I am cautiously optimistic regarding the series. My expectations were fairly low to start with, also taking into account that Westworld post-season 1 and the exception of som parts of season 2 was an absolute mess in terms of writing. First of all, the acting is generally great. A bit of a shame Goggins gets to play a rather one-note character like the Man-in-Black, though I am sure a bit of redemption lays predictably a head.
Secondly, the series is funnier than Westworld (I know, not hard), though writing good jokes is definitely not a strong point of Nolan and Joy. Jokes often fall flat, particularly in the Vault storyline. Strangely, I am caring more about the standard mystery box of the latter than whatever is in Emerson's head. The MacGuffin type of narrative is a bit lazy. I would have liked something more involving the world than just some people chasing an undefined object. The fact that the main characters keeping bumping into each other also undermines the world building, something fantasy and sci-fi series should excell at. It also does not help that Silo recently did a lot of this, but much better.
So, compared to innovative and involving apocalyptic series like Station Eleven - which focused much more on the present community than the destroyed past - Fallout is underwhelming. Even when compared to The Last of Us, the humanity of it all is a bit too much hidden below the bizarre and quirkiness. Nevertheless, it is a fun distraction and Nolan and Joy did prove that they can tie divergent storylines together in a entertaining finale. So cautiously optimistic for a decent finish and hopefully a more daring and world-involving season 2.
Glad to have a player of the games reviewing. I read a Witcher show review for a major publication once where the reporter made it clear she would never be touching the games, then ranted about all the weird names. It is kind of disappointing not to have individual reviews to digest, though. I know some people mention slow pacing, but I'm finding it intense (that ominous eerie music doesn't help). I like to unpack episodes by way of reviews.
When an IP has such deep lore (this, Avatar, Rings of Power), I find that adaptations are easiest to enjoy if I’m a casual fan. So my experience playing half of Fallout 3 then getting stuck in a DLC was just the right level of knowledge to avoid adaptation annoyance. My partner is usually in deeper and is happy to pause and explain how stuff works anyway.
As non-Americans, we were unable to place the boardwalk (Staten Island was my best guess), despite how many movies it's been in. Thanks for pointing out where it was.
Just want to say that Norm's investigation into the other vaults slowly became one of my favorite storylines. I love how it made evident over time that there was some sort of internal division between the Vaulters, which helped better explain why some of them seem more 'normal' or 'functional' as human beings than others.
And ANOTHER thing! Beyond constituting the least narratively interesting games of the core series — FO3 is politically simple, FO4 is actually underrated as gonzo sci fi but gives you next to no narrative choice — the thing that, imo, sucks about Bethesda’s stewardship of the IP is that it became all satirical (“”) Americana kitsch, all the time. And predictably but sadly, that’s something that the Fallout show has continued to hammer on.
At the risk of sounding like the old head I am, Fallouts 1 and 2 (and to a lesser extent, New Vegas) used retrofuturism as an aesthetic anchor for their world, but there was a real distinction between absurd black comedy, which was plentiful, and *satire about irl postwar American culture*, which was surprisingly rare, given how omnipresent it is in Bethesda’s entries.
The old Fallouts were properly post-apocalyptic — hardly anyone in them mentioned or had any frame of reference for the pre-war world, for all the ways it visually haunted the setting — whereas Bethesda’s games are fixated with the time before the war, and the one-note irony of Norman Rockwell caricatures like (initially) Lucy facing something beyond suburban comfort / values. It is literally a Gallagher routine, except the watermelon is Pete Campbell’s head.
(One of the many, many things that made New Vegas interesting was the way it took concepts of economy and society, eg, small-r republican democracy, and didn’t just use the pre-war world as the obvious reference. All its problems originate in the post-apocalypse.)
Anyway, is that bad? I think it’s less interesting than the genuine weirdness and darkness of the first game, or the realpolitik of New Vegas. It’s a low calorie sort of satire, like a series of SNL cold opens — always very obvious, but it hits its beats, and maybe that’s an appeal.
Bethesda’s schtick does come from a genuine understanding of what something of Fallout was going for. It’s just that the understanding doesn’t derive from the game itself. I think what they did was watch the FO1 intro CG cinematic — which is still incredible, even with its obvious debt to Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains” — and having got everything they needed stopped reading the text, so to speak. Really, who could blame them? It fucking goes.
