Fallout Season 1: Binge, Fringe, or Singe?
Written by Andreas Babiolakis
Binge, Fringe, or Singe? is our television series that will cover the latest seasons, miniseries, and more. Binge is our recommendation to marathon the reviewed season. Fringe means it won’t be everyone’s favourite show, but is worth a try (maybe there are issues with it). Singe means to avoid the reviewed series at all costs.
Remember when it felt impossible to have a good adaptation of a video game property to either film or television? It really wasn’t that long ago when it felt impossible to think of one — just one — worthwhile adaptation that didn’t bring your blood to a boil, your patience to its limit, or your brain cell count to zero. This reality was only five years ago, not even a full decade. There wasn’t an adaptation worth a damn (don’t even get me started on the plethora of times that hack Uwe Boll tried and made this claim only even more certain). A lot has changed since then, as we slowly ramped up the quality from the mediocre — Sonic the Hedgehog — and the fun-yet-sloppy — Pokémon: Detective Pikachu — to the works that were actually great to excellent (Arcane and The Last of Us). It no longer feels like a miracle for a film or series to adapt a video game properly, but that doesn’t mean that every attempt has gone well ever since. A lot was riding on the Fallout Amazon series that has been promoted for months and what creators Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet would bring to the blossoming genre of video game films and/or series. Would they be able to uphold the expectations surrounding this recent trend, and what comes from one of the most beloved video game franchises of all time?
Fallout is a franchise by developer Tim Cain and designer Leonard Boyarsky for Interplay Entertainment which goes all the way back to 1997; perhaps the turn of the new millennium had many wondering about the fate of humanity and the state of the planet. These RPG games place you in a post-apocalyptic wasteland that is trapped in the mindset of 1950s America as if to say that the Cold War era didn’t go well whatsoever. There’s far more going on than just the war side of things with this world-building in Fallout, as the usage of the fifties lends much context to work with, including a fixation on the American Dream and capitalism, shifting perceptions on roles and responsibilities, societal collapse and reconstruction, and so much more. With numerous acclaimed titles under its belt, including the third instalment and New Vegas, Fallout has had a growing audience for decades, thanks to its addicting gameplay, countless side quests (which add to the details of the thorough universal structure here), retrofuturistic style, and tongue-in-cheek nature. Each title has its own fully realized story within the same universe (although different games take place in different centuries, so you get the maximum coverage of how strained — yet advanced — civilization has become post nuclear fallout). This final note is what has become the most beneficial reason why a Fallout television series can exist. It doesn’t need to be tethered to certain characters and plot points. A series can just exist with the same rules and ideas of the Fallout games but exist entirely as its own concept.
That’s precisely what the first season of Amazon’s Fallout has accomplished: a faithful tribute to a franchise that has a legion of fans of all ages and walks of life while creating a fresh-enough story to make it matter on its own. While I prefer HBO’s answer to Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us, a major problem others had was that the series either veered away too far or focused too heavily on the goings-on in the narrative-heavy video game and these kinds of unrealistic, biased expectations — in my opinion — have no place when it comes to analyzing adaptations; this is its own project and deserves to be judged as is, not via your own obsessions or vitriol to source materials. Either way, that hardly matters with Fallout, and you can see that the series — whose eight episodes have been released on the same day for those who felt the need to binge watch — has already amassed a huge response without these kinds of complaints. Not only was this a clever approach, but perhaps Fallout was a clever franchise to tackle as opposed to the releases that would appear to be “easier” to adapt (if a game or series has a fully crafted story with key characters in a cinematic or literary way, perhaps the translation to visual media isn’t as seamless as we once thought, as opposed to properties that encourage showrunners and filmmakers to create their own answer to their anthological or widely open natures).
Amazon’s adaptation of Fallout is faithful, creative, compelling, and, ideally, fun.
What do we get — in a nutshell — with this series? Three key storylines which detail the different perspectives one would have in a Fallout game. The first sequence we see is the day that the bombs rained on the world through the eyes of actor Cooper Howard (Walton Goggins) who narrowly survives the apocalypse as a mutated ghoul (hence his new identity’s name) over two centuries later; the Ghoul now functions as a bounty hunter who embodies the spirit of the lone ranger of the wild west. Underground — in underground bunker Vault 33 — we have Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell) who is initially depicted as a stay-at-home wife-to-be, gifted off for marriage in the first episode “The End”, and finding herself in a rather prickly situation; her suitor is one of many raiders sent to infiltrate her community’s vault, and her father, Hank (Kyle MacLachlan), who oversees Vault 33, has been kidnapped. Lucy vows to go above ground to the ruins above to find her father and help save Vault 33 from further destruction. While we are back above ground, we will cut to the third storyline through the gaze of Maximus (Aaron Moten): a recently promoted squire of the Brotherhood of Steel (a powerful military organization that seeks answers and technological advancements) who is discovering his own secrets of corruption.
As these three different lives intersect — that of someone who lived before the fallout, of someone who grew up in a vault underground, and of someone who had to tough it out above ground — Fallout does a great job of covering all of its expansive bases in comprehensive ways. This is a large universe, but it never feels that way. If anything, it appears dialled down and personal. Perhaps our own current concerns for the state of the world have done some of the necessary legwork that a show like Fallout requires; no longer do projects surrounding the dread of the end of civilization need to set up the reasons why humanity crumbles, I suppose. Despite the ongoing fear of apocalypse that comes with the territory and these uncertain times, Fallout is also something that isn’t essential for video game adaptations but makes perfect sense for these kinds of properties given their source materials: Fallout is flat-out fun. Whether it is making bleak jokes amidst over-the-top violence or adversity, or making all characters likeable despite the tensions and deceptions, Fallout is quite a treat through and through. Even though self-awareness would allow for the possibility of going overboard with silliness or cheekiness, Fallout doesn’t overstay its welcome in this way either. It toes the line between severity and good old-fashioned thrills and gags nicely (in a way that doesn’t feel entirely reminiscent of the blueprint Marvel has beaten like a horse that has died, reincarnated, and died again under the same whip and spurs).
While I also think that the series has even more ground to cover and the potential for larger storylines and ideas, this is clearly a preliminary season that is getting us familiar with what is going on. I can tell that there is a larger endgame at stake here because of how quickly Fallout gallops towards stronger quality writing and payoffs in a mere eight-episode run (even so, it starts off with enough of a bang that you’ll want to keep watching episodes even with those idiotic ads that a corporation juggernaut like Amazon feels compelled to slap in between episodes now). I won’t gripe that all eight episodes were released at once and there’s nothing to look forward to until Season 2, because I was the idiot who couldn’t stop eating the cookies and now wants more. Having said that, it will feel like a long wait to see what transpires next regarding this series, because I sincerely think that this is only the tip of the iceberg with what we’ll have in store with Fallout: a new piece of evidence that we have finally figured out how to make video game source materials applicable to screens big and small.
Andreas Babiolakis has a Masters degree in Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management from Ryerson University, as well as a Bachelors degree in Cinema Studies from York University. His favourite times of year are the Criterion Collection flash sales and the annual Toronto International Film Festival.