I finally finished The Fallout Show after getting spoiled on some of the twists and deciding to binge the last few episodes now that I knew what was coming.
That said, the show still managed to throw me a couple of curve balls I wasn’t expecting, not least of all the quality of the production and its storytelling.
I did not expect to enjoy the show as much as I did, and it turned out to be far from the soulless husk of a societal commentary turned into the ideas it originally parodied as some of the Fallout media have regressed into.
This is just a basic overview of my thoughts on the storytelling elements of the show.
Characters
As our touchstones of the story, I felt the main characters did a great job of rooting us in the world and giving us a reason to feel a certain way about it.
Cooper (the Ghoul) was our peek at the pre-war world and the effects of the Wasteland on a good man. They gave the hardest character to relate with to the veteran actor, and my god, they could not have cast him better.
Walton Goggins somehow manages both the middle-of-the-road, sees-the-issues-but-isn’t-ready-to-face-them, wife-man of pre-war times in an affluent actor that doesn’t feel the economic crisis revving up, as well as a nose-less immortal mutant with the shoot-first, fuck-the-questions amoral charisma of a Greek god.
I know the Ghoul-fuckers out there are rolling their eyes at my blindness to the precedent set by Charon, Raul, and Handcock, but babes, you are not the norm and the lack of a nose is a hard sell for most people.
That said, Cooper is the audience’s mirror. He is the closest we can get to a (glorified) example of our own lives as the only pre-war main character (which is equal parts impressive and depressing given how broke everyone is).
He’s painfully centrist despite trying to do the right thing when he can, it’s just that pre-war Coop lacks the backbone to push against a dangerously seductive slide down the capitalist road to hell.
Until he’s given a push, that is.
Maximus as a Brotherhood of Steel cog had so much depth to him from the introduction, and it only grew as the show went on.
He has such violence and resolve in regards to his beliefs about what the Brotherhood should be, yet his actor, Aaron Moten, has this surprisingly soft voice that, coupled with the frequent flashbacks of little Max stepping out of the fridge, makes him feel so much younger.
His character spends so much of his time literally and figuratively behind the Brotherhood mask that we don’t get to see who he is until he drops it for Lucy.
Next to her naivete, we see that he’s not childish in Lucy’s sheltered sense. He knows the Wasteland and its occupants, and he knows the Brotherhood isn’t the shining, spotless saviors that his indoctrination has tried to instill in him. Or maybe he learns the latter as he travels.
There are a lot of questions surrounding Maximus that are answered by the last episode, some that we thought we knew the answers to, others we didn’t think to question in the first place, but beyond following after the other mains, what he plans on doing next is anyone’s guess.
Lucy originally felt like the weakest character in terms of (I guess) believability. That squeaky clean, picture-perfect appearance coupled with the hyper competence of her Vault training was almost too much.
But that was the point.
Ella Purnell is too beautiful for reality. As an actress in a normal, star-studded cast, she wouldn’t stand out for that. But here, amongst the filth and grunge of the Wasteland in Fallout, she strains credulity.
And it’s the perfect visual metaphor for the Vaults.
These are people completely sheltered and isolated from the devastation beyond their walls, even before the bombs fell. Vault Tec filled their doomsday backups with test subjects or the people who could pays unearthly sums to get in.
Just like how the one percent lived in decadent luxury while the rest of the world starved before the war, Vault dwellers have access to resources topsiders can’t begin to conceive of. Clean, running water, healthy and tasty foods, energy that powers their every need—the Vaults are a paradise tucked away from the hell of the Wasteland.
And Lucy is their shining result.
We see her grapple with her idealism throughout her journey but never abandon it. Even at the end, when the reveal has her question everything in her existence, her beliefs change, but she doesn’t give them up.
Though her spirit shatters as she does it, she puts a feral ghoul out of its misery (compared to how she objected to Cooper doing the same). She stands, having to abandon someone she deeply cares for to survive.
When she gives a hollow rendition of her catchphrase (a thousand-yard stare “okie dokie”) I think it shows that there is still a piece of her in there, one that had to adapt to the Wasteland or be consumed by it—in one way or another.
Cooper’s words return as you watch the scene, but she’s not him. Not yet, at least.
The side characters might not have had as much screen time to flesh them out, but each one fits into the archetypes of Fallout while adding their own spin.
Norm was great as the high-intelligence hacker, but when his apathy gave way to his dogged persistence in finding the truth about the Vaults, you just had to root for him.
Moldaver is the stoic villain with more to her than meets the eye, but her origin and drive make Kellogg seem as bland as the cereal he shares a name with (and we dug into him more than some of the companions in 4).
Hank is the ideal of a father who never could have lived up to the expectation even if he wasn’t a villain, but the twist was more than I could have expected and so much worse.
