Amazon's Fallout is a flawed but fun post-apocalyptic show
Also, give us more Zach Cherry
I have meant to play Fallout for a while, but I always get sidetracked by yet another playthrough of Stardew Valley or some Legend of Zelda game. That said, I do still love a post-apocalyptic television show, so I knew that I still wanted to give a watch to Amazon’s take on Fallout. These are some quick, non-spoiler thoughts from a non-player about the first season that drops later today on Prime.
The show starts in the vaults with our protagonist, Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell), volunteering for marriage and eventual reproduction with a member of one of the connecting vaults. Things go awry, and Lucy ends up leaving the safety of the vault to go to the surface to search for her father, Hank (Kyle MacLaughlan), and his kidnapper, Lee Moldaver (Sarita Choudhury).
While on the surface, Lucy meets Maximus (Aaron Moten), a disgraced member of the Brotherhood of the Steel. She and Maximus are both in search of Dr. Siggi Wilzig (Michael Emerson), who has vital information in his head that will help both of them get what they want - for Lucy access to her father and for Maximus, the opportunity to get back in the good graces of the Brotherhood.
But they are not the only ones looking for Dr. Wilzig - along the way, they meet The Ghoul (Walton Goggins), a former movie star who has been not quite dead and not quite alive for the two centuries since the nuclear attacks.
Overall, the show is good fun. The extent of my knowledge going into my viewing is that the game is called Fallout, so it must be about a post-nuclear world. Despite the lack of information about the IP, it never felt like I was missing out by not having that background. The story itself was enough to engage me, even if I wasn’t clamoring for the next episode.
The show does suffer from some pacing issues. It starts off strong in episode one but stagnates a bit in the following episodes. There are some fun creature designs, but ultimately, I wanted more than we were given. A diseased bear and giant cockroaches were cool, but the weird salamander-type mutant was awesome, and I wish there had been more like that throughout the show. It also struggles with tone a little in the early episodes, though that seems to settle in as the show progresses.
My biggest complaint was how much is stuffed into the finale. There are a few story beats that felt obvious prior to the end, and the finale would have been better served if they had been revealed earlier so that some less obvious elements could have had room to breathe in the finale. It would have still been plenty exciting if one or two reveals about Vault-Tec had been shared an episode or two sooner.
That said, the character arcs are interesting. Walton Goggins is a wonder and every single time he was on screen, it was fantastic. Ella Purnell does an admirable job of maintaining this sunny attitude, even when Lucy is facing horrific experiences on the surface. Aaron Moten felt like the weakest link, and I’m not sure if that was due to his performance or related to the writing for Maximus, but even he wasn’t bad. There are some wonderful cameos throughout the show that largely serve the broader story without simply being an opportunity for someone to show up. And my professional opinion is that all dystopian television shows would benefit from including Zach Cherry in them (and now I’m even more excited for the new season of Severance).
