Fallout Season 1 – REVIEW

I admittedly do not know much about the Fallout franchise, but the most exposure I have to it is the overall tone of the last few games franchise, along with playing a little bit past the opening of Fallout 4. However, it’s been pretty clear for the past few years that adaptations of video games into movies or shows are getting a lot better now. Sure, there’s the oddball one that’s pretty bad like the Halo show on Paramount+, but adaptations like Halo used to be the norm. The Last of Us seems to be the biggest example for shows, becoming a flagship HBO Sunday night series, and whether or not you liked it, The Super Mario Bros. Movie was one of the highest-grossing movies of 2023. There also seems to be some common threads that separates a Halo or an Assassin’s Creed from a Last of Us or Mario: involvement of the creators and overall respect of the source material. The writers and showrunners of Halo just tossed away the games and are doing their own thing, and look at what happened there. Fallout, fortunately, ends up being on the Last of Us side.

Let’s just start with a lore dump because Fallout is admittedly a lot to get into when summed up. Fallout is mainly set in an retrofuturistic timeline of the year 2296, in the aftermath of the Great War of 2077. In 2077, a nuclear holocaust caused people to take shelter in massive fallout bunkers called Vaults and they were all essentially hibernating in them for centuries. Three separate storylines are followed throughout the first season; The main one is about a Vaultdweller named Lucy who goes to the irradiated Wasteland to find her kidnapped father. During this, she meets Maximus, a member of the Brotherhood of Steel, which is an organization that walks the Wasteland to collect and study different artifacts and technology from before the bombs dropped, which is its own storyline. The third, which jumps time periods, follows The Ghoul, a mysterious bounty hunter wandering the Wasteland. Before the bombs drop, we see him as Cooper Howard, a Hollywood actor and an ambassador for Vault-Tec, the massive corporation responsible for the creation of the Vaults.

Okay, big lore dump is done. I had a lot of fun with Fallout, all things considered. I at least enjoyed every major storyline here, but Cooper Howard / The Ghoul was the most entertaining one to watch, and that’s mainly helped by an endlessly charismatic Walton Goggins playing Howard. Seeing the world before the end of the world was the most interesting part, especially with how we see this world eventually lead to its nuclear holocaust. There’s a specific scene in the second half in the season with Goggins and Matt Berry in a surprise appearance that’s a great yet haunting thesis statement for the series as a whole. The storyline with Lucy, who’s played by Ella Purnell, is the story we spend the most time with, and seeing Lucy become beaten and molded by the Wasteland throughout the season was very interesting to see. I would’ve loved to see more of her kidnapped father, played by Kyle MacLachlan, and see him more fleshed out, but by the end of the season, it’s definitely setting him up to have a bigger role in season 2. The storyline with Maximus, who’s played by Aaron Moten, was personally the weakest for me. It really feels like the Brotherhood of Steel were trying to be one of the more mysterious figures in the Wasteland, and while I enjoyed the cult-like nature, it just didn’t feel as engaging as the other two stories in motion.

What did work for me, though, was the world of Fallout. Ahead of the premiere, it was clarified that the series wouldn’t just be an adaptation of the Bethesda games: it’d be a new entry. All of the previous games in the series are canon to the series, and Todd Howard, game director and executive producer of the series, had said that every single ending to the popular game Fallout: New Vegas is canon. I’m not entirely sure how that works, but maybe that’ll be clarified in the future. Either way, it feels surprising that Fallout hadn’t gotten any sort of live-action movie or series before this because after watching the first season, it felt like it had been ready for years. Maybe that’s the fact of this *technically* being Fallout 5, but it already feels like this world really had been around for 219 years thanks to the dedication of the overall production. It looks and sounds wonderful, and most importantly, the costumes and make-up in the series never felt like it was cosplay. It felt like Fallout.





I’d definitely recommend Fallout to anyone that’s interested in it. Even if there’s the occasional character that you remember exists (there’s a lot of characters here), it makes up for it with its incredible performances and overall production value. Walton Goggins is the big highlight for me and Ella Purnell is just great to watch, but it really does feel like we have the next juggernaut streaming show in Fallout.

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The first season of Fallout is available to stream on Prime Video now, and like most originals from the service, it will most likely be available to rent and buy digitally at some point. Season 2 is reportedly set to begin filming later this year.