Photo: JoJo Whilden/Prime Video
Of course it begins with the bomb. Or, rather, a series of bombs. In the opening moments of Prime Video’s Fallout, we see Los Angeles obliterated by a salvo of nuclear warheads from the vantage point of the Hollywood Hills. It’s a disquieting image because nuclear weapons are obviously drop-your-guts terrifying on an instinctual level. But in Fallout, from the ashes of tragedy, gonzo slapstick mayhem is born: a wasteland replete with cartoonish gore, gigantic radioactive bugs, and atomic-age robots straight out of Forbidden Planet. Fallout, then, is both an escapist salve and a chilling cautionary tale.
Before it was Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s buzzy new television series, Fallout was a beloved video game. The game franchise, which celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2022, began life as an isometric RPG inspired by tabletop role-playing games. The brainchild of developer Tim Cain and his team at Interplay Productions, that game was Fallout: A Post Nuclear Role Playing Game, and it imagined a Mad Max–inspired world in which gaudy Atomic Age retro-futurism collides with the moral gray of a ruthless post-nuclear wasteland. It’s set hundreds of years in the future in an alternate historical timeline that diverged from our own sometime after World War II. America never evolved culturally from the ’50s — and then, in the year 2077, a devastating and prolonged war with Communist China over dwindling global resources draws to its apocalyptic conclusion. Bethesda Softworks bought the rights to Fallout in the mid-2000s, bringing it into 3-D modernity with Fallout 3, followed by a flurry of sequels and spinoffs. The rest, as they say, is history.
Prime Video’s adaptation arrives at an interesting time for the nuke stuff, sure, apropos of Ukraine and our generally heightened state of nuclear anxiety. But it’s also important to note that video-game adaptations are no longer considered to be entirely a fool’s errand. The obvious example to look to would be HBO’s The Last of Us, which was just about the most critically acclaimed and broadly watched TV show of 2023 not called Succession. That televised version of the post-apocalypse kept (mostly) strict, reverent fidelity to the story of the game. But Fallout isn’t like The Last of Us, which was acclaimed for its screen-ready narrative in the first place. The ripest part for adaptation is its world: the corny, B-movie retro-futurism; its blunt-force satire of the American Dream; the factions and locales that make Fallout … well, Fallout.
So, the nuking. We start the show pre-war, a cue presumably taken from the prologue to Fallout 4, which similarly opens on the day of the Great War in 2077, i.e. when the world was blown to bits. It’s an event we see, in this instance, through the eyes of famed western actor Cooper Howard (Walton Goggins), who is apparently down on his luck enough to be entertaining kids with the help of his daughter, Janey (Teagan Meredith, so cute!), at a rich guy’s son’s birthday in the Hollywood Hills. Even before the bombs have dropped, inevitability hangs in the air. There’s chatter on the news about the president being moved to an undisclosed location. The weatherman on TV, in a state of panic, puts it aptly: “I can’t do the weather if I don’t know if there’s gonna be a next week.”
Some of the parents ask Howard to pose with his thumb up, which seems innocuous enough; in reality, they want him to gesture not in the cheery affirmative but as if he’s measuring an imagined mushroom cloud on the horizon. (You’ll recognize this as the signature pose of Fallout’s Vault Boy.) He declines, given the state of things. He explains this all to Jane — essentially, he says, if the cloud is bigger than your thumb, you’re fucked. Then … boom. Warhead by warhead, the city is destroyed; the kids’ blissful ignorance is ended abruptly when the initial shockwave shatters the glass patio windows; everyone at the party is thrown into self-serving chaos, jostling over access to the temporary safety of a bomb shelter. Did I mention that this scene is genuinely quite terrifying? We are offered a dose of heroic levity when Howard mounts a horse with Janey to escape the destruction. Yeehaw.
Many of those who survived the bombs did so in sprawling subterranean bomb shelters called vaults. This is where we head next, jumping forward 219 years to 2296 to meet Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell) in Vault 33. She’s the vault-dwelling equivalent of an A+ student, excelling in repair, speech, and science (you can really tell that she’s a charisma build). Oh, and importantly, her “reproductive organs are intact” and her “hygiene well maintained.” (What did I say? Charisma!) Alas, as she explains to the assembled councilmembers before her, she has been unable to find a suitable marriage partner and thus has come to them to apply for the Triennial Trade with neighboring Vault 32.
And so begin the nuptials, but not first without a word from her dad, Hank (Kyle MacLachlan), who is also the vault’s overseer. The ceremony is set to take place in the bucolic environs of the … vault atrium, which plays host to cornfields and a majestic farmyard vista projected from projectors affixed to the ceiling. (Note on the lore: Almost every vault in Fallout has its own particular experiment, which varies from the ghoulishly evil to the bizarre, including at least one vault in which occupants are all numbered clones of a guy called Gary.)
In exchange for crops and spare parts, Vault 32 gives 33 a “breeder,” otherwise known as Lucy’s dashing future husband, Monty. They’re married, and the two vaults come together for a lavish celebratory banquet. But something seems off: Monty and his friends from 32 hardly show the etiquette you’d expect of people who have grown up in subterranean safety, wielding knives and forks like early humanoids who have just learned to use rocks as primitive tools. In fairness, Lucy isn’t exactly shy. Her first question for her new beau: “So, what’s your sperm count?” Hey, repopulation is the whole point.
