Weekend Plans Post: Exploring Fallout (the Show, I Mean)

At the behest of many folks, I finally sighed and jumped into watching Amazon’s new Fallout show.

I quickly found myself confused. “This is… this is actually good?”, I found myself saying multiple times.

I went into it as someone who has beaten the original Wasteland game, and then played Fallout seeing it as a spiritual sequel, and then played Fallout 2… and then couldn’t believe that they made a Fallout 3, and New Vegas, and then 4. So I went into watching the show thinking “they’ll screw it up”.

And… they didn’t screw it up? The show has a *LOT* of Fallout in it. You start out just before the bombs drop and you learn why Vault Boy is doing the Thumbs Up sign. (I didn’t know that the Thumbs Up needed a backstory but they gave it one and, believe it or not, they gave it a *GOOD* one.)

After that we get the opening credits and we find ourselves in Vault 33 where we meet our main Protagonist, Lucy. Remember the floaty girl in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children? She’s the main protagonist! And, holy cow, her eyes have gotten even bigger since then. We meet our secondary Protagonist, a young aspirant for The Brotherhood of Steel, and we meet Cooper, a ghoul bounty hunter who is very good at making caps.

I’m only 4 episodes in (halfway) because I’m watching it with Maribou on our date nights but… Jeez Louise, it’s something I’m pretty sure that I can wholeheartedly recommend to most people, even those who never played any of the games. But the people who had played the games before won’t need this caveat but the people who never had will need it:

The show is really violent.

Now, back in the 80’s, Wasteland was notable because it came with a warning that it had Explicit Violence. Now, you may wonder, “Didn’t Wasteland come out in 1988?” Yes. Yes, it did. “How violent could it possibly have been?” Well, it’s more that it gave really explicit descriptions of the violence in the game. If you did more than a certain number of points in damage beyond what was needed to kill this or that monster, the game described the combat death pretty dramatically with something like “the gila monster explodes like a blood sausage” or “the marauder turns into a fine red mist”.

It may seem quaint in the current year, but, seriously, for the kids playing Wasteland in 9th Grade? They thought that this was downright *SCANDALOUS*.

Well, years later, when Fallout came out, it included graphic violence for particularly gruesome deaths (though, granted, this was in pixels about the same height on your monitor as a dime). It wasn’t until Fallout 3 that we finally got a video game that showed us the mixture of horror and comedy that a post-apocalyptic game was truly capable of (among other things, you can explode your enemies like… well, like a blood sausage).

And the show includes deaths that copy, almost exactly, some of the deaths you’ve seen in Fallout 3 and New Vegas and Fallout 4. Explosions, dismemberments, and even harm to animals. It’s certainly not for the faint of heart… but, if you are someone who has switched from seeing 80’s movies like “The Running Man” as kitsch rather than “horribly violent” then the show is probably in your wheelhouse. I’d say that Total Recall was worse. Granted, there’s a *LOT* of body horror… but it’s played for laughs. Or, at least, as a way to defuse tension. Or resolve a conflict.

The story is played with a fairly tight focus on the characters we’re given so if this or that protagonist doesn’t know a thing, then *YOU*, the viewer, also don’t know it. So there are characters who show up and tell us that they know a *LOT* about the world and about the workings of what is going on and then they go on to *NOT ENLIGHTEN THE VIEWER*. So far, that’s done a good job of walking the tightrope between “annoying” and “engaging”. I want to see what they’re going to tell me next episode… and, if you’re only halfway through the series, that’s as it should be.

It’s a surprisingly good video game adaptation insofar as it not only has red meat for the folks who enjoy the games, but it also gets the spices right. You walk into a vault and it *FEELS* like a vault. You walk into a ghost town and it feels like one of the many ghost towns you visited in Fallout 3. You see the power armor just like in the game. You see the Blamco Mac & Cheese just like in the game. You see ghouls just like in the game. You see the little outfits and tchotchkes and weapons and, yes, enemies exploding like blood sausages just like you’re used to.

And, on top of that, THE WRITING IS GOOD. I have said “that’s a really good line…” multiple times *PER EPISODE*. They put effort into the sets, they put effort into the dialog, they put effort into the casting…

I’m shocked. It’s good. Check it out (unless, of course, you really want to avoid stuff exploding… there’s a lot of stuff exploding).

And, Sunday Night, I’m going to check out Episode 5.

So… what’s on your docket?

(Featured image is promotional art from the show.)