The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of 'Fallout'
In terms of popular franchises that were ripe for adaptation, Fallout had to be one of the best candidates available. It’s an immensely popular video game series with a devoted fanbase, several bestselling games, and endless source material that a team of talented writers could use to make a compelling story.
Done right, it could have joined the ranks of recent successful video game adaptations like The Last of Us, Arcane, or the The Super Mario Bros. Movie by handling the franchise with care and following the rules of good filmmaking. Then again, it could decide to go woke and make a hot mess of the IP like the recent Resident Evil and Halo television series or the old Super Mario Bros. movie, adaptations that made it clear that the filmmakers had no respect for the games or their respective audiences.
The new Fallout television series on Amazon lies somewhere in between these two extremes. Overall, the show is entertaining, but there are more than a few irritating flaws. It seems like the show’s creators wanted it to be all things to all people, staying faithful to the look and feel of the games to please fans while incorporating a wide range of characters and genres to reach a general audience. But, instead of becoming an all-encompassing epic adventure bringing these disparate elements into a harmonious whole, the show feels more like an incoherent hodgepodge that a viewer has to pick through.
To begin, what’s good about Fallout is the aesthetics and production. Nothing about it looks cheap or careless. The story takes place in California 200 years after a nuclear apocalypse that occurred sometime in the mid-20th century, rendering most of the surface a desert wasteland dotted with shantytowns, modern ruins, and military encampments. Underneath the surface are many vaults designed to preserve the corny, anti-communist Americana of the early Cold War period. Periodically, the story will flashback to the beginning when the bombs started dropping, faithfully depicting the fashions and interiors of that time. Visually speaking, the show somehow makes these typically drab settings appealing and colorful.
The same can be said for the action sequences and special effects, which are generally well-done. Occasionally, the gore is excessive, or the action is childishly unrealistic, but more often these scenes are exciting and believable.
However, Fallout’s greatest asset has to be Walton Goggins, who effectively carries the show, playing The Ghoul. Centuries before becoming a nose-less mutant bounty hunter who is feared across the land, The Ghoul was the famous actor Walter Cooper who did paid promotions for the morally dubious megacorporation Vault-Tec. Goggins does a masterful job switching from his character’s former self, an actor with misgivings about supporting a company that seems to be pushing nuclear war and a jaded bounty hunter roaming the wasteland vainly attempting to escape his past.
Unfortunately, Goggins’s excellence highlights the mediocrity of his costars, contributing to a real weakness in the series. Aside from Ella Purnell’s solid portrayal of the plucky Lucy Maclean, the rest of the cast is either forgettable or positively off-putting. At the top of this list is Aaron Moten who plays Maximus, a would-be knight who has the maturity and mannerisms of a toddler yet continually fails upwards. Moten somehow makes his already unlikeable character even worse by dragging out his lines and continually having a distressed facial expression where he always looks like he’s about to cry. The supporting cast is relatively flat due to a combination of lazy writing and one-note performances, though a few of the cameos (particularly those of Matt Berry and Fred Armisen) offer some genuinely funny moments.
In fairness to the actors, they have little to work with in terms of the writing, which is often schizophrenic and confused. This is probably unavoidable since the writers decided to make the show a sci-fi, zombie-apocalyptic satire of America during the Cold War in the style of an old Western—oh, and there’s a whole video game universe that needs to be represented as well. This smorgasbord of different genres leads to a clash of tones, irrational and sometimes contradictory character motivations, pointless conversations, and a host of jokes that don’t land. Even though plenty of things happen in each episode, it’s often difficult to determine what the show is trying to say or what the characters are trying to do.
Only in the final couple of episodes of the season does a coherent idea finally emerge and the plot threads come together. Unfortunately, it’s all pretty woke and ridiculously simplistic. Without giving away the ending, the show makes stupid complaints about capitalism, features a lesbian couple, casts some evil white men as villains, and derides American patriotism as abject hypocrisy.
Some other woke aspects of the show include its superlatively diverse cast (who knew pre-Civil Rights America was so progressive and inclusive?) and the obvious contrast between the dumb, deficient, and/or duped male characters and the competent, confident, and/or cool female characters. Even though this latter point seems tempered by the two main protagonists, the strong, fearsome Ghoul and the naive, ignorant Lucy, these dynamics reverse by the end of the season, with Lucy coming out on top and the Ghoul coming off like a chump.
That said, one could argue that the show doesn’t make a point of its wokeness, and it could have been much worse, which is true. There aren’t any tedious monologues about sexism or racism, and the Ghoul and Lucy at least have discernible character arcs that help them transcend the woke box-checking. And even if the show’s pervasive tokenism detracts from the realism and seriousness of the show, few people are actually going to watch it for these reasons.
Rather, they will watch it to escape from today’s controversies and have a good time. And in this regard, they will be satisfied with the first season of Fallout. Moreover, the show has great potential to become even better in future seasons. If its creators can pick a lane with the kind of story they want to tell, avoid the woke signaling, and give Goggins’s Ghoul some better foils, then Fallout can take its rightful place in the pantheon of superb video game adaptations.
Auguste Meyrat is an English teacher in the Dallas area. He holds an MA in humanities and an MEd in educational leadership. He is the senior editor of The Everyman and has written essays for The Federalist, The American Conservative, and The Imaginative Conservative, as well as the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter.
