It has taken God knows how long to get there, but we’re finally in a place where video-game adaptations aren’t generally considered DOA automatically. Much thanks for that goes to the small screen, not least HBO’s splashy TV adaptation of The Last of Us, watched by millions in its first season and steeped in critical praise like a mushroomified corpse stuffed with cordyceps. Fallout followed a year later, which itself posed a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it was inevitable that, despite being polar opposites in terms of tone, it would be cross-compared with its post-apocalyptic predecessor, widely considered one of the best series of the year, if not the decade so far. On the other hand, the brilliant success of The Last of Us proved that films and TV based on games didn’t need to be schlocky, bargain-bin gobbledegook à la the original Super Mario Bros. and anything made by Uwe Boll.
If you read my recaps last year, you’ll know my feelings on the first season of Fallout, which are partially informed by my status as a franchise zealot who has shelves stacked with Fallout merch in his bedroom, which I can promise is quite the aphrodisiac. (Trust me, guys love it when I show them my T-51b power armor helmet.) Both as a new-media installment in the wider Fallout franchise and as a piece of television in its own right, it largely ripped. The tone was perfectly bizarre and silly but not without contrasting moments of poignancy and darkness; thank Walton Goggins for much of the latter, who brought far more sincerity and enriching pathos to the role described by most as “the irradiated cowboy” and/or “the hot zombie” than many less committed actors would offer. Alongside The Last of Us, it’s considered one of the best game adaptations of all time: an admittedly low bar, but still a bar that needed to be cleared.
The alchemy behind Fallout’s success is different from that of TLOU. While the latter could just copy over the plot of its PlayStation source material, an inarguable highlight of a game that has gone down as a generational masterpiece, adapting Fallout was more about nailing its world, style, and that aforementioned gonzo tone. (You should know this by now, but the show follows its own original story, distinct from anything in the games, nevertheless existing in the same universe.) For the most part, the writing team led by co-showrunners Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet killed it. Save for some divisive lore decisions that threw Reddit megafans into a conniption, not least the destruction of Shady Sands and the seeming demise of the New California Republic, the emergent fan consensus was that Fallout was made with the love, care, and reverence of fellow Fallout nerds. We’re obviously only an episode into season two, but the early signs suggest they have stuck to this successful approach. Take the series’ production design, a highlight of season one, with props and set pieces that look ripped straight out of the 3-D Bethesda games. Hell, they’ve gone so far as to perfectly replicate the Novac sign from Fallout: New Vegas, down to the hue of its rusting metal and white-orange glow of its flickering bulbs.
But it’s not all about fan service. The first season of Fallout demonstrated that the writers were unafraid to take risks with the lore, as with the aforementioned nuking of the NCR. Season two finds us in trickier territory, with Goggins’s Ghoul and Lucy (Ella Purnell) chasing down Hank (Kyle MacLachlan) into the Mojave wasteland, the home of New Vegas, where the series’ most popular game installment is set. In the game, it’s the only major city in America that has been preserved — at least partially — in its prewar state. For which we have one man to thank: It was protected from nuclear devastation by multihyphenate tech genius Robert House, glimpsed briefly in the season-one finale at the meeting in which Barb (Frances Turner) announced Vault-Tec’s intent to drop the bomb themselves. Well, at least we thought that was House; turns out it was his body double, played by Rafi Silver. We meet the real guy — in all of his Walt Disney by way of Howard Hughes brilliance with more than a dash of Muskian sociopathy — in a flashback that kicks off the season, now played by Justin Theroux, introduced in a title card as “The Man Who Knew.”
Theroux’s House reveals himself to a handful of blue-collar guys in a bar who are on strike from RobCo, the robotics company that he owns, and quickly shows off his particular brand of sadism. He gets one of them to punch him in the face, in case he might enjoy it, then shoves a mind-control device in the back of his neck, forcing him to kill his friends with a baseball bat — before his head suddenly explodes. It’s a gleefully bizarre introduction for a character who will clearly be of major consequence in season two. Which is more than a welcome addition: He’s one of the most philosophically fascinating characters in the game series, a dictatorial technocrat who runs New Vegas with an army of robots and is committed to rescuing humankind by any means necessary. (It’s also notable that House is the first major character from the video games to hold a significant role in the TV show.) How that will be further explored is yet to be seen — the season is set 15 years after the events of New Vegas, which House may or may not have survived, depending on the actions of the player; the Fallout writers have stated that they wanted to avoid a canon New Vegas ending, but it’s hard to see how they’ll do that with House seemingly intact — but it’s great to see House’s prewar history fleshed out in flashback.
