Let’s get this out of the way right up front: I’ve never played a Fallout game. Other than recognizing its ubiquitous blond-haired mascot man and understanding it takes place after some kind of nuclear apocalypse, I knew nothing about the franchise at all prior to pressing play on the television adaptation’s first episode.
But co-writers/co-creators Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner, along with director Jonathan Nolan and his creative partner Lisa Joy, got me firmly on Fallout’s side in two easy steps. First, they opened with one of the most frightening nuclear attacks I’ve ever seen in film or television. Second, they made some funny incest jokes.
Seriously! It’s kind of a yin and yang thing. Adapted from the video game series created by Tim Cain, Fallout makes the argument that when it comes to doing a broad sci-fi satire, you can have your cake and eat it, too — you can depict the horrors of the devastation as honestly as possible, and still crack some sick jokes along the way.
The bombs get dropped during a prologue set in a ghastly retro-future, one in which the whitebread American culture of the post-war, pre-rock-and-roll period apparently lasted over a century, the Cold War right along with it. The U.S. and China are so close to the brink of nuclear war that the president has been moved to an undisclosed location; on TV, a weatherman quits live on air since he doesn’t see the point in a seven-day forecast.
Our focal point character in this medium-term future is Cooper Howard (Walton Goggins), some sort of famous cowboy type fallen on hard times following a divorce. He’s performing tricks for some rich kid’s birthday in a house in the hills overlooking the city skyline nearby. It winds up being all too perfect a vantage point for his adorable daughter Janey (Teagan Meredith) to be the first to witness the first explosion.
It all unfolds in dreadful slowness, as Cooper tries to reassure Janey it’s nothing but smoke, until the familiar mushroom of fire rises into the sky. A blast wave hits. Glass shatters. Children run. Fathers fight for shelter. Skyscrapers shatter into tiny pieces. And Cooper and Janey ride off on his horse as explosion after explosion flashes and blossoms, erasing all hope.
How’s that for an opening? I thought it would be hard to top 3 Body Problem for vulgar displays of apocalyptic power on television this year, but I was wrong. This is heart-pounding, mouth-drying stuff.
The action resumes over two centuries later in two very different communities, so different it’s not immediately apparent they exist in the same time frame. The first is the Vault, a cheesily cheery replica of idealized circa-1950 America preserved underground to keep the torch of civilization lit, or something to that effect. (I wonder if the Silo gang is down there somewhere too.) Here our lead is a plucky young lady named Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell), who participates in a variety of all-American activities when she isn’t doing “cousin stuff” in preparation for her eventual arranged marriage.
Unfortunately, Lucy’s father Hank (Kyle MacLachlan), the Overseer of this particular Vault (it’s number 33 in a series), is better at inspirational speeches than matchmaking. In a routine ritual gone awry, he accidentally flings open the vault doors for raiders from the surface, posing as fellow Vault-dwellers, by marrying Lucy off to one. The wedding night goes extremely well for both parties…until the shooting starts.
It doesn’t take long — perhaps the moment when her hubby wipes his post-coital junk off with the curtains — for Lucy to realize the barbarians have entered the gates, so to speak. After dispatching her “husband” in a brutal fight with knives and shattered glass, she emerges to find the whole placid community engulfed in bloody chaos. The raiders, led by the imposing Lee Moldavier (Sarita Choudhury), are running amok, slaughtering everyone they can while gorging themselves on the fruits of these coddled subterraneans’ labors.
Lots of people get bloodily dispatched. Lucy runs around in a wedding dress with a gun and bandolier, commando-style in more ways than one. Her friend Steph (Sannabel O’Hagan) opens fire with a fork jutting out of her eye. People go flying through the air and into picnic tables like Road House. Moldaver hints at some secret connection with Lucy’s mother. It’s fun stuff as far as massacres go.
In the end, the raiders make off with Hank, leaving the rest to their fate, but Lucy won’t sit still for it. Against everyone’s advice and orders, she heads to the surface to search for her dad all on her own.
Perhaps she’ll run into our other future hero, a young soldier named Maximus (Aaron Moten). As part of the sworn military order the Brotherhood of Steel, he spends most of his time in the barracks, horsing around with his fellow grunts, all of whom look and act like they’re preparing to ship off to Korea. Instead, their real goal is to become first a squire and then a knight, a super-soldier ensconced in Iron Man–like power armor.
When the time comes for a new squire to be selected, though, the powers that be, represented by the stern cleric Quintus (award-winning playwright and memorable Mr. Robot heavy Michael Cristofer), pass him over for his friend Dane (Xelia Mendes-Jones, a powerful presence in The Wheel of Time). But when Dane’s boot is rigged with a razor blade, Maximus quickly goes from prime suspect to replacement squire. (For what it’s worth, I don’t think he did it, but you’re certainly meant to understand he wants to be a squire badly enough to be okay with it happening.)
But there’s one more figure soon to be roaming the wastelands, this one on the hunt for a man on the run from a fabled place called the Enclave. He’s a familiar fellow, as it turns out: Thanks to the magic of science-fiction radiation, Cooper Howard is alive and indestructible 219 years after the bombs fell, though he looks a lot worse for the wear and seems like a pretty terrible guy now, all things considered. The first thing he does when a group of Western-style bounty hunters dig him up out of the ground where he’s being held and tortured by a crime boss is kill them and take on their quest as his own. A helpful title refers to him as THE GHOUL now, which seems fitting.
We’re only an episode in, but so far Fallout strikes me as superior to similarly ultraviolent, over-the-top sci-fi/fantasy comedic riffs on the American West, like Preacher or Mrs. Davis. Also, despite some superficial similarities, it bears so little real resemblance to Nolan and Joy’s previous dystopian-Western future TV series Westworld that it hardly bears mentioning. This speaks well of the team’s creativity and refusal to rehash their own work.
Watching Fallout is a bit like stepping into a hall of mirrors. All the post-apocalyptic stuff taken from film and television and then absorbed and reinterpreted by the game series — neo-Western stuff, barbarian raiders, utopian/dystopian underground communities, irradiated mutants, etc. — is being thrown back up on screen as narrative fiction.
Oddly, it works. It honestly feels fresh to see throwback tropes like futuristic planned communities, cowboys of the wastelands, and so on, instead of the grimy gritty aesthetic of the aforementioned Silo or the weirdly overpraised The Last of Us, another video game adaptation. Some of the aesthetic choices could have used another pass, though; does the future have to the same blue and orange color scheme as every other show in 2024? If the Vault’s environment is the work of a film projector anyway, a nice riff on Oklahoma!’s vivid Todd-AO splendor might have done the trick nicely.
But while that may impact the show qualitatively, it doesn’t impede its goals, which are to make a fun video-game show with a rated-R sense of humor, some gross-out stuff, and the occasional world-historical atrocity to remind us it’s not always a good time. I’d say they did what they set out to do.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
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