Hogan Reviews

After some good film efforts and an outstanding TV series in The Last of Us game adaptations are suddenly and frankly finally on the upswing and Fallout doesn’t do anything to stop the momentum, in fact it carries it forward showing that you can have an adaptation that’s amazingly faithful to the source material and have it be approachable to those completely unfamiliar with it. As one of “those” Fallout fans who got into the series thanks to Bethesda’s Fallout 3 and onwards I was constantly stunned at the level of detail the series had in recreating not just the look but the feel and storytelling of the games, as well as its comical over-violence. Basically, I loved the show, not just as a faithful adaptation but just as a great show in general! Let’s take a look.

The series has a trio of core characters it focuses on: Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell), a Vault Dweller and very much the protagonist if we’re going by the games, Cooper Howard (Walton Goggins), a former movie star turned Ghoul who now works as a bounty hunter, and Maximus (Aaron Moten), a Squire in the Brotherhood of Steel. These three completely different perspectives of peaceful vault life, pre-war life turned into 200 years of wasteland survival, and just wasteland survival leading to harsh military life are at odds with each other and yet as each cross paths they work to build off each other really well. To look at the overall story let’s first focus on Lucy, who like all good Vault Dweller protagonists leaves the safety of her vault when her father, Hank MacLean (Kyle MacLachlan), goes missing on the surface, in this case due to a Raider invasion of her vault led by a mysterious woman called Moldaver (Sarita Choudhury) leading to Hank being kidnapped.

Lucy in one of her first “this wasteland isn’t very nice” moments.

Lucy first meets a defector of the mysterious (or not if you’ve played the games!) organisation known as the Enclave called Dr. Wilzig (Michael Emerson) and his dog Dogmeat, which is a Fallout staple if you’re unfamiliar, and she eventually finds out that Moldaver has hired a courier to deliver him to her, so she begins to help him. During this initial trial she is exposed to the harshness of the Wasteland, still having the cheery 50’s can-do attitude of helping everyone out that her vault instilled in her. In a makeshift town Lucy is nearly killed by Cooper, or “The Ghoul” as he tends to be referred to as (despite there being many ghouls still around…) as he too wants the prize on Wilzig’s head, but he’s stopped by Maximus, who is also after Wilzig on behalf of the Brotherhood. More on those later, but the Doctor is injured in the shootout and eventually realises he can’t make it, so instructs Lucy to remove his head after he dies as the thing everyone wants is inside it. Despite everything she agrees and so begins a long string of “pass the head” as it switches between the three leads and other side characters. She eventually gets kidnapped by The Ghoul, escapes and meets Maximus again, then the two hit it off while they find themselves in Vault 4 and find out more about Maximus’ birthplace, the settlement known as Shady Sands that was mysteriously destroyed (some great game lore there, even if the dates were wrong, but you know, it is post-apocalypse, it’s unlikely everyone kept the dates correct over 200 years…) They then split up as Lucy finally arrives at Moldaver’s place with the head. It’s classic “the hero gets hardened over time” storytelling, and Ella Purnell nails it.

Cooper, in far … FAR from his first “this wasteland isn’t very nice” moment.

Cooper Howard / The Ghoul on the other hand we see as much if not more of his life pre-apocalypse than we do post. He was a famous actor known for his Westerns whose wife worked for Vault Tech, and due to that he did a series of adverts promoting the Vaults as the safest way to ensure your family’s safety “should the worse happen”. The only issue is that people, especially in Hollywood, were starting to find out about some of Vault Tech’s less morally agreeable areas and eventually Cooper is convinced to put a tracker on his wife’s Pipboy (like a giant watch/computer thing, again for the uninitiated) and there he hears of the company’s willingness to hand over their vaults to other companies to have a bit of a play around with, perform experiments and all the horrible things we (as least those of us who have played the games) know the vaults got up to. Plus she implies Vault Tech wouldn’t be opposed to dropping the bombs themselves so their chosen few can inherit the Earth once the wasteland is clear, though I don’t honest believe they did, that would be WAY too much of a change in lore and wouldn’t really make sense as the only thing driving her was her want to make a better world for her daughter, who was out in the open when the bombs dropped, so… yeah. Anyway, Cooper survived the bombs going off but became a Ghoul via radiation and has been travelling on the wasteland ever since. His non-flashback role is pretty simple, he’s after the head and comes across Lucy a couple of times as well as a few other side characters before arriving at the final showdown. As a classic old-West gunslinger type though he works well, and the Ghoul makeup is great.