Our suspicions are confirmed when Monty tries to go all stabby on Lucy on their marriage bed. And not in the way that would be conducive to the perpetuation of humankind. “Just so you know, this really was the best day of my life,” he says, lunging at her with a knife.
While Lucy is dealing with her own deathly struggle, the rest of the vault has plunged into chaos. Whaddya know? These 32-ers weren’t vault dwellers so much as wasteland raiders who had taken their place. Many of the inhabitants of Vault 33 are subsequently massacred in a delightfully silly slo-mo sequence that feels incredibly Fallout: visceral violence delivered with slapstick verve. The abundance of gore and splatter recalls the 3-D Fallout games’ V.A.T.S., a mechanic that allows the player to target specific limbs with head-popping results. At least one poor sap’s corpse is used as a meat shield. Lucy slices Monty’s face open with a smashed blender before he’s finished off by Hank.
This ends, alas, with Hank stolen away by the raider gang, led by Sarita Choudhury’s Moldaver, who we’ll no doubt meet again later. (Hank either didn’t realize or chose not to let on at first, for whatever reason, but he seems to recognize Moldaver after the massacre. Presumably by reputation, but still — he didn’t have the slightest inkling before?) Like so many player characters before her, Lucy leaves the vault to find him. And so, taking a cue from Fallout 3, one of the Fallout show’s central arcs emerges: a child trying to find their sole surviving parent, who may or may not be telling the truth about where they came from.
The bulk of the rest of the episode is dedicated to a battalion of the Brotherhood of Steel, a fascistic group of tech hoarders who are the long-standing anti-heroes of Fallout. We meet them in a boot camp in the remains of an airport somewhere outside L.A., which has an air of Full Metal Jacket about it. The grunts are juvenile meatheads brimming with machismo. They all worship at the altar of pre-war tech, which is the mission of the Brotherhood.
Our main guy in the Brotherhood is troubled squire Maximus (Aaron Moten), who is assigned to a knight — using antiquated Arthurian titles is, like, half of the Brotherhood’s schtick — in place of his friend, Aspirant Dane (Xelia Mendes-Jones), after one of the other Aspirants leaves a razor blade in their boot. Though he stands accused of doing it himself, Maximus stammers through his interrogation just about adequately enough to convince the Brotherhood brass that he’s worth a shot, and so he takes Dane’s place as the bitch-boy protégé of the power-armor-clad Knight Titus (Michael Rapaport). Their mission? To hunt down a runaway Enclave scientist who carries a MacGuffin of enormous potential to save — or destroy … again? — the world.
Splitting its time between three different protagonists is a risk for Fallout, especially given the first season is just eight episodes. You fear that one of the characters may feel short-changed. So far, so good, and it’s unsurprising we spend most of our time with Lucy as the most obvious audience surrogate.
In my view, nevertheless, the episode leaves the best until last. It’s the Ghoul, baby! That’s a rotting Walton Goggins (Ghoulgins, heh) in a cowboy hat, minus a nose, with a fierce trigger finger and Eastwoodian proclivity for scowling. Buried alive by some Big Cheese he’d pissed off, he’s pulled out of the mud by a trio of bounty hunters who seek his services in tracking down the aforementioned Enclave runaway, who has a retirement-level bounty on his head. He chews the scenery for a bit and blows a guy’s head off — it’s an instant win.
So what will become of our three wasteland heroes? Tune in next time on Galaxy News Ra— ahem, Vulture, to find out.
• Hello! I’m Jack, and I’ll be your wasteland guide for the next seven episodes of Fallout. Such is the embarrassing amount of time I’ve spent playing the games (and indulging in lore essays on YouTube) that I often call Fallout my Star Wars or my Lord of the Rings. Literally thousands of hours. Not a second wasted.
• The first song we hear in the show is “Orange Colored Sky,” which was one of the radio songs in Fallout: New Vegas, the hipsters’ choice of the games. What about New Vegas itself? It’s just a couple hundred miles from L.A., after all.
• The weather guy on the TV may be a small hat tip to Fallout 4, in which you also saw a newsman lose his shit on live television during its pre-war prologue.
• Lucy MacLean … a coincidence or a stealthy Die Hard reference?
• While the actual time that the bombs dropped in Fallout canonically is subject to some debate, the clocks in Fallout 3 stopped at 9:47 a.m. Eastern Time. That would be 6:47 a.m. on the West Coast; definitely too early for a kids’ birthday party, impending Armageddon be damned.
• In case you don’t know, the Enclave are the main bad guys of Fallout 2 and 3 and are the descendants of the corrupt pre-war American government. They’re very bad, very genocidal, etc. Worth using the bullets on. Their presence in the show is intriguing from a lore perspective: As far as we’ve seen in the games, they’re all but wiped out by the time of Fallout: New Vegas but seem to still exist as an active organization in 2296. A lot can happen in two decades, I guess. Maybe this is a Nü Enclave.
• The show’s interpretation of the Brotherhood of Steel is very much in line with Fallout 4 — there’s even a reference to them taking orders from “the highest clerics” in the Commonwealth. This means we can expect them to be tin-can assholes rather than the benevolent wasteland saviors they’re depicted as in Fallout 3. (The kindly Brotherhood of the Capital Wasteland was itself an aberration. The Brotherhood were traditionally dicks in the early isometric Fallout games, too.) As Fallout’s ubiquitous mascots, it only takes a cursory glance at the Fallout sub-Reddit to see that Brotherhood fatigue has set in across the fanbase. I suspect fans will appreciate the heel turn that they’ll seemingly undertake in the show.
