Fallout is something near and dear to my heart, with the original isometric games playing on a small netbook, where the Atom processor would heat up the table if there were more than 4 enemies on the screen at. It sits right next to the memories of “I Love Lucy” re-runs and that hefty Windows 95 laptop. I watched it change from isometric to 3D, as land-lines became a smart phone. I watched as the world around me changed, yet the rate that people can adopt new technology and make aesthetically identifiable technology seems to have stagnated.
This is a show about many things, but it is also a show about a society and a culture that has essentially been permanently rooted in the past. Fallout is the future, as imagined when the cold war turned hot, if we never miniaturized the transistor, if everything were wiped clean in the under glow of atomic fury. What will our technology look like if a pandemic were to decimate the world and our own culture were left to marinate in its own juices for 200 years? Are cat memes a currency? I like to imagine you’d have a stash to trade, just in case.
The show follows in the tradition of finding things and relatives, finding your son, finding your father, finding a water chip, finding your father with the water chip, finding who shot you in the head, finding the chip on the person that shot you in the head, finding someone’s head, finding a chip in someone’s head. I wouldn’t be surprised if Vin Diesel was in the last scene to talk about family, fries (this was lost in translation) and then shoot someone, in the head.
Each scene feels like a nod to parts of the game; it is fantastic. Someone outright says “It really is the most Fallout: New Vegas”, though I also liked the more subtle use of the general props and weapons that that help build the worlds iconic style. Watching someone get shot by a high velocity trash cannon is peak cinema. The world is harsh and death comes easily to the people on the surface, but through it all is the moments of utter mayhem and absurdity that characterize the franchise. Gore seems excessive but apt, given that the action serves as a reminder of a genuine apocalypse, despite the bright colored clothing and whimsy of junk towns that are slightly too clean.
Unfortunately, the show also diverges from the traditional game’s story in a rather unsubtle manner. One of the primary gameplay drivers, in tandem with the rest of the story, is aligning with factions to make the wasteland a better place, purifying water, establishing settlements, helping people, working with or against various governments to some end. Fallout is a game series is about rebuilding and watching communities grow, often as an incidental bystander, sometimes as a major force. It stings when one of the only locations that persists throughout the game series and grows to become a burgeoning civilization gets blown up by a new faction. I suppose that this makes sense, the game saying that “war never changes” also requires that the wasteland itself stay a wasteland, frozen in time for 200 years. While it means little as a minor city in the entirety of the United States, this is a location that I remember since the first Fallout game.
I suppose this is also part of the nature of Fallout. The game series itself can’t exist as a “wasteland frontier” forever no matter how impossible the task of remaking civilization is. The show ends with a McGuffin finally realized – and the possibility of change. Of course, all my critique is wiped clean by the fact that there might be a sequel, so 8/10, nuke Shady Sands again.