So the heavily comedic (distinct from absurd) focus is necessarily *bad*. It’s just that the famous intro’s focus on pre-war derangement makes for a less interesting well to tap than the more considered post-apocalypse we were originally offered.
The first few times I saw Goggins on screen I thought I was seeing James Marsden. It took some time for me to understand they were two different people. Probably because of Westworld. I thought Marsden was a genius.
I have never played the game and I can’t figure out if I’m going to stick with this or not. I’ve watched 3. I love Goggins, which is why I started in the first place and generally like this kind of show. But, it is a little slow, a little too focused on the violence, and I can’t stand the idiosyncratic songs.
I too was a Fallout head from its earliest days — I played the demo (which intentionally spoiled the water chip plot point ahead of release) as a 10 year old, and got the game for Christmas. I still remember waiting and looking at the Frank Frazetta-ass painting used for the installer, then the intro (of course) and then playing 5 hours straight until I’d gotten to the caves beneath the Necropolis. From there I was a particular type of nerd.
I remember when Black Isle’s insane Fallout 3 concept (much of which became interpolated through New Vegas) was canceled, and the rights bought by Bethesda in their imperial phase. I rehabbed the leaked Black Isle FO3 design into a tabletop game I played with friends for over a year. It was, as they say, a restricted / stereotyped / “special” interest of mine.
All of that would have been, I’m sure, a factor for me in how I watched the show, if it had come out however many years ago. But I’ve lived through enough expensive visual culture by this point in my life that profound annoyance is just my baseline where IP is concerned. Because everything that comes along with IP is what tends to make for leaden, shallow storytelling — world building, faithfulness to canon, fan service, “lore”. I dread those things now.
I love Fallout (even 4, which nearly everyone I know hated) and I love television, but just as in my other love (horror) the moment you start treating reverence for the material (or the medium) as an innately redeeming quality, things go downhill fast. So obviously when it was announced that the game devs were involved in production, and that the Nolan brother’s brain trust — who had with Westworld committed as hard as possible to courting Reddit through maximum Lore-driven Mystery — I felt I had very little to be optimistic about, and every reason to expect an insular, expensive misfire.
But of course I was going to watch. When it premiered I decided not to care what this did with the Fallout as anything other than a premise, one which just so happens to resemble some other, unrelated material. Did I do the Leo pointing meme while watching? Yes, obviously, at two points related to my favorite game of the series. How could I not? But as well as I could, I committed to watching the show as though I wasn’t meant to derive its pleasure through knowing its metatext. It was only to be a sci fi action-comedy television show.
(Despite myself I did see and bristle against the schlockiest changes Bethesda made to the fiction. But those thoughts are for another diatribe.)
My verdict, especially in this early going, is that (1) Walton Goggins can still steal any scene you give him, even when you force him into a Red Skull Halloween costume, and (2) wow is thing pretty slow. It’s slow in that prestige TV way that used to be impressive but now feels like scope for the sake of scope.
Listen: without the burden of metatext, the best version of this show is 100% Wally G-focused. You want to do the temporal puzzle box thing, switch between Howard and The Ghoul (would love to know what Jonathan thought he was doing with that name), fine, whatever, go nuts. But Goggins is the thing. He’s not spice, he’s the meat. I have become engulfed with the fire of desire for a doomy, sci fi-flavored LA noir where Walton Goggins smokes cigarettes and is generally troubled and / or skeptical of what people around him are saying. If Fallout TV succeeded in anything, it was making me yearn for that.
Are the other actors good? Sure. The Lucy actress is great at comedy. The Maximus guy is great all around. But those storylines, man, they’re all brand, all “you can’t have fallout without vaults and the Brotherhood”. No, actually. That’s wrong and you should know it, Amazon, Todd Howard, whoever.
If they named the Cooper character after a game executive I will slap someone at Amazon. But I digress.
I didn’t sleep through the Lucy / Maximus storylines, but I wasn’t really all that invested in them, either. Even if we allow them as broadly additive to the show, though, I think the continued triple vault storyline should have been cut at the quick. It is the least essential, least interesting, most puzzle box-y aspect of the show. It’s that way from the jump. I hate it with my life.
