Fallout: Post-apocalypse now

Hindustan Times

6 days ago

The Season 1 finale of Fallout dropped a bombshell of a reveal on long-time fans of the video games on which it is based. Since the 1997 entry that kicked the franchise into gear, theories have been floated as to who launched the first nukes. Did China trigger the chain reaction that scorched the Earth? Or was it the US? The games kept the players guessing for years. The show reveals all at a war conference. No top military and government officials are in attendance. Only corporate execs in a boardroom resembling a cavernous sanctum for supervillains. Leading the meeting is Vault-Tec, a defence megacorp and government contractor that builds nuclear fallout shelters. The main item on the agenda: effecting the end of the world to increase stock prices.
For the war industry to prosper, it needs prolonged stalemates. Ceasefires and peace talks are bad for business. If the Sino-American War were to end, there would be no need for fallout shelters. But if the war were to escalate, it would make the product essential, the difference between life and death. While making the sales pitch, Vault-Tec suits Barb (Frances Turner) and Bud (Michael Esper) even argue the company has a 'fiduciary responsibility' to its shareholders to advance the doomsday clock. The ruthless logic of Fallout stems from scarcity. The war between China and the US began over the last remaining resources. As far as the evil corporatocracy is concerned, a population purge is a chance to start over with a clean slate. Collateral damage, to the profiteers, is the price of progress. Bud describes 'time' as the greatest weapon in Vault-Tec's arsenal. Once the company has outlived its competition, the world and all its resources are theirs for the taking. This brave new world will be inherited by a managerial race in line with the company vision. As part of the plan for 'a true monopoly', the cabal is presented with a ground-floor opportunity. Each of the conspirators can invest in vaults of their own, like an R&D department, to get a head start in cornering their respective markets. The vault-dwellers can be used as unknowing test subjects for whatever social experiment or market analysis.
'There's a lot of earning potential with the end of the world,' as one tech magnate says. 'Hollywood is the past. Forget Hollywood. The future, my friend, is products. You're a product. I'm a product. The end of the world is a product. For those of us who can successfully embrace that, I say the future is golden,' says an actor who sells the rights to his voice to said tech magnate to bring a line of butler robots to life. The Fallout show rings out the warnings the games didn't exactly whisper. Do not fall for the illusion that sells military spending as a national security measure instead of a war profiteering strategy. Greedy corporations will destroy the world for a bigger slice of the pie. Billionaire CEOs will build luxury bunkers and chase immortality to escape the doomsday event they accelerated, while the rest of us distract ourselves with post-apocalyptic games and shows that commodify our fears. Consolidating industries will absorb all the competition, stripping away our economic and political freedoms. No single entity should have a monopoly on power. These messages are brought to you by Amazon, the megacorp behind Fallout.
Two years ago, Christopher Nolan reignited our dread about nuclear warfare with Oppenheimer. The same unease seems to haunt his brother Jonathan as he directs a show set centuries after the Armageddon. So far, the Fallout games have reimagined California, Washington DC, Boston, Las Vegas and West Virginia among others as irradiated wastelands. The show takes us to a previously unexplored Los Angeles and its surrounding areas. Creators Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet build a fanfic starter pack that fits within the rigorous confines of canon. As viewers, tagging along with the show's three main characters is like watching the sometimes parallel, sometimes overlapping playthroughs of three different sort of gamers. There is Lucy (Ella Purnell), the lawful good vault-dweller who is in for a rude awakening. There is Maximus (Aaron Moten), the chaotic neutral opportunist. And then there is the Ghoul (Walton Goggins), the wildcard bounty hunter who does whatever he wants. The end result is a treatment that both noobs and hardcore fans can engage with
There is no hiding the chequered past of video game adaptations. Translating the strengths of an interactive medium for a passive one been no stroll through the wasteland. Role-playing games (RPGs), in particular, let you decide who you want to be, engage with the world and make choices that have consequences. A movie of around two hours cannot match the same levels of immersion. But the luxury of longer runtimes and multi-season arcs has allowed shows a lot more room to crack the code in recent years. Halo (Paramount+), Resident Evil (Netflix) and Twisted Metal (Peacock) were a tiny step up. But it was The Last of Us (HBO) that hit the reset button and gave console-to-screen adaptations an extra life.
However, the challenge for the makers of Fallout was a more difficult one. For starters, the games have a much looser structure. You may not get to choose the destination, but the character and the journey are your own. The thrill of playing a game like Fallout 3 doesn't lie in rushing through the main questline, but in freely roaming around the Wasteland and getting side-tracked. The games are meant to be experienced differently. No two players will have the exact same journey. No two games share the same protagonist. Forget continuity. The games themselves have changed over the years. Fallout 1 and its 1998 sequel were 2D isometric RPGs featuring turn-based combat. Both were PC-exclusive titles. After acquiring the rights to the franchise from Interplay, Bethesda tapped into the console gaming market with the next two instalments. The Wasteland was reborn as a 3D open world; the players got a first-person perspective; combat was enhanced with an assisted targeting system and a real-time option. The odds seemed stacked against the show. But Wagner and Robertson-Dworet seized the opportunity to create their own travelogue, a how-to-survive guide of sorts for a world of doomsday conferences and red weddings, cold fusion and junk jets, body shots and incest jokes, undead gunslingers and junk merchants, mutant bears and two-headed cows called Brahmins. (Fun fact: Microsoft reportedly chose not to release Fallout 3 in India, worried the name might be udderly problematic.)
