TV Review: ‘Fallout’ is an Exciting New Adventure for Newcomers as Much As it Is for Fans of the Games

Rating: 94/100

I don’t know shit about Fallout games. I’m not a gamer. I find the culture fascinating, and maybe I should jump in, but it all looks so intimidating. But I saw the opportunity to attend an early screening of the first two episodes of the new Fallout TV series on an IMAX screen I figured, why not? The real challenge of any adaptation is that it has to find a way to appeal to the uninitiated. So, I figured it would be worth it to see if the new Amazon Prime series is up to that challenge. It absolutely is! This show is terrifying, powerful, and left me an emotional wreck at times in a way I wasn’t really expecting.

The premise of the show, like the games, is that there’s an alternate timeline where a series of nuclear bombs were dropped on America shortly after World War II, leading to a post-apocalyptic society where many of the survivors took refuge in underground bunkers, known as vaults, where society makes all of its decisions based on the survival of the species. Marriages are arranged between ideal candidates with an eye towards procreation. It’s 219 years since the bombs dropped and Lucy MacClean (Ella Purnell) lives in Vault 33, has done everything right in their society, and has earned the right to be married and begin a family.

Her vault arranges a marriage for her with a member of a neighboring vault, but that turns out to be a ruse for surface-dwelling terrorists, led by the evil Moldaver (Sarita Choudhury), to try to launch an attack on their vault. Lucy’s father Hank (Kyle MacLachlan) is taken prisoner onto the surface, and Lucy is compelled to do something that vault dwellers never do: venture out onto the surface to try to bring back her father.

Once there, she crosses paths with Maximus (Aaron Moten), a squire of the Brotherhood of Steel, who’s supposed to be a the assistant to one of these knights who wear giant metal suits, but Maximus has killed the knight he was meant to be squire to and stolen his armor. She also meets a mysterious man named Siggi Wilzig (Michael Emerson) who is kind to Lucy, but also may be the bait she needs to get to Moldaver. And then there’s The Ghoul, fka Cooper Howard (Walton Goggins), a mutated futuristic cowboy and gunslinger who’s been alive since the bombs first dropped over 200 years earlier when he was a marine-turned-actor who starred in a western called The Man from Deadhorse.

The opening scene of the movie was pretty hard to watch in an IMAX theater because it depicted a society being destroyed by very realistic-looking nuclear explosions, as viewed from the events of a children’s birthday party, at which Cooper Howard is appearing as his character from the movie only to see the birthday party turn into an emergency situation. The reality of that scene is that there were places that were hit with real bombs like that, in unspeakable tragedies, and an even larger scale nuclear attack right here in the United States like that remains, terrifyingly, possible.

Ella Purnell reminds me a bit of Jenna Coleman, which is great because I love Jenna Coleman as well. She does a great job of playing a sort of country bumpkin, by the Fallout world’s standards, and at the same time, she can throw down in a fight. Everyone seems to think she’s not going to make it on the surface, but she does a great job of demonstrating, even in the first two episodes, how she’s going to surprise everyone.

Kyle MacLachlan is one of those actors that I would listen to read a Chinese restaurant menu, and even in times when I don’t like the project he’s in, I always like him. He’s absolutely endearing as a loving father protective of his daughter, but he soon has a role-reversal as he becomes the show’s damsel-in-distress.

The series dropped an Amazon Prime two days earlier than announced, so the entire first season of eight episodes is on there to binge right now, and I will absolutely be finishing this as soon as possible. This series, from what I’ve read, doesn’t exactly follow any of the games and instead tells a new story that takes place within the existing backstory of the Fallout world. Thus, it’s really open for new fans to get involved, especially ones like me who aren’t gamers and would probably have no other opening into this fascinating universe.

Fallout is streaming now on Amazon Prime.