‘Fallout’ Puts The “Rad” In “Radiation”

The new hit Amazon show ‘Fallout’ sidesteps the major problem with fiction that takes place in dystopian, post-Armageddon society. Too often, they’re a huge fucking drag. That means you The Last of Us, and you over there wandering, The Road, and even you, Silo. All of ya, including Station Eleven. Why so glum, when ‘Fallout’ is so much fun?

Obviously, to even flirt with the idea of the end of the world, nuclear war-caused or not, is to confront the potential mortality of the entire human race and to try to imagine ways to avoid that path. Because if we’re being realistic, there is probably no post-Armageddon world worth living in. Just The End.

Which is why Fallout is such a welcome surprise. It’s an action-adventure show that’s also trying to be a satire while spinning the plates on stories of three distinct Los Angeles survivors 200 years after a nuclear war. And it’s adapted from a long-running series of videogames. What a recipe for disaster, right?

But by the end of its first season (a second was apparently greenlit before the show even aired), Fallout proves much smarter than it looks. And how it looks, at first glance, is like a big-budget, dumb and violent B-show with no regards to science or reality. It’s got characters living for hundreds of years, irradiated ghouls using human teeth as bullets, and… uh, cold fusion to solve any global energy crisis. But not every big, dumb oaf is what it seems. In the hands of the former showrunners of Westworld, Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, Fallout becomes more than the sum of its parts, building on the cleverest parts of more than 20 years of digital canon and somehow integrating itself into that timeline while avoiding the over-cerebral muck of their previous show.

For those who don’t know the games: Fallout takes place in an alternate retro-futuristic United States with a distinct 1950s Cold War vibe melded to technological advances like levitating medical robots and advanced underground bunkers called “Vaults” where nuclear war survivors are supposed to survive a war and repopulate the planet once the radiation coast is clear.

The Fallout games have always had a subversive sense of humor, injecting levity and over-the-top obstacles and violence into the narrative. That humor survives the transition to the screen with vault dwellers operating in a weird, too-chipper system not unlike the office workers from Severance. Aboveground, residents in the blasted terrain include desperate cannibals, mutants and traumatized humans who buy things with soda bottle caps and who can survive indefinitely with the right kinds of anti-radiation and stimulant drugs.

Enter Lucy (Ella Purnell from Yellowjackets, perfect here), a citizen of Vault 33 whose father (Kyle MacLachlan) is kidnapped by violent raiders, braves the surface to get him back and meets an assortment of friends and foes. They include Maxiumus, a squire in training for a mech-robot worshipping clan called The Brotherhood of Steel, and The Ghoul, a noseless, ageless western-drawlin’ desperado played by Walton Goggins. The three keep crossing paths and working with and against each other on their way to find the kidnapper, a woman named Moldaver (Sarita Choudhury).

After the first few episodes, we’ve learned The Ghoul’s Hollywood backstory, some of the secrets of the vaults, and that this show is not going to settle on being a straight action-comedy or a prestige drama. At one moment it’s a silly special-effects showcase featuring an irradiated bear fighting a cowardly mecha-soldier, the next moment it’s a family melodrama as Lucy figures out all the lies people have told her since birth. Then it still manages to function, albeit with little nuance, as an indictment on corporate culture and the industrial military complex through a series of flashbacks. It’s a show that manages a brisk pace while also digressing for the occasional absurd side quest, like any good role-playing game.

None of it would work if the three leads didn’t balance the tricky tone changes of all these threads. Purnell’s character goes from plucky and naïve to hardened and mature, but doesn’t suddenly become a heartless badass like you’d expect. Aaron Moten’s performance starts off shaky but develops into something more complex and interesting once he meets Lucy. And Goggins conducts a master class playing both pre-war and post-war versions of the same character, a Hollywood actor caught up in forces much bigger than himself and his family. 

Crucially, the show takes its characters more seriously than it takes its premise or its fidelity to realism. Fallout populates its world with ace character actors including Chris Parnell, Fred Armisen and the great Matt Berry from What We Do in the Shadows executing note-perfect cameos. The needle drops, though excessive, capture the retro mood with songs from Perry Como, The Ink Spots and Johnny Cash. 

And the show looks glorious. It never feels confined to its vault locations, with expansive outdoor shots, big CGI money shots of nuclear destruction, and an almost obsessive attention to detail in the production design that never calls too much attention to itself. There are dozens of references to the games in the background signs and billboards, the origin story of its “Vault Boy” mascot, and even a movie poster for “A Man and His Dog,” which in just a few seconds manages to serve as a prophesy for the character standing in front of it as well as an allusion to the classic Harlan Ellison story “A Boy and His Dog,” a story that also took place after a nuclear holocaust. 

There’s lots of reasons Fallout shouldn’t work, and after an episode or two, it might appear to some viewers to be too ridiculous to succeed. But this first season as a whole proves wildly entertaining with lots of potential for more story. Against all odds, Fallout’s a survivor.