In our SECOND Boiled Leather podcast of the day, Stefan and I have an in-depth discussion of Fallout, which is not a thing either of us thought would happen. It’s up now for our Patreon subscribers!

Fallout may be the first show I’ve ever watched that actually benefits from the standard streaming model of a simultaneous full-season release. Watching this show, moving from level to level and world to world, following Lucy and Maximus and the Ghoul and Norm on their side quests, getting those Cooper Howard cut-scene flashbacks: Watching Fallout feels like spending the weekend trying to beat a video game. What do you think? Be the first to comment.

I mean that as a full-on compliment, by the way. Making no effort, and showing no desire, to conceal its roots in an entertainment-first art form, Fallout is that rarest of beasts: a post-apocalyptic romp with a sense of humor too black to be cute about it. In the process provides a real star turn for Ella Purnell in particular, the one lead whose face is on display for all to read at all times and who thus has to carry so much weight on her shoulders. I want Lucy to beat this game, and I’ll be happy to watch her try.

I reviewed the season finale of Fallout for Decider. Fun show!

You know what they say: If you’re in a Vault, and you’re not conducting an experiment, you’re the experiment. That’s the lesson I think Lucy MacLean ought to take from her madcap adventures in the mysterious Vault 4, which come to a surprising conclusion in this, yet another charmingly nasty episode of Fallout. 

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Fallout Season One for Decider.

While far from a perfect episode of television — if I never see that goddamn blue-orange color scheme on a TV screen again it’ll be too soon — this is a very well-structured one. Both Coop in the past and Lucy in the present go through the same slow journey of terrified disillusionment. They’re both realizing that the society that made them the people they are, in which they believe, for which they’ve worked and fought and even killed, is a sick society, not a healthy one. What does that make them? 

I reviewed episode six of Fallout for Decider.

Coming back to video games, I mentioned in a previous review that each episode of Fallout feels like reaching a new level, or unlocking a new area, or launching a new side quest. This, perhaps, is how to adapt video games: Translate their iterative structure into episodic storytelling in the old television tradition, with cliffhangers to keep things going. You know what show did this really well, even though a generation of television that followed seemed determined to learn every wrong lesson they could from it instead? Lost. Not a bad place to be.

I reviewed the fifth episode of Fallout for Decider.

The Ghoul does not 100% work for me as a villain. I find his shock-value tough guy talk, the whole “I’m you, sweetie, you just give it a little time” business, to be the kind of stuff that makes “video game dialogue” an inherently pejorative phrase. I’m not sure what kind of lesson he’s trying to impart.

It was around the time he was calmly, methodically slicing off Lucy’s finger as payback for biting off one of his own that I realized this is the point: He’s not trying to teach Lucy anything. You want to believe he’s trying to toughen her up, shake her out of her naïveté, but you can’t square that with the way he pours his water out right in front of her, or gloats as she guzzles down radioactive animal piss or whatever the hell it is, or chops off her finger and then sells her to organ harvesters, presumably never to see her again. 

He’s just being mean, because he’s a mean person. He’s a villain, as described by his old fully human self in a movie just prior to blowing a bad guy’s head off via “an old Mexican eulogy” about how a person “was ugly, strong, and he had dignity.” Cooper awards the baddie two out of three before putting one through his skull. But now, the Ghoul, too, is nothing more than ugly and strong. His dignity died out long ago, as his senseless cruelty to Lucy demonstrates.

I reviewed episode four of Fallout for Decider.

Ideologically, this episode of a video game adaptation makes some provocative points. That’s probably not a sentence you’d have read until very recently, given the track record of video game adaptations. 

But that’s a historical fluke, not a reflection of limitations in the source material. When I was awakened to the artistic potential of video games in the 1990s first Myst, then Quake, then Super Mario 64, then The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time — I’ve never seen any reason a movie or TV show based on one couldn’t also be thoughtful, beautiful, powerful in its own right. Even if we’re not quite there yet, it’s only a matter of time.

At any rate, Fallout Episode 3 (“The Head”) is, indeed, an interesting political text. It starts early, in a flashback to the Ghoul’s days as horse-opera movie star Cooper Howard. On set one day, Cooper balks at executing a wounded villain in cold blood after a cool monologue. He’s told by the director that the original writer has been fired for being a Commie, that the new script reflects “the power of the individual when the chips are down, the new America,” and that “out here, it’s just you, your gun, and your personal code, bringing order to the Wild Wild West.”

That’s fascism. You get that that’s fascism, right? Persecuted Communists, patriotic übermenschen, the wide world tamed by the master race and the beauty of its weapons: plain old American fascism, ladies and germs! That’s the America that went up in smoke when the bombs dropped: a fascist state in Donna Reed dresses and Ward Cleaver cardigans. That it’s also the America one of our two major political parties is frantically scrambling to recreate…I leave it to you to decide if the filmmakers had that in mind.

I reviewed episode three of Fallout for Decider.

Like Guy Ritchie’s recent Netflix surprise The Gentlemen, this is (so far) good solid genre storytelling in an over-the-top mode. with no pretensions of profundity beyond its welcome, intelligent mean streak. Let’s hope the streak continues.

I reviewed episode 2 of Fallout for Decider.

Let’s get this out of the way right up front: I’ve never played a Fallout game. Other than recognizing its ubiquitous blond-haired mascot man and understanding it takes place after some kind of nuclear apocalypse, I knew nothing about the franchise at all prior to pressing play on the television adaptation’s first episode. 

But co-writers/co-creators Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner, along with director Jonathan Nolan and his creative partner Lisa Joy, got me firmly on Fallout’s side in two easy steps. First, they opened with one of the most frightening nuclear attacks I’ve ever seen in film or television. Second, they made some funny incest jokes.

Seriously! It’s kind of a yin and yang thing. Adapted from the video game series created by Tim Cain, Fallout makes the argument that when it comes to doing a broad sci-fi satire, you can have your cake and eat it, too — you can depict the horrors of the devastation as honestly as possible, and still crack some sick jokes along the way. 

I’m covering Fallout for Decider, starting with my review of the premiere.