To say nothing of the minor characters that filled out the world. A particular favorite of mine was the Snake Oil Salesman who could have been a recurring random encounter in any of the games.
Setting
One of the first things I was impressed by in the setting was the locales and sets that the show used.
Prewar felt properly luxurious and retrofuturistic. I think starting with the party and the bombs dropping gave new and old fans alike a sense of what was lost when the world ended, and also how chaotic and violent it became in seconds.
It’s a glimpse of how the Wasteland ended up like it did, but also that maybe those dog-eat-dog, every-man-for-himself mentalities were always there and just needed the excuse of an apocalypse to bubble to the surface.
The Vaults, true to their name, were that ideal of a perfect prewar society that never existed. A reverse of The Truman Show if only Truman was in on it.
And just like the Vaults in-game, each had their fucked up experiment going. What surprised me was the way the horror of Vault 4 was still outdone by the revelation of 31.
I genuinely didn’t think they would be able to top that one, but switching from body horror to psychological horror did the trick.
Filly and other Wasteland settlements like the SuperDuper Mart were that kind of ramshackle piecemeal of repurposed garbage that Fallout is known for, and it honestly looked great. Nothing says “apocalypse” better than living in garbage instead of just fixing up existing structures.
The wasteland was equal parts awe-inspiring and haunting. I particularly loved the (I believe) salt flats of the Brotherhood training camp. Something about that expanse of nothingness was both eerie and beautiful.
I’m sure some hard-core fans are complaining about how much greenery was around Filly, but I enjoyed it. One of my biggest issues with Fallout (vs other Bethesda games like Skyrim) is that the scenery is so grey and monotonous at times that I get bored looking at it.
I know it’s an aesthetic choice rather than one rooted in reality, I’m not arguing about how green Chernobyl is. The grey of Fallout is a design element meant to tell a story. All I’m saying is that the grey could use some variation, and the inclusion of select green areas can tell a story as well.
I feel like the show did that.
The desert and the empty, barren places, were relatively safe compared with the green areas filled with life. When life can thrive, it includes dangerous mutated creatures like the west coast gulpers and yao guai that need a food chain to sustain them.
I know Shady Sands was a gut punch to a lot of players. I don’t have a personal stake in this as I never made it there, but I get how upending (literally nuking) one of the most powerful factions can leave a bad taste in someone’s mouth.
While I think it makes sense as far as motivations, reasoning, and the believability of both go, I’m not sure why this all had to happen around an existing place—especially that place being the core of the original games.
Shady Sands, and the rest of the west coast in Fallout, are the bedrock of the franchise. It’s where the canon started, so why fuck with the foundation? This isn’t going to affect or mean anything to the people who haven’t been playing since the 90s—you know, the hardcore fan base that’s put up with Bethesda’s bullshit since it began.
If you want a story without major stabilizing powers like the NCR, put the show somewhere else like, oh, I don’t know, the east coast? The same sandbox Bethesda’s been shitting in since it took over the IP?
It has all the same major players (Vault Tec, the BOS, and the Enclave) and plenty of room to add on. If they were going to retcon anything, it could have been NYC being blown off the map. I don’t think I’m alone in thinking that expanding canon should do just that—expand—rather than subtract.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the Old Hollywood feel of the prewar flashbacks, but not at the expense of fucking around with the beloved side of the franchise. Do whatever the fuck you want on the east coast, but the west is for real story.
And I guess that’s my only issue with it. If they hadn’t started erasing existing backstory and had engaged with preexisting canon instead, this could have added to the love and complexity of the west coast.
And if not, art-deco New York at its sparkling finest was right there.
Or, as a personal favorite, Nuka Florida. God, consider the possibilities . . .
Tone
I think the show nailed the dark humor of the wasteland horrors coupled with the squeaky-clean prewar aesthetic covering up true evil.
The show is the most we’ve seen of the prewar world, though we’ve been told of it quite a bit in the games. I think, especially for non-gamers watching, they had to show more of the old world to explain how the wasteland turned out the way it did. We can read endless files on corporate negligence and corruption in eight hours.
It would have been easy to make the old world a shining utopia where everything was wonderful and any and all issues were just due to mean overseas powers that refused to play nice with a level-headed and rational America.
Is that not just about what we got in Fallout 4? An army vet and his lawyer wife living in a picture-perfect suburb at the start of their 2.5 kids? An idealized past to pine for, to make the wasteland seem that much more barbaric?
That’s not what the show did. However you feel about the reveal of the war, Bethesda has been toying with it since Fallout 3. And now all that destruction, all the corruption and degradation and death was placed squarely in the hands of prewar evil.