Yes, the mutated wildlife are also featured in the story! Wouldn’t be very Fallout-y if they weren’t!

Maximus then is our third lead and he survived the destruction of Shady Sands and saw a Brotherhood of Steel knight, complete with Power Armour, afterwards so enlisted with them. Sadly he’s not really cut out for the life, he’s constantly picked on and beaten up and the like, though he does seem dedicated, eventually getting to be a Squire for a knight called Titus, though Titus is a complete bastard and a coward who Maximus lets die and then steals his Power Armour, so… maybe not 100% dedicated. He believes getting the head (or the man until he finds out its just a head) will clear him of wrong-doing, and even acts as Titus and gets a “new Squire” in Thaddeus (Johnny Pemberton) who was one of the people who picked on him, allowing him to get some sweet revenge. The two eventually fight though and Thaddeus takes not only the head but Maximus’ armour’s power core, making it useless and trapping him, he’s only saved by a coincidentally passing-by Lucy, who he’d met briefly in the makeshift town I mentioned earlier. As I said in Lucy’s description they meet up and travel for a bit, but soon Maximus is recaptured by the Brotherhood and set to be executed but he manages to get a stay of execution when he reveals he knows where the head is…

There are obviously plenty of other characters walking around. Lucy’s brother Norm (Moisés Arias) gets a whole story where he looks into his vault’s shady antics as it is one of three connected Vaults but Vault 31 is steeped in mystery. The high council of Lucy’s vault get plenty of appearances, as do her friends Chet (Dave Register) and Stephanie (Annabel O’Hagan) who end up in a relationship, though one that is rather one-sided. I also want to mention Matt Berry, who’s super distinctive voice is used for the Mr. Handy series of robots in the show (including a fun side-step story appearance as an organ-harvesting robot called “Snip Snip”), as well as an appearance in person during one of the flashbacks. Always great to see him on TV! So plenty of fun characters, a great plot and lots of fun scenery, action and nods to the game series. I was more than happy and I was genuinely excited to watch each episode.

Overall Thoughts:

“Wait, so this is a post-post Apocalypse?” “Well, this part of the country is, anyway. Yeah.”

Fallout was a triumph of not just how you adapt a game series for live action (without even remaking it, this is a fresh story within the game’s continuity!) but just how to make a fun, unique, often comically violent sci-fi series. Very little to dislike, and completely approachable even if you’ve never held a controller in you hand (or a mouse and keyboard, I guess…?)

As Lucy arrives at Moldaver’s place we actually see that the kidnapper was alive back in Cooper’s time and actually tried to warn him about his wife’s actions and Vault Tech in general, and that leads into the big reveal as she eats her meal with Lucy’s father caged up behind him and a feral ghoul chained up in front of her. Moldaver reveals that each Vault has a secret and the trio of vaults she belongs to is a big one as Vault 31 is actually full of cryo-tubes and the Vault Tech top-brass froze themselves in order to takeover the new world when enough time had passed (as this is happening Norm also finds this out, for the record) and Lucy’s father Hank was one of them. Not only that but when Lucy’s mother left the Vault and began living in Shady Sands it was Hank who set off the bomb that wiped out the whole settlement and turned his wife in the feral Ghoul that now sat at the table. As she digests this news Moldaver extracts a special cold fusion chip that was in the head this whole time and activates a computer that return electricity to the surrounding buildings before Maximus leads the Brotherhood of Steel to her door.

I just realised I didn’t actually mention Moldaver’s crew are former NCR members, for that extra bit of game lore. Oh well, I have now! Here are some fighting the Brotherhood of Steel. Hooray!

As the fight begins between the Brotherhood and Moldaver’s crew Maximus arrives and frees Lucy’s Dad, not knowing he’s actually bad, and then while letting his guard down Hank steals his Power Armour and knocks him unconscious. Just then though The Ghoul arrives, shooting Hank across the cheek and then demanding he tell him “where his family is”, which is a fun plot point. The older MacLean manages to escape though, but this was intentional as Cooper wants to follow him, presumably back to where he can find his family, and Lucy joins him as she wants to settle things with her own Dad, though she shoots the Ghoul that was once her mother properly dead before leaving. Moldaver is mortally wounded and dies holding the hand of Lucy’s mother, Maximus is heralded a hero after being mistaken for the one who killed her and found the cold fusion tech, and Hank arrives on the outskirts of New Vegas to tease Season 2 (and make fans of the games freak out!) Good stuff!