Okay, I watched this new-fangled TV series, which I told y’all I was pretty psyched about several months ago, (and ya’ll should be really happy because this time I actually did what I said I was gonna do), and overall, I can say I was not disappointed. It was very good. I heard it’s probably getting a second season, and I’ll take a look at that.
Amazon moved the date of the release up one day, so I watched it this Wednesday evening, conveniently right before I had a day off, so I could binge watch this all night. I guess most people didn’t know about the early release time on Wednesday, so most people waited until Thursday morning, and some are watching it Friday. There are eight episodes and I finished them sometime around four in the morning of Thursday. I don’t binge watch stuff very often because I usually don’t get that type of open time, but I did this week, and except for a couple of slower episodes that seemed to be treading water, even though they were still important to the backstory, I very much enjoyed it.
There are several iterations of Fallout in game form, and I haven’t played a single one of them, so I understand the worldbuilding on the show based on the experience of someone who has never played the games. I did watch a few videos explaining the lore, after I watched the series, because I had questions. Like: How many Vaults are there? Are all the vaults as messed up as the one I saw in the show? What are ghouls, and how do they happen? What were the monsters I saw? What’s up with that dog? (It’s just a regular dog, as far as I can tell.) After watching the series and looking at it from the point of view of someone who has never played the games, I can understand why some of the lore was changed, like the making of the zombie-like creatures we see in the show. I was seeing a few comparisons to the HBO series The Last of Us on my YouTube thumbnails, asking if the show was better, worse, or as good. I can honestly say I don’t think its as good as TLOU, but it is a lot more fun, very compelling, and I was intrigued and captivated enough to keep watching one episode after another. I don’t know that this will make my “best of” list at the end of the year, ( I think that distinction will go to Shogun) but it was alright!
The series literally starts off with a bang! We meet one of the primary characters in a flashback on the day of multiple atomic bomb explosions, on an alternate Earth. One of the things non-gamers have to understand is this is not our world. It’s an another reality where atomic bombs have been dropped on countries more than once (there is a war in the Middle East over oil, China invaded Alaska, the US has annexed Canada) and the technological, and some of the cultural foundations, is that of the fifties, with an international war over basic resources, and the invention of cold fusion, a perpetual energy source, all of which is the base plot of the entire series. There are several things that are very different about this world. One of those is that there was no Jim Crow, or MLK, I guess because interracial marriages are widely accepted, and people’s greatest concern is the coming war between China and the US. There is no McCarthyism, but people are paranoid about their colleagues and actors being Communists. There is a certain level of fantasy 50’s technology too.
We then meet the main character we saw in the trailer named Lucy. The show moves back and forth in time, covering the backstory of the three primary characters, Lucy (played by Ella Purnell), The Ghoul (played by Walton Goggins), and Maximus (played by Aaron Moten). Each one of these characters gets a backstory, a clear character arc, and a mystery or goal they need to solve before the end of the season. The episodes move from the adventures of one character to another and occasionally back in time. The Ghoul’s story is told entirely in flashback though because that explains who and what he is in the present. The show is directed and written by the same people who brought us Westworld, Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, which I was happy to see, because the two of them are very competent at weaving multiple story threads together. There is no confusion about where we are in the story, what’s happening to who, and/or why.
The primary story, which takes place 200 years before we even meet Lucy, involves a company called Vault Tech, which created over 100 bunkers designed for the survival of the human race after WW3, but not all is at it seems. Most of that is the backstory of The Ghoul, because his wife plays a large role in the creation of this future. The show then shifts 219 years in the future, where Lucy’s story begins as she is about to get married to a member of another Vault (#32) that’s connected to her own. Lucy is from Vault 33 (hence the numbers seen on the backs of the character’s blue radiation proof suits.) Her marriage goes tits up when the wedding party is massacred and her father is kidnapped, which prompts Lucy’s exit from the Vault in an attempt to find him. Along the way, she meets Maximus who is a member of a faction called The Brotherhood of Steel, who have taken it upon themselves to act sort of like the cops of the nuclear wasteland beyond the Vaults. Lucy and Max become allies. Interspersed with Lucy’s story is how Max came to be a member of The Brotherhood.
