious monster the survivors had faced, Negan, after his more openly brutal order was defeated.

The original Walking Dead has now splintered into 3 series with only one of them suggesting a critique of the post-apocalyptic world. Dead City (2023-) simply plays up the antagonism of the two leads, the killer Negan seeking redemption and his unforgiving counterpart Maggie. Confronting the catastrophe then becomes simply a clash of personalities.

The Ones Who Live (2024-) focuses on the love story of Rick and Michonne and returns to the earlier quasi-philosophical concerns of the original series such as “how moral can you be in a deteriorating world” while raising almost no questions about the role of the power structure and its contribution to this disaster.

The actual continuation of Season 11 of the original is Daryl Dixon, which has the lead transported to a ravaged Paris and the North of France and doing battle with the Le Peniste Marion Genet whose demagogic diatribes to her soldiers laud as inevitable the harsh reality of an imposed fascism. The critique of this series is not a mistake. It owes at least in part to the season 11 showrunner Angela Kang, executive producer here, who makes the series more than just a landscape of carnage. (21) 

The Last of Us’ communal alternatives

More problematic is another zombie apocalypse, The Last of Us, adapted from the game with its showrunner Craig Mazin having visualized the real apocalypse of Chernobyl (HBO, US, 2019). The series, after it quickly jumps 20 years beyond the onset of a virus, or fungus, posits first in the North, in Boston, Fedra, a broken-down police state, after a mycologist has proposed as a solution, since there is no vaccine, to “bomb everyone in the city.” Joel—The Mandalorian’s (Disney+, US, 2019-) Pedro Pascal— and the teenage Ellie —Game of Thrones’ Bella Ramsey— then go on a cross-country tour to find a group of scientists since Ellie, who survived a bite, may hold the cure.[7] Initially, Joel belongs to a rebel group called The Fireflies, a nod to Josh Whedon’s series (Fox, US, 2002-3) about opposing the empire after 9/11.

On their tour they encounter in St. Louis populist fascists who hunt their African American guide. He explains to them that their viciousness is the product of the police state government’s “torturing and killing people for 20 years.” The dialogue seems to offer an admission that the brutality of these Trump-like survivors partly derives from their being brutalized by a system in the United States that for the last 50 years has continually attacked their wages and lifestyle.

Finally, Joel and Ellie find an alternative in Wyoming in a collective where leaders are democratically elected and ownership is shared.[8] It is here that they are offered hope, a chance as Joel’s brother says to “figure out what they want to do with their lives.” But this actual utopia is simply a resting spot they might hope to return to because they must press on to get Ellie to a hospital where she can be examined, which proves again to be part of the nightmare of modern science, where curing and killing are synonymous.

Snowpiercer and the return of the utopian impulse

“It will then turn out that the world has long dreamt of that of which it had only to have a clear idea to possess it really.”— Karl Marx, 1843

The most class-conscious apocalyptic series, and ultimately the most hopeful, is Bong Joon-ho’s adaptation of his film of the same name. Bong Joon-ho, the most class-conscious director working in film and television today, is currently adapting his Academy Award winning film about class divisions and income disparity in South Korea Parasite for television. In Snowpiercer, the train the survivors of a nuclear winter cling to as it circles the earth is, as they describe it, “a fortress to class” with the “tailies”are at the back in cramped quarters, called “unticketed passengers” to stress their illegitimacy, while the ultra-rich in the front of the train enjoy fine dining. “The Revolution,” with the tailies, led by a stalwart leader Andre Layton, prevails in season 1 but is beaten back in Season 2 by the return of the train’s “engineer-entrepreneur” founder Mr. Wilford, a Richard Branson/Jeff Bezos/Elon Musk type whose contempt for equality drips from every corner of his mouth onto his fur coat.

Season 3 ends in a truly startling moment. Mr. Wilford has lost control of the train and is imprisoned but attempts to regain power when the train’s original leader Melanie Cavill and Layton disagree on how to proceed over the possibility that there may be a spot on the earth warm enough to sustain life. The traditional method of control, divide and conquer, though does not prevail as Melanie, whose loyalty is to the engineers, and Layton, the representative of the workers, agree to disagree on what path to follow but come together to oppose the capitalist retaking the train. Wilford is offloaded with enough supplies to survive but has lost his place in this now more equal class structure. Thus, technology and revolutionary esprit de corps join to defeat the capitalist but diverge on how most effectively to promote the best interests of humanity. The two factions then come to a mutual agreement where each takes a principled stand which sees them dividing the train. The point is clear though. With the capitalist gone, they are then able to hash out a compromise that has each doing what they think is best for the train and for what is left of humanity as a whole.

Season 4 has the two factions separated with the train taken over by the fascistic Admiral Milius, whom the passengers eventually defeat. There is a glimmer of hope in the end in their settlement outside named New Eden. However, in the scripting Milius (Clark Gregg, the stalwart protector of the team in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.-2013-20) dominates much of the season. The (in fact sleight) transformation of Gregg’s persona from intelligence chief to open fascist still marks a social movement away from any belief in the righteousness of the law to its transmutation into the type of martial law, or strongman, that menaces the post-apocalyptic world, as, with Trump and his neo-con cohorts, it menaces ours.

The final lesson of Snowpiercer in its supreme collective moment at the end of season three is that if the world is shorn of its capitalist billionaires, its various and diverse peoples will find compromises that could yet save humanity. So, working from the presupposition that the world has ended, this series posits a way forward that begins with the overthrow of the controlling leader who puts his own interests ahead of everyone else on the train and the planet. The reward for season 3’s bold proclamation? Warner Bros. or now Warner Bros./Discovery, still ruled by the very conservative Texas company AT&T which owns over 70 percent of the company’s stock, refused to air the final season—shot and ready to go—on TNT. The company preferred a tax write off to airing a show whose season is about how groups cooperate to learn how to retake the planet. AMC finally rescued the season from limbo, airing it many months after it was completed. It’s a grim scenario but we are in a grim place right now.

In the wake of a second Trump reign though, aided by the world’s richest man Elon Musk, the Wilfords and Milius’ are again running the train and it will take all of us “tailies” to put it back on track.

Barroux, Rémi and Fatoumata Silah (2023). “En Ukraine, la crainte d’un ecocidé.” Le Monde, Friday June 9, 2.

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Dembicki, Geoff.  The Petroleum Papers. Greystone Books, 2022. Kindle Edition.

Dworkin, Dennis. “Paul Gilroy and the cultural politics of decline.” Rethinking History, December, 2009, 13(4); 521-539.

Harvey, David. A Companion to Marx’s Grundrisse. London: Verso, 2023.

Hersh, Seymour. “How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline.” February 8, 2023.  https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream.

Jameson, Fredric. “The Politics of Utopia” New Left Review, Jan, Feb. 2004, 35-56.

— “Radical Fantasy.” Historical Materialism, January 2002, 273-280.

Global Witness. “Crisis year 2022 brought $134 billion in excess profit to the West’s five largest oil and gas companies.” Feb. 9, 2023. https://www.globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/fossil-gas/crisis-year-2022-brought-134-billion-in-excess-profit-to-the-wests-five-largest-oil-and-gas-companies/

Klein, Naomi. This changes everything : capitalism vs. the climate. New York :Simon & Schuster, 2014. Kindle Edition.  

Norton, Ben. “87% of the World Doesn’t Support West’s New Cold War on Russia.” Geopolitical Economy Report, September 21, 2022. https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2022/09/21/global-south-west-cold-war-russia/

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