Does Fallout the TV Show Make Sense?

or, "How Are We Going to Sell All These Glass Slippers?"

Full Spoilers.

I'm still gobsmacked there was no whiff. How did they make not only a good "video game adaptation" but a good TV show? Well, for one thing there's no difference. If you lower your standards for something because it's an adaptation you have already cheated yourself of the critical experience you deserve. I distinctly remember thinking "I wish I had never played any Fallout," while watching. What part was it? I think when Norm was exploring Vault 30-something.

The one full of suicides.

I'm still not clear on why they all killed themselves exactly, because they learned the Overseers were all frozen modern-day middle managers? A Douglous Adamsian joke (lifted, more or less, entirely from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.) But where does it go?

Whether we like it or not the TV show has to contend with a world and lore that was imagined before literally 9/11. How many different companies have owned this series and made drastic additions and changes to it? Do YOU remember the fourth Fallout game? I do. It was an action shooting game on the PlayStation 2 called Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel. In it you can play as the protagonist of the first Fallout game and the plot partially concerns a giant mutant blob. I have never played it or indeed heard anyone ever talk about it. Does this lore matter?

It's hard for me to answer that question because I don't think any lore matters. But I do think making sense matters. So, does it? Does Fallout make sense? It is nourishing to us as a Story? Where do we find food in the Wasteland of Media when all we have to eat are remakes of copies of adaptations?

It's easy to blame yourself when something doesn't make sense. But this is TV. If it was supposed to make sense then Vault 4, which we eventually learn is hysterically Good Guys-coded, wouldn't lure people in and open a trap door under them. But we moved on. We saw how it turned out. Maybe we don't care about how unhinged the story-telling and joke-telling in Vault 4 is because we like that Maximus gave back their nuclear power battery thingie he needed for his super suit thing. (I know what they are actually called.) What I'm saying is, we enjoy the moment Max returns the battery enough not to question too hard the series of events which lead to it.

And that's sort of where the show fails to diverge from the quest structures of the Bethesda-developed Fallout games. A set of tasks, or moments that lead to a quaint and tidy conclusion. (It even leaves the characters outside and ready for the next episode.) Most all the little tasks a player is rewarded for completing in the Bethesda-developed Fallout games is a single, shallow idea, executed mundanely. Fetch this item, have a weightless conversation with that NPC, kill those monsters. Should I provide examples of times when Bethesda did include something interesting? Maybe if Todd Howard hired me to act as his legal representation but otherwise…. Who cares?

Who Cares not just because it's not my job to be fair to a huge, exploitative media giant (dwarfed, I know, by the huge, exploitative giant that actually produced the show itself) but also because, critically speaking one or two affecting pieces of storytelling floating like plastic babies in a sedan-sized King Cake of Mediocrity only serves to make the rest of the experience sort of worse. What I mean is, accidentally coming across some actually good story-telling in a Bethesda game makes the entire experience a little bit worse because you know what they are capable of but won't do. Imagine now how bad the company would look if someone else came along and took that IP and made something fabulous and ground-breaking with it. Then imagine if 14 years later it happened again but this time as a pretty ok TV show.

I'm saying Bethesda sucks!! I don't care if it's the conventional opinion, sometimes game critics are right. Anyone who's compared Fallout New Vegas to Fallouts 3, 4, or 76 has already come to this conclusion by themself. But really, we have to talk about Bethesda if we're going to talk about the show, because if we talk about Interplay we're just going to get depressed and then quibble about The Lore. Like how The Lore doesn't require Shady Sands to exist for the NCR to continue, the NCR controls several states at this point, although Fallout the TV Show insists this is enough.

Will I have to wait for Season 2 to learn why the show considers it in-keeping for the remnants of the NCR to be run by a… Communist millionaire who was cryogenically frozen and then later unfrozen… off-screen…? Like, that is what happened in this show, right? This question is obnoxious. I hate that I feel led to ask it. But, that's the consequence of thinking about what I'm seeing on the screen. A consequence of The Lore.

