Fallout Prime Show Puts the Wastes On Screen

As a well-loved game world with a dedicated user base dating back over two decades, Fallout had all the potential to be an epic celebration or a spectacular disappointment.

The Fallout games are a classic series of post-apocalyptic adventure RPGs, with the most recent installment (Fallout 76) released in 2020. Fallout features a whole wasteland full of lore, characters, and humor, making it an ideal inspiration for a streaming series like Prime Video’s 2024 release.

That said, any time a studio adapts a popular property for the screen, fans must be ready for anything. In the past few years, we’ve seen wide praise for game-to-screen adaptations like The Last of Us and Super Mario Bros., mixed reactions for productions like Uncharted and Five Nights at Freddy’s, and flops like the Assassin’s Creed film, which got rated rotten by critics and audiences alike.

As a well-loved game world with a dedicated user base dating back over two decades, Fallout had all the potential to be an epic celebration or a spectacular disappointment. Having watched the first season all the way through, I consider it a strong success with some room for improvement.

WARNING: This article may contain spoilers, but I’ll try to keep specifics to a minimum.

Fallout’s Wasteland: Marvelous Mutations and Some Missed Opportunities

Overall, the showrunners brought Fallout to the screen in a way that resonates with the game experience and takes inspiration from nostalgic moments. The settings, props, and costumes all look familiar to anyone who has played the games, and the tone of the show captures both their whimsical humor and the horror of the wastes. Even so, there are definitely some missed opportunities and room for improvement. For example, quite a few characters are excessively incompetent for no reason other than to make the principal characters look better and for comic relief. While the Fallout games do have outlandishly bizarre characters, some of the character choices made in the show don’t follow the internal logic of the setting. 

For example, most of the vault-dwelling women, including the main character, Lucy, are competent and resilient as a result of their extensive training. Part of Lucy’s introductory montage shows her learning a variety of survival and combat skills. For some reason, the vault-dwelling men who grew up in the same environment as Lucy are much more cowardly and incompetent. There are also a number of less significant characters in the wasteland who are unbelievably foolish in order to make the plot run smoother. At one point, Lucy is sold to an organ harvesting facility, but she easily escapes and kills the facility owners in the process. Considering how difficult it is to survive in the wastes, a fact which is often mentioned in the show, it’s hard to believe that incompetent fools would be able to run a profitable organ harvesting facility if they couldn’t even contain a single vault dweller.

There are other instances of very convenient events that don’t make sense but facilitate the plot. When Lucy first leaves the vault, she knows she’s entering a world of untold danger, and yet she camps next to an open fire that night as if there’s no threat. Conveniently, the only person who sees her fire is one of the few wastelanders who wouldn’t want to murder or at least rob her. He just gives her some friendly advice and moves on. There are strange writing choices like this in most episodes, but they don’t subtract much from the overall entertainment value. It would be great to see the writing tightened up a bit, but the story is told effectively enough to maintain the suspension of disbelief.

Bringing the Game Lore to Life

Many iconic items and locations from the Fallout games are well-represented in the series. The vault jumpsuits and doors, the power armor and 10mm pistols, the sentry turrets, and the stimpacks are all effective parts of the setting. PipBoys are featured prominently, reminding fans that it’s not any old post-apocalyptic hellscape. 

There’s so much lore across all the games that it’s not reasonable to expect everything to make an appearance, but there are a few things that I hope will be included in a potential second season. 

There are a few mutated animals and monsters in the show, but some of the most familiar beasts, such as deathclaws, are not part of the tapestry. It also would have been interesting to see more iconic Fallout equipment and weapons featured prominently, such as plasma pistols, lockpick sets, and substances like Buffout and Jet.

A Big Vault Boy Thumbs Up to the Cast and Crew

The series is exceptionally well cast. There are three leads: Ella Purnell has both the look and emotional range for the golden-hearted Lucy. Walton Goggins embodies the wasteland’s brutality as a weathered ghoul who’s seen more horror than anyone should. Aaron Moten excels as Maximus, the Brotherhood of Steel recruit who can’t help but be inspired by Lucy’s optimism and his own evolving skills. Other familiar names in the cast include Michael Emerson and Kyle MacLachlan, and the entire cast and crew clearly dedicated themselves to telling the story effectively.

As a long-time fan of the Fallout games and post-apocalyptic science fiction, I enjoyed watching the streaming series and am glad it’s been extended into another season; hopefully, there will be a few more. There’s still so much lore to explore, and the showrunners have shown themselves to be rugged pathfinders.