I am cautiously optimistic regarding the series. My expectations were fairly low to start with, also taking into account that Westworld post-season 1 and the exception of som parts of season 2 was an absolute mess in terms of writing. First of all, the acting is generally great. A bit of a shame Goggins gets to play a rather one-note character like the Man-in-Black, though I am sure a bit of redemption lays predictably a head.
Secondly, the series is funnier than Westworld (I know, not hard), though writing good jokes is definitely not a strong point of Nolan and Joy. Jokes often fall flat, particularly in the Vault storyline. Strangely, I am caring more about the standard mystery box of the latter than whatever is in Emerson's head. The MacGuffin type of narrative is a bit lazy. I would have liked something more involving the world than just some people chasing an undefined object. The fact that the main characters keeping bumping into each other also undermines the world building, something fantasy and sci-fi series should excell at. It also does not help that Silo recently did a lot of this, but much better.
So, compared to innovative and involving apocalyptic series like Station Eleven - which focused much more on the present community than the destroyed past - Fallout is underwhelming. Even when compared to The Last of Us, the humanity of it all is a bit too much hidden below the bizarre and quirkiness. Nevertheless, it is a fun distraction and Nolan and Joy did prove that they can tie divergent storylines together in a entertaining finale. So cautiously optimistic for a decent finish and hopefully a more daring and world-involving season 2.
Glad to have a player of the games reviewing. I read a Witcher show review for a major publication once where the reporter made it clear she would never be touching the games, then ranted about all the weird names. It is kind of disappointing not to have individual reviews to digest, though. I know some people mention slow pacing, but I'm finding it intense (that ominous eerie music doesn't help). I like to unpack episodes by way of reviews.
When an IP has such deep lore (this, Avatar, Rings of Power), I find that adaptations are easiest to enjoy if I’m a casual fan. So my experience playing half of Fallout 3 then getting stuck in a DLC was just the right level of knowledge to avoid adaptation annoyance. My partner is usually in deeper and is happy to pause and explain how stuff works anyway.
As non-Americans, we were unable to place the boardwalk (Staten Island was my best guess), despite how many movies it's been in. Thanks for pointing out where it was.
Just want to say that Norm's investigation into the other vaults slowly became one of my favorite storylines. I love how it made evident over time that there was some sort of internal division between the Vaulters, which helped better explain why some of them seem more 'normal' or 'functional' as human beings than others.
And ANOTHER thing! Beyond constituting the least narratively interesting games of the core series — FO3 is politically simple, FO4 is actually underrated as gonzo sci fi but gives you next to no narrative choice — the thing that, imo, sucks about Bethesda’s stewardship of the IP is that it became all satirical (“”) Americana kitsch, all the time. And predictably but sadly, that’s something that the Fallout show has continued to hammer on.
At the risk of sounding like the old head I am, Fallouts 1 and 2 (and to a lesser extent, New Vegas) used retrofuturism as an aesthetic anchor for their world, but there was a real distinction between absurd black comedy, which was plentiful, and *satire about irl postwar American culture*, which was surprisingly rare, given how omnipresent it is in Bethesda’s entries.
The old Fallouts were properly post-apocalyptic — hardly anyone in them mentioned or had any frame of reference for the pre-war world, for all the ways it visually haunted the setting — whereas Bethesda’s games are fixated with the time before the war, and the one-note irony of Norman Rockwell caricatures like (initially) Lucy facing something beyond suburban comfort / values. It is literally a Gallagher routine, except the watermelon is Pete Campbell’s head.
(One of the many, many things that made New Vegas interesting was the way it took concepts of economy and society, eg, small-r republican democracy, and didn’t just use the pre-war world as the obvious reference. All its problems originate in the post-apocalypse.)
Anyway, is that bad? I think it’s less interesting than the genuine weirdness and darkness of the first game, or the realpolitik of New Vegas. It’s a low calorie sort of satire, like a series of SNL cold opens — always very obvious, but it hits its beats, and maybe that’s an appeal.
Bethesda’s schtick does come from a genuine understanding of what something of Fallout was going for. It’s just that the understanding doesn’t derive from the game itself. I think what they did was watch the FO1 intro CG cinematic — which is still incredible, even with its obvious debt to Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains” — and having got everything they needed stopped reading the text, so to speak. Really, who could blame them? It fucking goes.
https://youtu.be/hG3uBgQmTnk?si=-hbBiFPObVPZLnSb
So the heavily comedic (distinct from absurd) focus is necessarily *bad*. It’s just that the famous intro’s focus on pre-war derangement makes for a less interesting well to tap than the more considered post-apocalypse we were originally offered.
