Fallout is the Worst of Both Worlds

An uneven mix of episodic adventure and prestige drama makes the show a disappointment

Note: This piece assumes you’ve watched Fallout and contains massive spoilers for the ending and other elements

It’s no secret that long-time Fallout fans have a somewhat contentious relationship with Bethesda’s stewardship of the property. Hbomberguy has already made the two definitive videos on this topic if you have a spare three hours, but essentially their games have a tendency towards shallow storytelling and bland gameplay. The former is especially disappointing to those who like the old games (and New Vegas, perhaps the best game ever made), as they are known for their strong themes and engaging stories. And over three installments in the franchise, Bethesda has shown no sign of improving on this front.

That’s why I, like many others, was pretty apprehensive when Amazon announced they would be making a Fallout show. While obviously Bethesda’s writers would not be writing the episodes, they were going to be involved in creating the story. Still, if nothing else, money would be lavished on the project, given Amazon’s tendency to spend truly unreasonable sums on their TV shows for questionable returns. And then the involvement of Jonathan Nolan as producer and director of several episodes added a more prestigious pedigree to the roster. Might one dare to hope…?

Then it came out, and it had a pretty strong opening! Ella Purnell’s wide-eyed optimism and excellent comic timing made the “gee whiz” 50’s aesthetic the series is known for really work. And that, in turn, helped sell the shock of when that bubble is violently popped. While some (including me) might gripe about it ending in the standard Bethesda plot of a vault dweller chasing after a family member with a mysterious past, this was better executed than the examples in Fallout 3 and 4. Perhaps different writers were all they had ever needed?

And yet…

I never fully turned on the show. Ella Purnell and Walton Goggins are wonderful performers, and even when the writing failed they really helped sell their arcs. Their character writing was by far the strongest aspect of the show’s story, with two focused arcs that come together well by the end. The sets and costuming were the main beneficiaries of Amazon’s incredibly bloated budgets, adding a visual fidelity to the look of the game that made for lots of whiz-bang thrills for fans. There are many things to praise about Fallout!

But I think one of the targets of that praise is also the clearest explanation for why the show doesn’t work. Many have noted, and I agree, that the show does an admirable job of recreating the wandering feeling of a Bethesda game. The narrative captures the idea of journeying aimlessly through a blasted wasteland, stumbling across juicy tidbits and plot hooks that send the characters spinning off in new directions. This was especially tricky to pull off considering it was made as a prestige drama with only eight episodes.

Do you see the contradiction there? An amiable wander across the wasteland is a great vehicle for a Fallout show, but it’s an awkward fit at best for a prestige mini-series. It yearns to be a 22-minute show with at least 20 episodes a season, where every episode is a new adventure with maybe a crumb or two of main plot outside of big plot episodes. But instead they’re stuck in the prestige format, and all the drama and limited runtime that entails. I’m sure there are ways to resolve this tension, but the big problem is that they don’t really try.

The show frequently does have what feel like episodic adventures, where the characters do something only tangentially related to their main goal. In particular, the Ghoul and Lucy’s detour to the organ harvesters and Maximus and Lucy’s stay in Vault 4 feel like side quests you might stumble across in a Fallout game. These two plotlines are interesting and well-executed, but you can feel the show creaking around the edges to fit them in. The justification for the Ghoul’s detour feels thin, to the point that he even lampshades it in a way I found grating. And the stretch in Vault 4 leaves little time for the finale, to the point that a lot of questions are left hanging.

And here’s where I think this approach hurts the show the most. The final stretch centers around the pasts of Moldaver and Lucy’s father Hank, both pre-War and after the bombs fell. The emotional turmoil of Lucy realizing what her father has done in a bid for control, both for the world at large and their family in particular, is great. Her reconciliation with the Ghoul in the aftermath of the battle is similarly affecting. But this is all irreparably marred by one major problem: with little time to devote to these revelations, it ends up making no sense at all.

I understand this criticism is even more subjective than criticism is normally, since the show very much has a mystery box approach. What is nonsensical to me may be an intriguing mystery to someone else. And it’s possible that some of these questions will be answered in the future. But even leaving out the ones that seem like they’ll be addressed or have implied answers, I think there’s far too much about the final series of events that don’t add up.

To wit: how did Moldaver end up hundreds of years in the future? Presumably she used the same cryotech Hank used, but how did she get access to proprietary, experimental Vault-Tec tech? Why did she wake up around now? Why was her cold fusion tech, which Vault-Tec had bought and buried, in the possession of the Enclave, which is supposed to be the remnants of the US government? How did Wilzig know where Moldaver is, that she would still be alive now, and that she would want this technology? How, exactly, did Hank manage to nuke Shady Sands? Does he have access to nuclear missiles that Vault-Tec squirreled away? What is Moldaver’s relationship to the New California Republic anyway? Why did those Shady Sands residents seem to worship her in bizarre rituals? What actually happened between Moldaver, Hank, and Lucy’s mom that could possibly make sense with all the information we have now?

What the characters reveal in that final confrontation are definitely the salient points, what you need to know in order to understand the emotional beats that unfold. But the sheer volume of what it leaves unexplained is so large that it is impossible not to wonder about, dramatically lessening the impact of what is happening. It can’t help but feel like a more focused story, that had the time to dole out these reveals over a larger period of time, could have been much more cohesive instead of rushing past the details in a dead sprint to the ending.

But even with all of that, it still could have worked if the ending had totally clicked on an emotional and thematic level. Unfortunately, it doesn’t manage that either. The character arcs are well-realized, but in terms of theme, it leaves a lot to be desired. After all, this is built up as an ideological conflict between the Hanks and Moldavers of the world. The insatiable greed of the capitalist class is made more than clear when we see the culmination of the Ghoul’s flashback storyline, but what about Moldaver?

With her, the ideas the show brings are much more nebulous. Her invention of cold fusion is an abundance that can’t be effectively monetized, and that certainly makes it a threat to the capitalist desire for profit at any cost, but beyond a fuzzy sense of helping people, there’s not much else there. She even specifically declaims communist ideology at one point in the show. That naturally raises the question of what she does believe in, a question the show isn’t interested in answering.

Even her association with the New California Republic muddies this issue. While they are, broadly speaking, one of the more benevolent forces in the series, their major flaw has always been that they seek to rebuild in the image of pre-War America. That means they replicate the problems of modern society too: the NCR is a capitalist society whose government is unduly influenced by rich landowners, often unresponsive to the will of the average citizen, and constantly overextending itself on imperialist adventures. In short, they replicate all the things Moldaver railed against in her speeches. If that’s the case, then why was she apparently such an ardent support and important figure in that government?

All of this adds up to Moldaver not really standing for anything. The critique of capitalist excess may be sharp, but the show finds itself utterly unable to articulate any kind of alternative. That wouldn’t be a problem, except they pretend that they will before revealing that it’s a completely hollow idea of “free energy.” And that means this confrontation doesn’t have any weight to it on that thematic level. For a show that’s trying to be a big prestige drama with big ideas, this is a pretty serious failure.

So what are we left with? A show that’s far too short to be a rambling wasteland adventure, but also too unfocused to have clear thematic throughlines. A show that wants to give its characters lots of moments to percolate, but also wants to power through reams of plot and exposition. A show that wants to be about sweeping themes of corporate greed and capitalism run amok, but is too busy doing other things to find the time to really say anything. In short, a show that tries to be both an episodic journey and a prestige drama, and in doing so fails at both.