The post-nuclear wastes of California in which the <em>Fallout</em> series takes place offer a glimpse into a steampunk Dark Age in a state of flux. As the American Commonwealth falls away amid the dropping bombs, new factions vie with one another in a bid to establish their truths as the New Order.
The vault-dwellers, descendants of the pre-war rich, who could afford access to the fallout shelters known as vaults in the old world, reside underground in ordered communities run by the Vault-Tec Corporation.
The Brotherhood of Steel, a pseudo-religious military order, seek out old-world technologies in a bid to reestablish society. Besides them are the poor beggars who fight to scratch a living from what is left of the elements.
From these groups are drawn our three protagonists: Lucy, a vault-dweller raised in a sheltered and idealistic space of comfortable communitarianism that fostered a good-natured but naïve moral certainty, who offers herself up for voluntary marriage exchange to a man from a neighbouring vault; Maximus, a squire of the brotherhood (ambitious and determined to find the prestige promised by the armour of his knightly superiors); and the Ghoul, a skeletal bounty-hunter and former Hollywood star who survived two centuries in the barren waste.
The main storyline begins after Lucy’s short-lived (approximately 30-minute) marriage. After the celebrations are concluded, she is betrayed by her new beau and his compatriots, who turn out to be raiders from the surface. Their leader lays waste to her idyllic community and kidnaps her father. In response, she leaves the safety of her home to find and free him.
Maximus, who has trained all his life for combat in the Wasteland, does so entering the service of one of the knights that he so wishes to emulate. He soon finds himself cannon fodder for an unprincipled armoured cynic who has no care for the mission his brethren claim to uphold.
Lucy, Maximus and the Ghoul find themselves in pursuit of a rogue scientist. He goes on the run from a heavily-guarded facility in which he worked, after injecting himself with a mysterious substance. Over the next eight episodes, the characters wade through the strange and deformed world to find him: Lucy to use him as a bargaining chip to save her father, Maximus to make his name, and the Ghoul in pursuit of the almighty dollar.
As Maximus and Lucy pursue the scientist, they are for the first time faced with reality, unprotected and undirected by the codes and conduct of their homes. As each comes to terms with the fallacy of those institutions, they must rely on their own consciences for direction. While Lucy adapts to the brutal realities of the Wasteland, she retains her moral probity.
When the Ghoul sells her to save his life, she escapes but takes the time to save her erstwhile captor. But when Maximus’s commander, Knight Titus, is mauled by a mutant bear, the squire chooses to let him die, taking his armour and the prestige and pride that goes with it.
But how does this cyberpunk dark-age representation stack up? <em>Fallout</em> seems unserious. The scenario is absurd; the lore is hard to follow – while not wholly necessary either – for those unfamiliar with the 40 years of games from which it is adapted.
However, the interesting question of how we are to determine right action when there is no truth is a poignant one.
Cracks begin to show in Lucy’s home as its inhabitants, with their mutually supportive blandness, struggle to civilise the captive raiders that brought death to their door. Her brother Norm, a misfit in the vault, discovers that the cosy reality of the existence of the vault is not what it seems.
Through flashbacks to the Ghoul’s pre-war life as actor-superstar, where his wife, one of Vault-Tec’s leading executives, pushes him to be the public face of the company, we learn that the company’s motivation extends far beyond the preservation of humanity.
In seeing his story played out in reverse, we learn how the hardened cynic capable of astonishing brutality was once an idealist. He is sanitised as the cynicism and distrust with which he faces the world is explained into the understandable.
Like the game before it, the series favours muddy waters and foregoes the moral binary of good and evil. In the games, the smallest decisions can change the entire course of the narrative. The adaptation effectively captures the moral muddiness of the games.
The folly and hypocrisy of those who seek to impose order in <em>Fallout</em> damns the false prophets of order, but there is a total absence of common cause between protagonists. In effect, there is no change, which leaves the conclusion rather hollow – one better suited to a game than a show.
Video games offer hundreds of hours of content to be enjoyed at the player’s own pace and in their own way – within the confines of the scriptwriters’ imagination. Moral certainty is returned to the player in that limited agency. They alone determine the destiny of that virtual world. In short, that gaming virtual world is arguably the perfect narrative product (and much more so than a cyberpunk dark-age-themed TV series). Yikes.<br><br><em>Photo: a scene from 'Fallout'; screenshot.</em>
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