The Weather Underground

Fallout

starring Ella Purnell, Walton Goggins, Aaron Moten, Frances Turner, Kyle MacLachlan, Leslie Uggams, Michael Emerson, Moises Arias and Sarita Choudhury

created by Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner (first time showrunner-ing, as far as I can tell, way to go, you two!)

---

Spoilers for this show. Spoilers for Fallout games. These are subjects I know WAY too much about. Warning ends here. If you're mad after this, I don't really know how else to help you.

---

This is going to surprise some of you, but I wasn't always the exact age I am now and I didn't always know all the stuff I already currently know. You see me in person or read what I write here, whatever, your first impression might legitimately be: a being out of time, preserved in amber, spontaneously generated fully formed by a world in need at the exact moment he was needed. To that I'd say: do better, World In Need. If you're going to manifest a savior in the form of a single conscious human, you should have aimed higher than one whose primary skills lie in an above-average typing speed and the ability to keep the rind in a single piece when peeling a citrus fruit. I know you're thinking "that's actually legitimately impressive if we're including limes, their skin is so thin..." and you're right of course, but it's not going to do a lot for the problems of, like, microplastics in the drinking water, that's my point.

No, my history as a human--and I apologize if this comes as a shock--includes previous years where I was younger than I am now, up to and inclusive of 1997, when there were probably already microplastics but nobody knew to freak out appropriately about them yet because we were all too busy playing a top-down 3D isometric post-apocalyptic computer role-playing game called Fallout. I don't want to assume everyone had the exact same experience of being 23 years old that I did that year, but here we are 27 years later talking about a television series based on that exact game (and its postcedent iterations) so I can confidently at least say I was far from the only one. And these were the days before the mainstreaming of gamer culture, so this is for the naysayers (mainly my wife at the time) who were certain the hours locked in a dark room in front of a humming CRT monitor would amount to nothing. But now look at me, in 2024, a testament to my own relentless self-belief and commitment and DEFINITELY NOT any kind of clinical psycho-chemical imbalance, qualifying me to over-write a blithely anonymous review piece in a cramped, unlit corner of the internet for you today. I'd like to thank my mom once again for never looking into Ritalin.

Since this is about the TV show, I won't break down for you the entire history of the intellectual property, the hands its gone through since the first iteration, the state of the franchise or the dispositions of the studios involved in developing, maintaining and releasing further games and their success/failure rates as stewards of the story. You can find loads of those all over the internet already and nearly 100% of them all end more or less the same way, with some version of "...and Todd Howard is a fussy little bitch." Boring!

There has also been plenty written about the now-out-of-favor binge-drop version of the show's release, with Amazon dropping all 8 episodes at once, something they haven't done in ages. Apparently a complicated state-of-the-human-condition expressionist long-form word-poem piece like Reacher needs an IV-drip weekly scheduled doling out, presumably so we can savor the minimalist character work of Alan Ritchson and whoever paints him that shade of bronze every shooting day. As luck would have it, however, I found myself severed from my (already minimal) sources of motivation or ambition by an invasive gut virus as Fallout came out, so I was in perfect position* to take the whole thing in.

I find myself in a similar state to where I was when Rings of Power debuted, Amazon's last high-budget crack at something very near and dear to the root geekness of my wee, misshapen heart. I was able to be somewhat sanguine about RoP in the moment (though I've become less charitable over time), but Tolkien and Fallout fandoms are two different things. For Tolkien, the books (literally) are closed. There's a finite amount to know since Tolkien died before I was born, so the keeping of the info feels precious, meticulous, lawyerly; there's a default pedantry to it constantly bristling against incoming offenses like mild inaccuracy or, worse, any indication of a level of interest below this type of grammarian's fanaticism.

With Fallout, it's a thing that has already passed through the hands of several studios, in several forms, with a lore and structure that necessarily grows, without a single source like Tolkien to devote one's imaginary and unasked-for service to. As a result, going into the show, I was ready for it to be what it was going to be: just another version of a many-versioned thing. As long as it wasn't, you know, shitty.

I didn't know the names Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner going in to the show, but I did know executive producers Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan from Westworld, which had the right spiritual vibe (especially in the final season) for a Fallout adaptation, so I was confident enough. Ella Purnell and Aaron Moten I didn't really know, but Walton Goggins always delivers, usually as bad guys, even when the role is generic and underwritten like in Ant-Man and the Wasp. Under a shit-ton of (mostly) practical make-up, he cuts a jagged and rough figure, forgiven for having sometimes inscrutable or overlapping motivations encounter to encounter because he's playing a literal survivor, (as everyone is to some degree) uncompromised by any code past "not being the one who dies" in any exchange. There's a freedom to the character and the performance that he only trades in at the very close of the last episode when he finds a main-story quest of his very own.

As far as faithfulness to the game series, there's a lot the series really gets right. The games all have basically two settings, the protagonist's present and the echo of the alt-history past that birthed it. It's always a retro-futurist atomic age America locked in resource wars with China some time post-World War II, with all the implied and amplified features therein like anti-communist paranoia and an unchecked capitalism completely untethered from scruples or ethics, where there is no line between product and consumer. Everything is fuel for the engine of wealth generation for a select few (selected for worthiness, of course, by their wealth in an uncomfortably prescient and present tautology), where even they realize too late (always too late) that there was always another dividing line between them and the corporations (like Vault-Tec, correctly centered here) reaping profit out of misery and inventing streams of revenue above even their heads. The difference between the show and real life, then, is basically null.

There's always been a dark symmetry between the hyper-gore of exploding heads and limbs of Fallout combat for entertainment and the in-game universe's rendering of human life as fodder for either immolation or needlessly cruel experimentation, the latter of which is the truth of literally every vault in every game, no matter how peaceful or idyllic it might seem. The show understands and translates this with utter fidelity.

It's what the show gets most right: the lies exist as rot under everything that seems foundational. The transactional nature of human life is exaggerated and extorted to extreme degrees, where humans are traded as slaves or food by other humans (or mutated versions thereof) in exchange for literally bottle caps (the in-game currency) from the long-dead Coca-Cola analogue and every single community, however large or small, trying to build some version of a civil society on an scale is constantly under threat, one stiff, slightly radioactive breeze away from disappearing from the featureless, sandblasted map.

These are the stories the show tries to tell, with Ella Purnell coming from her literally sheltered existence learning the grim realities of the struggling surface world and Aaron Moten's Maximus, no less naive for having lived in a different bubble, his made of brain-poisoning lead-lined steel topside.

The stories felt true to the spirit of the games, with a main trunk-quest for Purnell's Lucy deflected into tangents by side-quests and companion actions. The grand ending suffered for making itself kind of static and expository, largely wasting a hugely charismatic Surita Choudhury as the ultimately overhyped Moldaver and reducing Lucy to like four lingering close-ups of her tear-stained face while an airborne invasion and running firefight was supposedly going on all around.

The production design was gorgeous and nearly perfect. Plus as a SoCal person, I'm always biased towards stories set here. A Fallout story with zero super mutants or forced evolutionary virus (if you don't know what any of that means, just think of bits of the the Vault 4 storyline with the lab on Level 12, except with even more body horror and more exploding heads), but I guess that's what the potential season two is for: literally everything else I want and/or don't know I need yet. No pressure.

--

*couch-mounted, supine, almost inaudibly moaning