I watched the Amazon’s Fallout series when it first came out and just now got around to reviewing it. Bottom line, it is a fun nostalgia trip for people who played the game but really has nothing to say.
For readers who are unfamiliar, Fallout is based on the popular post-apocalyptic video game series of the same name.
There are a lot of things about the show I like. The vast majority of on-screen adaptions of game titles are lazy, low-risk cash grabs depending on brand recognition and little else. Fallout, to the writers’ credit, takes its inspiration seriously and stays true to the games’ humorous and often silly tone while maintaining a certain level of seriousness and not coming off as too silly.
The marketplace shoot out early in the series is probably the best “video game style” fight I’ve seen. The ghoul fights like a guy on his 15th playthrough of the game lazily mowing down hordes of low-level enemies who don’t pose a threat to him and he destroys them all effortlessly. Even though the ghoul isn’t in any danger, the scene maintains tension because the girl and the black guy are new players who are at risk of being randomly killed, mostly due to their own lack of ability.
I also like how the show incorporate game mechanics, like characters being able to shrug off even extremely serious injuries in a few minutes by finding a health pack or a wasteland doctor. TV characters tend to do this anyway, but at least here there’s the explanation of well, it’s a game.
That said, the show’s strength is also its weakness. There are at least several points when the script leans too heavily into video game logic to smooth over short-comings in the plot. This includes enemies making implausibly dumb mistakes so heroes can survive an otherwise fatal situations, or characters just being overly linear and specific in the way they react to things (of course non-playable characters in video games have to always react in a certain way so the hero can progress to the next level).
But the biggest problem isn’t directly related to video games. Fallout feels like the episodes were written by different groups of people who didn’t communicate with each other, resulting in a season climax that I found to be dumb and unbelievable.The first episode starts with a gang of raiders violently murdering their way through a vault (an underground generational bomb shelter people survived a nuclear war in). Okay, this is fine and illustrates how vault people are naive and clueless in comparison to the barbaric crazy savages on the surface world. But then in the final episodes it is explained that, actually, the gang was working for one of the good characters. There’s no plausible explanation for this, it is just a giant self-contradiction, like the first and last episodes were written by different people who didn’t talk to each other.
Another problem is the ghoul, who is a fallen hero. AKA someone who started good but became evil later. His back story gets more screen time than anyone else’s, but so far it is all just stuff that happened and doesn’t explain why he’s evil now. Presumably there’s a big reveal in a later season, but I don’t consider it good writing to put an inordinate amount of time into one character without even a hint toward why he started becoming bad. If a flashback scene can be cut without impacting the present day characters, then it needs to be asked why that scene was included at all.
The girl is interesting because she’s a nobody who left the vault to go out into the world for the first time. She’s actually weaker than most of the other characters which makes her interesting to watch and progress. But the final episodes completely sabotage this concept by declaring well actually she’s super important and is a direct relative of the most important people in the world. Something similar happened with the Disney Star Wars trilogy when they went through great lengths to establish that Rey is a nobody then changed their minds and said actually she’s the emperor’s daughter. The girl as a random character who wanders into a world-changing event by accident was a lot more interesting than saying she was destined for it all along. And I need to point out that she was almost killed in the first ten minutes of the show, so it made no sense for the other characters to include her in their super-important plans.
In the first episodes there is a scientist working for the Enclave (a bad guy organization trying to make America great again) who steals an important device from his employers and implants it in his head. Several factions converge on the scientist to take him captive, not knowing the reason why, and he ends up badly injured and with the girl. Before dying, the scientist tells the girl to cut off his head and complete the quest. These events made sense in the moment for the exact reason that the scientist’s motives and the purpose of the device were unexplained. I assumed the scientist wanted his head intact so he could be brought back to life with some advanced video game technology at the destination, but no, the head was just discarded and he stayed dead. He could have just told the girl to remove the device. That would have been a lot less gory and drawn a lot less attention to her. Once again, this is like someone wrote the head scene and someone else wrote the recovery scene.
An equally serious story-telling problem is the big bad corporation Vault Tec. They built the vaults in the game and are evil. But the Fallout show gives them a much larger role in everything. Actually, it was the corporation that deliberately caused the end of the world for… profit? This is completely ridiculous. Wiping out their competitors doesn’t help a corporation if they also wipe out their customers. There was absolutely no need for including this plot line. And actually, if the bad guy corporation scenes were all cut, that wouldn’t have really changed anything in the present-day quest line.
Oh, and guess what, the ghoul was married to the bad corporation lady who decided to nuke the world. So not one but two of the main characters were directly involved or related to extremely important people. And then just bumped into each other at complete random. What are the odds of that? The two random people bumping into each other did not need to be important, and making them both super important largely invalidates all significance of the events that caused them to meet.
Ian Kummer
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I’d say the plot was very predictable, I immediately guessed there was some family story behind it. I didn’t completely guess who f*cked who right before the war, but still, i could feel it was something like that
I remember you saying that 🙂