There are several other factions and creatures that Lucy interacts with outside Vault 33. She eventually meets up with Goggin’s character, who is simply called “The Ghoul”, who has lived an unnaturally long life (over 200 years) thanks to being exposed to radiation and a special serum he needs to constantly procure, in order to remain sane. Remember, this is an alternate world based on what people believed about technology in the 1950s, so in this world people can survive severe radiation damage by becoming what we would essentially call “zombies”. They can keep their minds from deteriorating by ingesting a special drug. Without it they turn into what others call Ferals (basically the wild, people-eating, type of zombies).
All three characters converge in an effort to take the bounty on a Scientist from another faction, called The Enclave, whose worth is stored in his brain. After he is dead, all that is needed is his head. These three characters, and a couple of others, spend most of the season chasing after it, beating the crap out of each other, and falling into various adventures, over this man’s decapitated head.
The worldbuilding is well done. Not every image gets an answer this season, as they are holding back a lot of information for the second, and what you think is a tiny scrap of information has significant resonance later, even throwaway characters turns out to be important detail to the worldbuilding, like Lucy’s father (played by the always excellent Kyle McClachlan). You do get thrown in the deep end, with some characters and mysteries being presented along the way, and a cast of interesting and occasionally disgusting, creatures like giant cockroaches, giant aquatic grabbers, organ stealing robots, brains in jars, irradiated mutant bears (ugh!), a Snake Oil Salesman who f**ks chickens (???), a Ghoul dog, people who hate Ghouls and Vault Dwellers (they do not have the best reputation in this world), and a faction of Vault raiders.
Some of the most interesting things (that are non-spoilery) is the show’s approach to sex. The women in the series are shown as enthusiastic initiators of sex, happily jumping guys bones if they are also willing, which is something I found both remarkable and deeply funny. It’s an element of storytelling that is rarely thought of or shown, in favor of showing women as semi-reluctant prey, or sexual assault victims. Walton Goggin’s character is married to a Black woman and the two get pretty frisky, sometimes in front of other people. so this particular contingent of human beings seem to have very healthy attitudes towards sex, although one must note that I had not noticed any gay or lesbian characters. Lucy is especially interesting in this regard. At one point, she just comes straight out and propositions Maximus, who, having never even been told about sex, (since he’s been raised by an order of violent, but celibate, monks) has no idea what the hell she’s talking about.
Next to all the other somewhat gray and villainous characters in the series, Lucy and her fellow Vault Dwellers tend to be what we would call “annoyingly wholesome”, in that they wear their hearts on their sleeves, believe in old 50s American values, and are refreshingly honest about their feelings, even when they’re villains. The only other gray character in the Vault is Lucy’s brother, because he’s always shuffling quickly around like he’s furtively holding onto a secret, but he’s not a villain, and it’s for a good reason.
No doubt, the star of the series, and the character most people are tuning in to watch is Walton Goggins, The Ghoul, mostly because he is professionally ultra-violent bad ass, who is the most mysterious, and we love Bounty Hunters! How did he get that way? What series of events allowed him to survive the nuclear events in the opening scene? What happened to his wife and daughter and are either of them Ghouls like him? I guess we’ll find out next season, and I hope there will be, because the series has received some very good reviews, and Amazon has been offered a deal for more episodes.
I would say more, but then I’d start getting into spoiler territory. I don’t have a problem with giving spoilers (the series is kind of hard to spoil, really), but I want y’all to watch the show, and some of the episodes have some really nice and very funny surprises. Yes, the shows is darkly humorous, so it’s okay to laugh at some things. Of course Mr. Goggins gets ALL the best lines, but the other actors aren’t phoning it in, and some of the situations these characters get into are dangerous, but still very ridiculous.
Usually when I fall in love with a series I hope for at least three to five seasons, which is just enough for a show to hit its stride, and gets most of the viewer’s questions answered, all without getting too bogged down in minutiae, or getting boring. So here’s to two more seasons of Fallout!
Next up: I wanna talk about Shogun ,which may turn out to be the best show of the year, and the movie Poor Things, which I greatly enjoyed.
Geeking Out about It 