So what about Lucy? Sweet, motherfucking golden rule Lucy. We love her! She's proof that a Good Person character can have some depths. Some chasms. Same with Maximus.

I'm particularly interested in how much of a romance Maximus's story is. He begins as an aspiring squire who received his position due to error and we see how it was his naivety, misinterpreted by the true believers of his order, that constantly propels him forward. And then, a fateful moment of decision. "I shall murder Titus and take his place." "I shall lie to my childhood tormentor." "I shall choose to help people." In microcosm, Thaddeus and Maximus must exchange roles of power as they both pass into manhood, tormentor to servant; betrayer to rescuer; et cetera (that's Latin.)

Too bad his fraudulent knighthood doesn't last a whole season. Too bad it wasn't the central point of the show. Oh god, I just came up with a better show. The Gamers would hate it. This is why most traditional (classical, even mythic) story-telling stops working whenever something gets a sequel. It feels like a compromise to break with The Lore, it feels like a compromise to stick precisely to The Lore, and it feels like a migraine to even try to pin down what The Lore is.

Imagine if you wrote a sequel to Cinderella. OK, she lives in the castle now... and... what, are we going to center shoes again? The audience loved the bit with the glass slipper don't leave that out. Maybe a plot about how there are magic glass shoes and a whole host of young women who want husbands... and the shoes can get them husbands... The point is we're going to make a killing selling Glass Slipper t-shirts. Now it's the franchise with a bunch of shoe-related plot points.

The second you start penning a second chapter you start having to Respect The Lore. And when it gets really popular you have to Respect the Brand. Which is difficult when you're a soulless corporation trying to make art based on a story that is ultimately anti-nuke, anti-establishment, anti-branding. These people literally live in a world where branding is reduced to incomprehensible markings on pre-war junk. In Fallout the First your character can pick up a box of Blamco Mac and Cheese and they have no idea what it is. Reduced from junk food to junk.

But in modern Fallout we all love Vault Boy, the grinning corporate mascot for a business who's entire purpose is to outlive civilization. This is marketing making babydolls out of Star Wars stormtroopers. Lucas literally called them STORMTROOPERS and people still don't get it. Well, get real, it's not about getting anything. You can tell people the thing they like is fucked up until you're blue in the face but they won't stop clutching tightly whatever ugly comfort media they scavenged out of the sludge until something truly changes inside of them.

So, obviously, there's quite a bit of messiness, ideologically speaking with Fallout the TV Show. That's ok, lots of things can be fraught, contradictory, or malicious and we still find something to think about, to even respond to, in them. We don't have a choice, nothing is allowed to be produced under Capitalism that is capable of providing a true critique of it, or alternative to it. Why would they?

I started writing this because I wanted to work through Maximus, honest I did. So, we'll start with his order, The Brotherhood of Steel.

In truth (here, "truth" means, according to a couple of the games) the Brotherhood of Steel was formed by a small group of military scientists shortly after the War. These scientists had access to technical knowledge and technology, most notably power armor, flying vehicles, and secure bunkers in Southern California. They decided it was in everyone's best interest, especially their own, if they hoarded technology and continued to develop new tech as the rest of the world slowly recovered from the bombs.

They began leaving their bunkers and raiding settlements, or going on "quests" to recover old world tech. Eventually they get into a meaningful conflict with the mutated remains of some important person or other. Questions about humanity, mutation, purity, and control are all grappled with. And, I guess, a hundred years later (??) they are ALSO in Washington DC? And Boston? And Appalacha? The helmet was on the box, therefore, it's ICONIC to the brand, therefore they have to appear in every other game. This is why I wished I had never played the games, I guess. People love the glass slipper!

I will never understand Fallout the TV Show. When I behold Fallout the TV Show I behold what is incomprehensible to me. It rots in my hand but I eat it anyway. Because I live in the wasteland and in the wasteland we are always starving.