I Watch TV: Fallout
Fallout
Based on the video game series; in America after WW2 nuclear technology advanced but society stayed very late 1950s/early 1960s. In 2077 there was a nuclear war; some people survived in Vaults. These Vaults built by Vault-Tec, were as much experiments as places to survive; this gets explained in detail in the show.
In 2296 Vault 33 is raided by outsiders, and they kidnap Hank MacClean (Kyle MacLachlan). His daughter Lucy MacClean (Ella Purnell) decides to leave the Vault and track him down. Her brother Norm (Moisés Arias) doesn’t leave the Vault. We follow both of them as Norm uncovers secrets and strangeness in Vault 33 and the sister Vaults of 32 and 31. Looking for Hank, Lucy encounters numerous horrid and dangerous Wasteland inhabitants, attempting to win them over with her sunny and good-natured mid-20th century American optimism, with mixed success.
In the Wasteland is Maximus (Aaron Moten) a squire to a knight of the Brotherhood of Steel. They use power armour to hunt and seize pre-war technology. He’s sent on a mission to find a scientist with a secret. Also on the trail of the secret is bounty hunter The Ghoul (Walter Goggins), a ghoul. Ghouls are mutant creations of the post-nuclear wasteland, immortal yet disfigured.
Lucy explains the Golden Rule (Do Unto Others As You Would Have Others Do Unto You) and The Ghoul responds with the Golden Rule Of The Wasteland “Thou shalt get sidetracked by bullshit every god damn time.” This then is the nature of the show; you’re trying to progress your main quest, but to do that you have to do other things, and also you have side quests distracting you. That’s fine, the show is if anything more upfront about this than most TV thanks to its video game roots.
One thing the show is interested in is the past, and secrets from it. This neatly meshes with the retro-futuristic style; the show is about high technology and about a shattered world built on the ruins of the old. In particular The Ghoul was Howard Cooper, a film star, whose wife, a Vault-Tec executive, was involved in the run up to the 2077 Great War.
So what has this going for it? It’s got all the fun bits of the Fallout Games, people in vaults with weird experiments being conducted on them, but thinking that this is just normal. Villains somehow trying to make the Wasteland worse. One note comedy gag characters who turn out to have a second note, and a bit of plot related stuff as well. Monsters, power armour, fights, setpieces. The strength of it is in the three characters who wander the Wasteland are more-or-less unfamiliar with it – Lucy grew up in a Vault, Maximus in the barracks of the Brotherhood, and The Ghoul has been buried alive for some time for some reason as the show starts. Is this, then, a good match between video game source and TV adaption? Have they made a good video game TV series?
Yes, yet that comes with a few reservations. Violent, gory and disgusting death and mutilation is a common punchline, and too common for me. It loses it’s shock value and leaves me just feeling unpleasantly uneasy. And the wacky, funny, gleeful look at a dark nihilistic, cynical world makes the moments where the characters reach for real surprise and emotion seem flimsy. We know the rug’s getting pulled out, this moment of grief and betrayal will be turned to slapstick, or at least to dark irony.
Both Maximus and Lucy have to compromise their ideals, to adapt to the Wasteland. And this is fine, yet no one they encounter has to adapt back. Everyone else gets to just be the who they are (like NPCs in a game). And though we learn more about The Ghoul and how he’s not just a self-interested gunslinger, he doesn’t learn or change, that all took place two hundred years ago. In fact we might see the three wasteland main characters as three different playstyles. While Norm, back in the Vault is in a different kind of game (or maybe a themed DLC).
Anyway, it’s good and it does give us some answers while leaving more for another season.
Watch This: Zany adventures in a deep yet entertaining
post-apocalyptic world
Don’t Watch This: Gory, full of silly references to video
game nonsense, won’t end, can’t end
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