The wastelanders didn’t do this to themselves. It wasn’t some unnamed and unmentioned overseas conflict. China isn’t the racially scapegoated boogeyman, nor did the United States government annihilate its own people.
It was a plutocratic monopoly’s calculated and logical result of putting profit over (all) life.
If anything, this is going back to Fallout’s tonal roots.
And the black humor is still there too. Between Lucy talking to the head she severed, or the organ-harvesting robot running a legitimate business, there were plenty of sick jokes throughout.
Not to mention the off-the-wall humor of anything sexual between Lucy and Max. They were like two aliens pretending to be human but not realizing they’re interacting with another alien. It was the funniest fucking shit in the entire show and I loved it.
Plot
For better or worse, the show stuck with the tried and true Fallout Plot™.
It essentially boiled down to: Gotta find my dad (again), Gotta find my kid (again), and Gotta find the Chip (again).
Nothing new here, we’re chasing world-changing tech and emotional connections, but the same could be said for any number of games and shows.
It’s just funny that the plot of the three main characters uses the exact same motivation of the last three single-player games.
Themes
The show goes back to its roots in regards to themes, but I would argue they’re a little less-over-the-top parodies like power-armored soldiers executing unarmed civilians on their knees and thumbs-upping the camera, and more along the lines of these things are fucking evil, no mockery involved.
Considering how the satire became reality with the newer games, I think losing the nuance was a good call. It’s too easy to become the thing you’re mocking, and the show is already made by an evil mega-corporation that puts profit before human lives and wellbeing, so . . .
I would say it’s ironic except that would require Amazon and its top dogs to both understand and care that they’re the bad guys here, and if the real-life warehouse worker deaths haven’t done that, nothing will.
So the themes of anti-consumerism, anti-capitalism, and anti-war aren’t so much going over their heads as not mattering to them because they’re untouchable.
When a hermetically sealed factory worker—sorry, Vault dweller—has to drink from an irradiated puddle because Ama—Vault-Tec figured they could make more money by keeping the people they want safe while cosplaying a perfect world and kill off everyone else (again, for profit), I don’t think anyone being paid more money than god cares.
If anything, they’re probably taking notes, if they watch the show at all which seems unlikely.
So the millions (likely billions) dead, and the rest barely eking out a life, the state of the Wasteland because someone wanted more money, and the unconscionable wars that made those things possible—all that and more is going right over the heads of the people who most need to see it for what it is.
But there is also a theme of not closing your eyes, not letting the world harden you.
Cooper tried to ignore the shit going on with Vault-Tec and just get paid and care about his family. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t ignore what the company was doing, what they were using him to achieve. He might not have been able to stop it, but he (eventually) dug his head out of the sand.
Lucy has to question her entire world and decides that she’s not going to let go of her better instincts. In the end, when that last bit of light she was holding onto turns into a darker shadow than she ever could have imagined, she gets up and keeps going.
And that’s what we end with, that no matter what happens, you have to get up and keep trying.
Ending and Reveals
Even if that end is your father who took part in the original apocalypse and has destroyed the world again (via the only stable power left) to punish your mother.
Lucy’s world is shattered. Cooper gets the first lead back to his family. Maximus is finally a knight.
And no one’s happy about it.
We learn that:
Vault-Tec dropped the bombs (hinted at since Megaton and its fucking Vault-Tec sticker).
The Tri-Vault was a cryo storage for less important individuals in the company (and there’s likely a similar Vault for the big-wigs).
Moldaver has been around since prewar yet isn’t associated with Vault-Tec, meaning she didn’t survive the same way Hank did.
The BoS has its hands on unlimited power.
And we’re heading to New Vegas babyyyy!
Final Thoughts
I liked it. A lot more than I thought I would.
I don’t watch many shows anymore (because I’m tired of falling in love with a piece of media just for it to be canceled two seasons in), but I was genuinely surprised at the quality and depth of the storytelling here.
I know I ragged on the company making it (and I stand by that), but I don’t place the sins of the decision-makers on the shoulders they stand on (and exploit).
My story-based issues are surrounding the changing of the games’ beloved side of the canon (i.e. the west coast) when they could have interacted with it instead of nuking it.
I enjoyed the things they added like the anti-feral serum and the inclusion of a new kind of tri-Vault system, but taking out an established faction instead of making their own to destroy feels like the wrong move.
It’s only going to matter to the hard-core fans and fucking with the original is likely never going to be taken well.
Meanwhile, the east coast has all the same factions (and plenty of fun places to retcon back into the lore, rather than taking something out of it) and I don’t think people would care nearly as much if the canon was messed with.
But as far as the characters, the (look of the) setting, the backstory, the machinations—really, everything but the fact that the show fucks with the west coast canon—it was great.
And I can’t wait to see how they resurrect a cannibalized billionaire in the second season.