I've played most of the Fallout video games, I'm a frequent player of the board game, and so far I've watched both series of the TV show. I didn't become aware of Fallout until Fallout 3 (I did go back and play the first 2 games to find out what I'd missed) but I do consider myself a fan of the franchise. I engaged with the TV show with some hesitation, not because I hold the setting so dear that I feared the show would get it wrong, but because I wasn't sure I needed to see somebody else's story when I was otherwise busy experiencing my own. After 2 series, though, I've come to the conclusion that I like the Fallout TV show. This is my review of the first and second series, with major spoilers.
My short review: If you're a fan of Fallout or of post-apocalyptic fiction or of very good worldbuilding, then you ought to watch the Fallout TV show.
The formula of the Fallout TV show follows the well-established formula of the video games. Our hero starts in a vault, and then leaves the vault to search for lost family.
I love it when self-evident logic turns out to be correct. Somebody at a studio obviously figured that the formula worked for pretty much every video game, so why not for a TV show? Seems obvious, but then again that's what geeks have been saying since the 1980s and studios are only just now catching on. Luckily, Fallout is one more attestation that honouring "geek" fiction results in good geek media.
The Fallout world is surprisingly vast, despite being confined to just a few regions of North America. The show wisely focuses mostly on established lore, showing us the world we've already seen in the games. We explore the interiours of vaults, we see junk towns and wasteland dugouts, industrial complex holdouts, and lots of classic factions. The show doesn't waste time or effort expanding the universe, except in the same way a video game would: Defining a unique vault.
Vault 33 is the "home" vault of the show. In many ways, Vault 33 is the ideal vault. It's not perfect, but it's very much as Vault-Tec advertised. Inhabitants work together in a presidential (well, overseer) democracy. There are minor issues, such as diminishing options for the gene pool, limited career options, and what seems to be almost mandated happiness, but people are working together to keep the vault operational.
Unfortunately, the vault's water chip is failing, and they don't have a replacement. Luckily, vaults 31, 32, and 33 form a triad of inter-connected vaults. This is not common, and as far as we know it's the only set of connected vaults constructed by Vault-Tec. The vaults are meant to function in isolation, but now it seems to be time to exchange resources.
Because the show establishes the culture of Vault 33, and its relationship to Vaults 31 and 32, and because this isn't a video game, there's a steady B-plot about how these vaults survive after our hero leaves for the wasteland.
Lucy MacLean is a central character in the show. At the start of the first series, she's preparing for her wedding, but due to duplicity and subterfuge she ends up marrying a raider in disguise, and ultimately her new husband is killed. During the same violent event, her father is kidnapped, and so Lucy must leave Vault 33 to search for him. Were this one of the video games, we'd be playing Lucy, fresh out of the vault, and wholly unprepared for life in the irradiated wasteland. It's not a video game, so instead we view the world of Fallout at least partly through her eyes.
It's tempting at first to write Lucy off as a consummate and naïve optimist. Her personal philosophy, despite the horrors she witnesses in the wasteland, is that the human condition is improved when people help people. She says plainly to a companion at one point that she believes in the "golden rule": Treat others as you want to be treated by them. But Lucy's true character is deeper than just the token optimist in a dystopian world.
As we come to find out in the final episode of the first series, Lucy's father is one of the primary villains of the world. As a middle manager dedicated to gaining power and status within the Vault-Tec corporation, Hank MacLean was instrumental in engineering a nuclear disaster. Worse still, as we learn in the second series, his wife left him to go to Shady Sands, which was a specific target of an attack presumably by Hank himself. In a flashback sequence, we see him get a notification of the detonation on his Pip-Boy, so I think it's implied that Shady Sands was a particularly personal target. Whatever his motivation for helping to wipe out billions of lives, Lucy was raised by him and the vault society he, as overseer, helps maintain. Lucy is a conditioned character. Everything she believes comes from a carefully engineered educational system and culture. So why does she insist on showing wasteland dwellers kindness and compassion while quoting the "golden rule"? Why isn't she horrible sociopath like the father that raised her?
The relationship between Lucy and her father mirrors, I think, a very particular modern relationship many of us have discovered we have with our parents. During the 1980s and early 1990s, a lot of kids were raised with strictly hopeful and optimistic ideals. A lot of us were taught that we were going to be the generation to end racism, to figure out a way to end starvation around the globe (especially in Africa, according to those TV ads we all had to sit through), overcome a whole variety of addictions, single-handedly conquer the evil empire, and build a future of flying cars and intergalactic federations. When we failed to live up to those expectations by doing something aberrant, like playing D&D or skipping Sunday school or saying something rude, or whatever, we were punished or made to feel bad about ourselves for what we'd done. So to many people who had those life goals, it's awfully confusing now that the same people who instilled those ideals are the same people voting and making policies that are objectively counter to them.
It seems that many parents of the 1980s were teaching their children aspirational values, the values they wanted to have but couldn't find the strength to adopt. It's infamously easier to preach the golden rule than to practise it. Lucy and many of her peers didn't get the corporate training that Hank MacLean and his peers did. Instead, they got the values Vault-Tec wanted in Vault-Tec's eventual utopia for other Vault-Tec people.
Howard Cooper was a former movie star, but post apocalypse he has become an irradiated walking humanoid, known as a ghoul in the Fallout setting. He and Lucy are at first at odds, and then companions by necessity. Their tenuous alliance both serves and is subject to the plot, an overt reference to The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. By the second series, they're literally pulling the same scam as Blondie and Tuco.
Thematically, the significance of their relationship is the contrast between them. Cooper is a middle-aged ghoul with scorched skin and no nose, while Lucy is a young vault-dweller, pristine in her vault jumpsuit. Cooper is a cannibal by necessity (he must eat human flesh, or use chems instead, to survive), and Lucy is definitely not. Cooper has survived out in the wasteland for as long as Lucy has been alive, and he's come to expect the worst of people, and Lucy has come to the wasteland to help people rebuild.
Cooper sums it up succinctly in the first series: "I'm you, sweetie. You just give it a little time." The implication is clear. Lucy will be forced to change her ideals by the harsh realities of the wasteland. She'll have to lose hope, eventually. I don't know whether that's a reference to the plight of a generation of people who were raised thinking it was their calling to change the world, or just commentary on life in general, but it hits close to home.
Cooper is certainly right on some level. Lucy must adapt to her new world, even if only pragmatically. It's anybody's guess as to how much she'll be changed by it, and how much she might benefit from change, and what kind of change. I'm guessing a lot of people ask themselves these same kinds of questions, maybe not in so many words, in real life.
The Fallout TV series isn't perfect, but it's a good show and I don't think it's just for existing Fallout fans. Its story is accessible to any fan of post-apocalyptic settings. The production value is high, too. The visuals are always impeccable. I never doubt that vertibirds (basically ornithopters) and T-45 power armour and radscorpions really exist in the world. Everything's perfectly integrated, the visual worldbuilding is as good as it is in the games. If you're a Fallout fan, you have to see this show just for the satisfaction of seeing all the things from the video games in "real" life. If you're a fan of post-apocalyptic fiction, then Fallout offers an interesting alternate history version of a grim future, with well-established worldbuilding that's developed over decades of video games, and the TV series tells a story of obstinate hope and the constant struggle to improve the human condition.
Images from Fallout 3 owned by Bethesda.