I also really liked the nod to Goggins using VATS during the shootout in Filly (even if he doesn't have a Pip Boy).
The first few times I saw Goggins on screen I thought I was seeing James Marsden. It took some time for me to understand they were two different people. Probably because of Westworld. I thought Marsden was a genius.
I have never played the game and I can’t figure out if I’m going to stick with this or not. I’ve watched 3. I love Goggins, which is why I started in the first place and generally like this kind of show. But, it is a little slow, a little too focused on the violence, and I can’t stand the idiosyncratic songs.
Also come on Les, Bloody Mess is a TRAIT. It’s a TRAIT, not a PERK. You’re killing me out here
I too was a Fallout head from its earliest days — I played the demo (which intentionally spoiled the water chip plot point ahead of release) as a 10 year old, and got the game for Christmas. I still remember waiting and looking at the Frank Frazetta-ass painting used for the installer, then the intro (of course) and then playing 5 hours straight until I’d gotten to the caves beneath the Necropolis. From there I was a particular type of nerd.
I remember when Black Isle’s insane Fallout 3 concept (much of which became interpolated through New Vegas) was canceled, and the rights bought by Bethesda in their imperial phase. I rehabbed the leaked Black Isle FO3 design into a tabletop game I played with friends for over a year. It was, as they say, a restricted / stereotyped / “special” interest of mine.
All of that would have been, I’m sure, a factor for me in how I watched the show, if it had come out however many years ago. But I’ve lived through enough expensive visual culture by this point in my life that profound annoyance is just my baseline where IP is concerned. Because everything that comes along with IP is what tends to make for leaden, shallow storytelling — world building, faithfulness to canon, fan service, “lore”. I dread those things now.
I love Fallout (even 4, which nearly everyone I know hated) and I love television, but just as in my other love (horror) the moment you start treating reverence for the material (or the medium) as an innately redeeming quality, things go downhill fast. So obviously when it was announced that the game devs were involved in production, and that the Nolan brother’s brain trust — who had with Westworld committed as hard as possible to courting Reddit through maximum Lore-driven Mystery — I felt I had very little to be optimistic about, and every reason to expect an insular, expensive misfire.
But of course I was going to watch. When it premiered I decided not to care what this did with the Fallout as anything other than a premise, one which just so happens to resemble some other, unrelated material. Did I do the Leo pointing meme while watching? Yes, obviously, at two points related to my favorite game of the series. How could I not? But as well as I could, I committed to watching the show as though I wasn’t meant to derive its pleasure through knowing its metatext. It was only to be a sci fi action-comedy television show.
(Despite myself I did see and bristle against the schlockiest changes Bethesda made to the fiction. But those thoughts are for another diatribe.)
My verdict, especially in this early going, is that (1) Walton Goggins can still steal any scene you give him, even when you force him into a Red Skull Halloween costume, and (2) wow is thing pretty slow. It’s slow in that prestige TV way that used to be impressive but now feels like scope for the sake of scope.
Listen: without the burden of metatext, the best version of this show is 100% Wally G-focused. You want to do the temporal puzzle box thing, switch between Howard and The Ghoul (would love to know what Jonathan thought he was doing with that name), fine, whatever, go nuts. But Goggins is the thing. He’s not spice, he’s the meat. I have become engulfed with the fire of desire for a doomy, sci fi-flavored LA noir where Walton Goggins smokes cigarettes and is generally troubled and / or skeptical of what people around him are saying. If Fallout TV succeeded in anything, it was making me yearn for that.
Are the other actors good? Sure. The Lucy actress is great at comedy. The Maximus guy is great all around. But those storylines, man, they’re all brand, all “you can’t have fallout without vaults and the Brotherhood”. No, actually. That’s wrong and you should know it, Amazon, Todd Howard, whoever.
If they named the Cooper character after a game executive I will slap someone at Amazon. But I digress.
I didn’t sleep through the Lucy / Maximus storylines, but I wasn’t really all that invested in them, either. Even if we allow them as broadly additive to the show, though, I think the continued triple vault storyline should have been cut at the quick. It is the least essential, least interesting, most puzzle box-y aspect of the show. It’s that way from the jump. I hate it with my life.