Yet another post-apocalyptic living-dead saga; or is it another dystopian, underground civilisation story, with the authorities concealing the truth from the citizens about the world above? Well, both. Sort of. Also funny. Amazon Prime adapts the successful video game series Fallout, and successfully, as it turns out. With no prior awareness of the video game franchise (and I mean no awareness) I have a lot to catch up on—but the tone and world-building develop right away.
It starts in a 1950s California backyard, at a rich kid’s birthday party. An old- Hollywood cowboy provides themed stunts on his horse for the
kids, while behind him a mushroom cloud blooms. ‘If it’s smaller than your thumb, run for the bunkers,’ he tells his daughter. ‘If it’s bigger, don’t bother.’ This one is bigger—much, and followed by a series of closer explosions. The rich folks run for their bunkers anyway and the cowboy Cooper Howard (Walton Goggins) sweeps his daughter into the saddle and rides for the hills. The next time we see Cooper he emerges from a grave, still wearing a cowboy hat, but missing his nose.
Flash forward two hundred years and the 1950s haven’t ended; they’ve just gone underground, where a futuristic society operates on community effort and a can-do attitude. And a bit of incest. ‘It’s OK to fool around with your cousins before marriage,’ says young Lucy MacLean to her love-struck relation, “but after, not a good idea”. Lucy is a ‘Vault-dweller’, a descendant of the privileged few who survived the blast intact, noses and all. When she embarks on a mission to the surface to rescue her captive father, the folks above ground spot her breed a mile away: “Clean hair, nice teeth and all ten fingers,” says a grizzled old shopkeeper. “Must be nice.”
Lucy’s father has been captured by the legendary military leader Moldaver (played by Sarita Choudhury) and she risks everything by leaving her underground paradise to find him. Brave and plucky as she is, she’s not prepared for the grimness of life on the surface. Early on, Lucy
comes across a spectacled man and his attack dog in the dark wastes of former Santa Monica. The dog saves her from a cockroach grown to the
size of a house cat. They’ve grown incisors too, and you can imagine what they use them for. The spectacled man is ‘The Target’, sought by three
different entities, ‘The Enclave’ laboratory which he fled, a metal-suited military unit called ‘The Brotherhood of Steel’ and the mutant cowboy
bounty hunter formerly known as Cooper Howard. ‘The Target’ played by Michael Emerson, the creepy scientist from Lost, plays a creepy scientist
here too. He works at ‘The Enclave’, some kind of horror lab where they breed perfect dogs and put puppies who are too small in incinerators. It’s
not yet clear what ‘The Enclave’ is for, but we know it manufactures cyanide and its walls are guarded by robots with machine guns, bearing signs that say ‘Please Remain Calm’ while they gun you down.
The stand-out factor of Fallout is its cheery Stepford Wives tone, which carries on amid all the horror and bloodshed of a Wild West apocalypse. The endless and incongruous positivity is fuelled by Lucy (Ella Purnell), who stands up to the gun-wielding mutant by politely asking him
to stop killing people. Ella Purnell has limited range and facial expressions: mostly we get a raised eyebrow of concern and enormous cutesy Disney
eyes, but as the series goes on I wonder if there’s more to it; if Lucy’s placid Barbie persona is ingrained by the perfect society she grew up in,
one which will be shattered by ‘real life’.
Lucy’s other annoying attribute is her seeming invincibility in the face of mortal danger. In the first episode (spoilers) she takes a knife in the abdomen while wearing her wedding dress, and then calmly goes to the bathroom to freshen up and take some painkillers. Days later she appears to have no wound at all. Perhaps that’s also part of the show’s sophisticated subversion of several genres. This tough old world hasn’t turned her into a Lara Croft, jaded and bloodied by constant combat. She’s actually averse to violence and is very nice to everyone,
including mutant ghoul cowboys with guns. Either way, I’m impressed that I can’t quite tell.
The other naïve, optimistic youngster is Maximus (Aaron Moten), an aspiring Knight of the Brotherhood of Steel who holds sway over the
wastelands that were once Los Angeles. Maximus is really a geek who knows everything about the ‘T-60s’, the Iron Man suits the knights wear.
Maximus really wants to try one on and, after his knight overlord dies battling a rabid mutant grizzly bear, Maximus gets his chance. Later he
runs into Lucy on his way to collect ‘The Target’ and their eyes twinkle. He’s polite as well, so that ticks Lucy’s box. Handsome, dull Maximus and
cutesy, plucky Lucy seem designed to be easy on the eye and not too taxing on the brain. But I’m open to persuasion. I’m more interested in
Cooper Howard, ‘The Ghoul’ bounty hunter, and finding out what he’s after. ‘The Target’ seems important to him for some reason—not his whole
body though, just his head. Before he left ‘The Enclave’, ‘The Target’ injected a microchip into the skin behind his ear, which may be what the
bounty hunter and the Brotherhood are searching for.
Fallout is impressive for a show adapted from a video game but that’s no longer a contradiction. Video game graphics andstorylines have become so sophisticated and well-realised that many are like TV shows already, only with extended footage and role-play thrown in. Studios brave enough to adapt them may face the fury of jilted fans, but I bet a significant number of the Fallout audience have never held a PlayStation controller. Many mainstream Amazon viewers will find lots to enjoy in Fallout, if they can get past the puppy incinerators.