I Have Some Good News

Fallout is a huge gamble for Amazon, a sprawling, expensive series that must simultaneously create a brand new story in the video game’s world, while pleasing longtime fans of that world. Plus, drawing in new eyes to make it a truly massive hit.

I am happy to report that as a game, as a fan of the series, I thought it was excellent. I’ve seen all eight episodes and my appreciation for the series only grew in time. The trailers made it look like they just might manage to pull it off, and I think they did.

The tone, the visuals, the meticulous attention to the detail of the game world is a far cry from some other adaptations-which-will-not-be-named that try to completely blaze their own path. This is extraordinarily faithful to the games while not being a straight adaptation of any one game in particular, even if it shares at least one central baseline: A vault dweller must head to the surface and find their father.

That vault dweller is Lucy, played by Yellowjackets’ Ella Purnell in what I would argue is a star-making turn for her. While her naiveté and innocence is slowly twisted by the horrors of the wasteland, it’s not a full Joker arc, and she retains her core values even as she gets very comfortable shooting lots of things.

I also appreciated the performance of Aaron Moten, an actor I was wholly unfamiliar with before this, but as Maximus, a squire of the Brotherhood of Steel, he takes on a personality I was not expecting of “awkward dopey dude” but somehow I mean that as a compliment, as he’s a long ways from the badass soldier you’d expect from the Brotherhood, sort of a boy thrown into a man-suit (literally, in this instance) and a far cry from the usual grizzled combat veteran you might expect to be playing this part.

And of course, there’s Walton Goggins. Everyone thought that his casting as a ghoul was spot-on and guess what? It’s spot-on. But you may not realize just what a dual role it is, as yes Goggins is a badass, somewhat villainous ghoul gunslinger with a CGI-ed out nose, but there are lengthy stretches of the show about his time before the war as a Clint Eastwood-type movie star who starts shilling for Vault Tec while slowly learning the company’s actual plans.

This series is from Jonathan Nolan of Westworld fame, and as such, it has traditional Nolan-esque mysteries. Many fans will be intimately familiar with some of these, such as “the vaults are actually bad and terrifying most of the time” though how they are bad is still something you’ll be eager to discover. Then, larger questions. What is this item everyone in the Wasteland is trying to track down? Why was Lucy’s father taken? Who is this warlord in the mountain? How has Goggins’ ghoul survived this long and what is he still looking for?

Not all of these are answered by the end, but this isn’t Netflix or Max where we have to sit around and bite our nails to see if the mysteries will last forever after a cancellation, as all signs indicate Amazon believes in this show and season 2 is already in the works.

They nailed the tone here. This is a hard-R rated series with gore, cursing, sex, nudity, the whole lot. But not in a way that feels exploitative for its own sake just…mirroring the games in most ways. And again, the attention to detail here is stellar from the replica weapons to Stimpaks to the design of the Vault sets and the wasteland’s CGI, which never looks phony. While a show like The Last of Us had to create a ruined world to some degree, Fallout had to take the scope of its world three levels beyond that, and they did.

Complaints? Not many. There’s not a ton of emotional weight to much of anything here until the final minutes, but it’s so entertaining that you don’t really care. The “pass the MacGuffin object around” storyline relies a bit much on coincidence at times. The start of the show can be a bit jarring with all the different storylines but it smooths out in time. I appreciated the fact that this is a show that covers all angles of the Fallout universe, not just surviving in the Wasteland, but Goggins’ exploration of pre-war storylines, Lucy’s brother stuck back in his original vault solving its own mysteries. It’s great.

I’d be shocked if Fallout fans didn’t like the show and want to see more. As for general audiences I can’t quite predict how its insanity might land, but regardless, I think it will do well, and be back for one or more seasons for sure after this. Enjoy.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.