During the winter of 2009, a few months after the release of Fallout 3, my friends and I took a trip to Washington DC. I had been playing Fallout non-stop since it released and it felt truly surreal walking around the actual Capital Wasteland from the game. Late into the evening of exploring, we realized that we were going to be racing the clock to catch a Metro train out of the city but all of our phones were dead and we were lost. With how entrenched I was with Fallout 3 at the time, I knew the basic layout of the city enough to navigate us back to a Metro station to escape the city. That was the closest I had to a real life Fallout experience until I pressed play on episode one of the Fallout TV show.
From the opening moments of the Fallout show until the jaw-dropping finale, you are fully transported to the world you know and love from the games. As someone who has spent uncountable hours of their life playing these games, watching multi-hour lore videos, and spending too much time looking into theories around all the events in the world, I can safely say the team that worked on the show nailed what makes Fallout special.
Fallout is weird. It is a series that cannot be put safely into one genre because the stories and world explore so many themes. Some quests in Fallout are to unravel a mystery while others have you scavenging a Super Duper Mart for items but then at other times you’ll get way too deep into the weirdness that is Vault-Tec. What the show does perfectly is allow all of that to exist in one world without feeling too far fetched. The post-bomb world is filled with horrifying monsters and people who want nothing more than everything from your pockets or the skin off your back. The show captures it all so perfectly with a stellar story, characters, and the best set design and props that have ever been made for an adaptation.
Even if you have never picked up a Fallout game, the show is easily accessible for newcomers. It may actually be the best bridge for people who don’t like the gameplay to actually experience why people love this world so much. It rests on the series use of satire, comedy, and other themes to bring in new viewers to a strange new world.
One of the things that always fascinated me about Fallout was the idea of almost unregulated capitalism with the major corporations that existed pre-war. The show actually uses The Ghoul (played by the golden god Walton Goggins), who lived before the wars, to explore more about Vault-Tec. Without giving away anything, I was shocked how well the show balanced giving more insight into what happened to get us to this point while never steering too far away from the main story. There were certain scenes were I had to sit on the edge of my seat as a long time fan because the glimpses into the past were few and far between in the franchise before. The Ghoul often steals the show when the focus is on him but the other two leads pull the spotlight right back to them.
While the Vaults themselves are one of the biggest parts of the universe, the people inside them are even more so. Most games main POV is a Vault Dweller which is a person who has lived underground in a bunker their whole life before being pushed to the surface for one reason or another. This story follows Lucy (played by Ella Purnell) who heads into the wastelands to find her Dad after he is taken by raiders.
We get to see the world with the freshest and most cherub like set of eyes imaginable. Lucy starts her journey with the most innocent and naive mindset on the world because of the safety she has been raised in. People take advantage of it many times through the story so we see how she grows and reacts to the world around her. The wasteland shapes her into something new as it does every player character in the franchise. Having Lucy as the main point of view with the other two leads acting almost as companion characters is an incredible adaptation of the companion system in the game itself.
Lucy spends a good amount of time with The Ghoul in the series and they even do side quests that further his story and our understanding of the character. That is a story telling mechanic pulled right from the game and they even made a very funny comment about being sidetracked. Small things that work well in games don’t often translate well to the big screen but this only made me fall deeper in love with the show.
But the Ghoul is not the only one that gets a turn traveling with Lucy, she also spends time with a member of the Brotherhood of Steel named Maximus (played by Aaron Moten). If you know Fallout, you know what a Brotherhood of Steel Knight looks like in the power armor. When you see it in action, if your jaw doesn’t drop then I don’t know what is wrong with you. It is an iconic piece of video game clothing that strikes the same chords in many people’s hearts as Mario’s mustache or Sonic’s rings may get at. The fact that the armor was a practical thing the actors could touch and interact with blows me away.
With other shows relying so heavily on CGI for something this massive, I have to take a second to just admire the work put in by Howard Cummings (Series Production Design), Regina Graves and Philippa Culpepper (Set Decoration), and Amy Westcott (Costume Design) and anyone else involved with the sets, costumes, and design. Getting to see so much of the detail of a series brought to life is unheard of. There are hundreds of easter eggs laying around every shot that aren’t just there to make nerds like me scream at the tv but to build a world that feels lived in. Fallout is a world after the world we know. Everything is worn and faded with it’s own unique flair that this team has brought to life as if it was already something that existed. I often found myself pausing and rewinding scenes just to admire a costume or something that I know I have picked up in game. It is a testament to practical filmmaking and I applaud it. This team deserves every award imaginable and more that should be made up just to honor them.
Something that all fans of Fallout find themselves coming back to is the classic oldies music that plays on the game’s radios. I promise you if you start singing “Butcher Pete” around many Fallout fans, they will not be able to stop themselves from singing along. Music is so important to the immersion into this world and the show nails it. They use so many of the songs you know and love from the games that fit the show so well. I am not going to spoil it but there is a quirky radio personality, which is also a series staple, that made me smile. Even with the soundtrack being as prevalent as it is, Ramin Djawadi’s score is powerful and atmospheric that helps drive so much of the series. Ramin also uses the incredible themes that were written for the games by Inon Zur. There is one scene where a familiar theme takes front and center that brought tears to my nerdy little eyes.
If you have gotten this far in my review and haven’t been convinced to give the series a chance, I don’t know what is wrong with you. Fallout brings a world I have spent so much of my life living in and now I get to see it come to life with a perfect adaptation. Maybe I am a little biased because Bethesda and Todd Howard helped me escape the real Capital Wasteland all those years ago but Fallout is the future. The themes and stories of Fallout will always be relevant because we all know that war…war never changes.