Back in the postwar present, we’re reunited with the Ghoul and Lucy, who have got themselves into a bit of hot water. They’re in the aforementioned settlement of Novac, a dilapidated motel named for its broken “No Vacancy” sign; while in the game it was a relatively peaceful rest stop for weary travelers, it has now been taken over by the Great Khans, a tribalistic clan of raiders known for their dominance over the local drug trade. While the Ghoul is strung up in a noose, dangling over the motel’s empty swimming pool, Lucy watches over from Novac’s iconic dinosaur statue, a.k.a. Dinky. Lucy initially tries to bargain with the Khans in her regular tone of peppy optimism, which is thrown back in her face when the Khans’ leader threatens to eat Dogmeat. For his part, once freed, the Ghoul sets to work massacring the gang with cartoonish brutality; gotta love the grenade kill at the end, setting off a shower of limbs, blood, and various vital organs. Soon thereafter, Lucy and the Ghoul set out further into the wasteland, filling the air with their familiar moral debate, the latter frustrated by the former’s commitment to pacifism in a brutal world. “I won’t apologize for not murdering people,” Lucy says. “Well, all that matters to me is that you shoot that fuckin’ rope,” the Ghoul warns. Coming over a dune, they spot New Vegas in the distance. I’m gonna say it’ll take them at least two or three episodes to get there, not least with all of the inevitable side-questing.
In the meantime, we revisit the folk from Vaults 32 and 33, which have mostly returned to peaceful normalcy in the wake of the chaos stoked by the raider invasion that kicked off season one, save for a water shortage in 33. Though there are some funny gags, like Davey’s (Leer Leary) confusion at the mirrored layout of his new vault home, and new Vault 32 overseer Stephanie (Annabel O’Hagan) stress-slicing an orange like she’s cutting someone’s throat, I’m less interested in the B-plot of the vaulties’ subterranean goings-on than I am anything happening above ground. The same goes for the predicament faced by Norm (Moisés Arias), who has been trapped in Vault 31 by Bud’s Brain-on-a-Roomba (Michael Esper). He makes pretty swift work of overpowering Bud, then decides to thaw out all of the Vault-Tec employees in cryostasis. Hey, it’s (probably) not like it’s going to make his situation any worse.
The main question overhanging the episode, and which will presumably drive much of the season, revolves around how all of the series’ players are connected to House. We’re offered somewhat of an answer insofar as the Ghoul goes in flashback to a prewar meeting between Cooper Howard and Moldaver (Sarita Choudhury), where she reveals that House is building a “privately owned missile system” in Las Vegas. In Fallout: New Vegas, we’re led to believe that said missile system is what prevented Vegas from being destroyed during the Great War with all but 11 warheads destroyed or deactivated by House before they could blow. Moldaver’s read is much more sinister: The missile system would essentially allow House to press the button himself, triggering nuclear annihilation. She wants Cooper to stop him before the world burns. “Are you asking me to spy on the wealthiest man in America?” Cooper asks. “Not spy,” Moldaver responds, with the implication of murder. Maybe the Ghoul would kill a guy without blinking an eye, but assassination seems less in Cooper’s wheelhouse.
Back on the trail for Hank, the Ghoul and Lucy come across a wrecked vault hidden behind a drive-in cinema. In its heyday, the vault seemingly hosted a macabre experiment to do with mental control and psychological reconditioning. In very One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest fashion, good ol’ American capitalists were brainwashed into embracing Red communism. (Lucy’s genuine disgust at this is hilarious; great line read from Purnell.) Hank’s interest in the vault’s research becomes clearer toward the end of the episode, when we find him in a gigantic underground Vault-Tec lab. It seems that he worked, in some capacity, for House before the war, on the same “brain-computer interface” that we saw House deploy on the RobCo workers in the episode’s opening flashback. It clearly calls into question where Hank’s loyalty actually lies; is he really the Vault-Tec company man that we’d been led to believe? Whatever the case, he might be a little late for that promotion.
Bottle Caps
• I can’t get over how brilliant the production design is in this show. Its attention to detail in adapting props and sets from the game series is unrivaled. The layout of Novac isn’t entirely accurate — Dinky is facing the wrong way, and the in-game motel doesn’t have a swimming pool — but the details that matter are perfect.
• On the Novac sequence: I’m surprised that the show dropped “Big Iron,” which is probably the most recognizable and excessively memed song from Fallout: New Vegas, so early on. But at least it was done in the most kick-ass way possible.
• I’ve watched this episode a few times now, one of which was at a screening in London. The biggest pop in the room? When the Vault-Tec rep turned up in live action in that flashback sequence.
• Maybe it’ll appear later in the season, but the Ghoul and Lucy surely would’ve passed through Goodsprings en route to Vegas. It’ll be a little surprising if the town — where you begin in Fallout: New Vegas — doesn’t appear, given it literally exists in real life in essentially the same form as it takes in-game.