Amazon's "Fallout" Includes a Surprisingly Gutsy Take
What if I told you that war was driven by financial interests?
Amazon’s new Fallout series has a number of issues, but overall it’s pretty fun and not a bad adaptation of the popular video game franchise. I was pretty surprised, however, to see it included some seriously on-point criticism of the current jingoistic tendencies in our society. I hadn´t expected this from what I thought was a light-hearted entertainment product that didn’t take itself too seriously.
Amazon’s Fallout is Hollywood’s take on the popular video game franchise of the same name. The main character, as in the video games, is a vault dweller — someone who grew up in a huge underground bomb shelter and is entering the nuclear wasteland of the surface for the first time. Fallout is set in an alternate history future that diverged from our reality after World War II. After entering an extended era of a prosperous atomic age in the ‘50s, the US finally goes to war with Communist China over dwindling planetary resources and, in 2077, the world is destroyed in a brief nuclear exchange that kills most of humanity.
In the series, a vault dweller named Lucy leaves her bomb shelter in search of her father who has been captured by raiders (a very familiar plot to anyone who's played the video games). On the way, she meets a Brotherhood of Steel squire who’s killed the knight he was assigned to for his immensely powerful suit of armour and a ghoul bounty hunter who used to be a major film star before the bombs dropped and the world ended.
The Usual Bad Writing You’d Expect from Modern Hollywood
Fallout has some of the typical problems most modern TV shows are plagued with. One of the issues is that its writers, like most of Hollywood these days, keep tossing member berries1 into the plot to give viewers familiar with the games some cheap nostalgia endorphin kicks and justify the fact that they didn’t think up their own characters, stories and worlds and so have to rehash other people’s creativity. This often creates issues, as it does here, as these plot points are often wasted on cheap audience reactions and promptly forgotten, which often makes for plot holes and story inconsistencies.
Another issue is the obligatory woke bullshit. In Fallout’s case, the writers introduce a non-binary gender character in the place where this character would be least likely to exist: The Brotherhood of Steel. The Brotherhood is basically an order of medieval warrior monks that is hell-bent on amassing powerful technology to rule the wasteland. Traditionally an organisation dominated by testosterone, it has barbaric customs and treats especially its initiates very cruelly.
It is not inconceivable that an organisation like this would take on people with female genitalia. There are several precedents for this in the games, in fact. But it is pretty dumb to think that the people in charge would care about that person’s pronouns. We’re talking about a world where murder, rape and cannibalism is a daily fact of life. I’m not saying you wouldn´t have non-binary or transgender characters in this world. But with all the whack jobs walking around, nobody would fucking care what you wanted your pronouns to be. You’d probably be way too busy not getting murdered or maimed by mutants to care yourself. This is a world where getting enough clean water to survive the day is an almost an insurmountable obstacle. Who the fuck had the silly idea that a religious fundamental organisation in such a world would care about pronouns?2
The series has other problems, mostly to do with shoddy writing that fails to sell its world — the main characters constantly running into each other as if everything was set in a single neighbourhood, people travelling unrealistic distances way too quickly and so on. And there’s also a problem with cheap-looking sets and props clashing with real-world locations, but most of this I can overlook in favour of enjoying the show. And I’d really like to give it the benefit of the doubt, because it also does something that’s surprisingly courageous.
Some Timely Social Criticism
In the final episode of the show’s first season, we see a meeting between representatives from Vault-Tec and other iconic Fallout companies like RobCo, West Tek and Repconn — all of them are more or less defence contractors; the heart of the military-industrial complex. In the meeting, Vault-Tec (a company that spent billions on building huge underground nuclear fallout shelters) tries to convince the other companies to invest in their vault projects. During this meeting it is heavily implied that Vault-Tec is approaching bankruptcy and that peace talks between the US government and the Chinese are threatening to derail the nuclear apocalypse that the company has invested so much money in. The Vault-Tec representatives suggest that these peace talks need to be ended and that, if push comes to shove, Vault-Tec will make sure the US fires its nukes first to start World War III in order to bring about nuclear devastation of the planet.
It is revealed that Vault-Tec’s plan at this point is to make the apocalypse happen, retreat to their vaults and then repopulate the US, having secured the ultimate capitalist victory of eliminating all competition in one single stroke. The Fallout games had often hinted at Vault-Tec having an obvious vested interest in the Great War kicking off, but never went this far with the idea. I salute the writers of this series of actually going there. Especially at this point in time, where Fallout’s post-apocalyptic vision for the future is more real than ever before.
Companies pushing a war agenda to make money, bringing the world to the brink of the very real possibility of nuclear war? Kinda reminds me of the current situation in Ukraine. I can’t believe including this in the show was an accident. As surprised as I am to see such a perspective coming from a Hollywood production these days, as happy I am about it. It seems the fear of nuclear devastation trumps the woke mind virus. Finally someone using a story to push some common sense instead of government or corporate propaganda!
Because as it turns out, war never changes.
The term “member berries” is a reference to a famous South Park episode. What people mean by this when criticising modern TV shows is the tendency of writers to bring up ideas, props or plot points from earlier material in an effort to give their remakes or spinoffs legitimacy with the fan base.
And yes, I am aware that there are precedents for this in Fallout 76. But I’m not sure that looking to the by far the worst game in the series for inspiration is a good idea at all. Releasing Fallout 76 at all was a big mistake by Bethesda, since the vision of the world of the previous games just isn’t compatible with an MMORPG-style, multiplayer-online game. It simply doesn’t feel like Fallout at all.