Snark keeps the action crackling in the games and the show. Here, the sense of humour is buoyed by winning support from the likes of Matt Berry, Fred Armisen, Chris Parnell, Jon Daly, Zach Cherry, Matty Cardarople and Johnny Pemberton. Not all these comedians may be cut from the same stylistic cloth, but they ensure an ensemble-wide commitment to Fallout's quirky approach to the post-apocalypse. The alt-history of the games' in-universe freezes American society at the turn of the 1950s. But instead of semiconductor innovations sparking a revolution in electronics, advancements were made in nuclear physics. Everything, from cities to homes, is reactor-powered. Until the fight for resources escalates to nuclear warfare in 2077. Whole cities are flattened. Survivors turn to scavenging. Bottlecaps become the new currency. Medicine supplies prove critical to counter the effects of radiation-poisoned food and water. All sorts of unfriendly abominations lurk around every corner.
Safe and sound from the merciless realities above ground, generations of naive optimists in matching blue-and-yellow jumpsuits have flourished in subterranean sanctuaries. The player characters are often vault dwellers in need of a reality check. At the start of each game, players are asked to determine the S.P.E.C.I.A.L (Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, and Luck) attributes of their characters. This gameplay mechanism is depicted in the show with Vault 33 resident Lucy outlining her skills (repair, science, speech) to a special council to marry a man from the neighbouring Vault 32. Every now and again, residents from sister vaults arrange marriages and trade supplies, a practice meant to ensure a deep gene pool to restart civilisation. For generations, the residents have been taught to await Reclamation Day i.e., once the radiation levels above ground have stabilised enough for resettlement.
On her wedding day, Lucy gets an unpleasant surprise when the ceremony is infiltrated by Lee Moldaver (Sarita Choudhury) and her band of raiders from the surface. Celebrations end in a bloodbath. When her father Hank (Kyle MacLachlan) is kidnapped, Lucy leaves the safety and comfort of her underground life to brave the unforgiving wasteland. Her quest echoes the start of Fallout 3, in which the vault-dwelling player character, nicknamed the Lone Wanderer, is similarly forced to step out of the vault to track down their dad. The show stays true to the thematic spirit of the games, bringing a gee-whiz Americana to the post-apocalypse. Lucy the sheltered vault-dweller who okey-dokeys after asking her new husband about his sperm count is no less mission-driven than Lucy the out-and-about quester who okey-dokeys before revving up a chainsaw. But with each okey-dokey, you sense her innocence fading. The slight shift in tone hints at a slow curdling of her optimism. The brutalities of the wasteland pare down the pep in her step. Purnell's wide green eyes reflect the self-assurance and innocence of a model citizen who has been drip-fed positive affirmations all their life. Having been raised in a controlled environment, Lucy has never experienced real hardship. Once outside the vault, she goes around exploring, making conversation with strangers, and gets drawn into disputes and subplots — echoing the actions of a player acquainting themselves with the realm. When she runs into a near-immortal bounty hunter known as the Ghoul, it will be the first real test of her convictions and her childlike trust in the goodness of others. The Ghoul has prowled the Wasteland for going on two centuries. Before the bombs fell and the radiation turned him into a mutant, he was an actor named Cooper Howard and married to Vault-Tec exec Barb (yes, the very same one). Goggins has the rare ability to make the world around him more tactile. When he is Cooper, the alt-history of Fallout seems more convincing. When he transforms into the Ghoul, the future feels unforeseeable.
Elsewhere, Maximus, a conflicted trainee soldier in the Brotherhood of Steel, is on a journey of his own in search of purpose and a place to belong. The Brotherhood is a paramilitary faction galvanized by the self-proclaimed noble mission to preserve technology and rekindle the spark of civilisation. When Maximus is tasked to retrieve a pre-War technology, he crosses paths with Lucy and the Ghoul. With this being the comically brutal world of Fallout, the pre-war tech turns out to be cold fusion, the solution to which lies in the severed head of Dr. Siggi Wilzig (Michael Emerson), a scientist working for the Enclave, the big bad shadow government formed by remnants of the American deep state. Siggi had been carrying out unauthorized research into cold fusion. When the Enclave found out, he has no choice but to defect and escape. A bounty is issued for his head. A manhunt is launched. All because he had pieced together the code to a limitless power source.
Cold fusion may be largely dismissed in our own world. But in Fallout, the hypothesis had become fact. We learn in the penultimate episode of the season that the ostensible antagonist Moldaver had found the solution way back in the pre-War days. The clean renewable energy of her cold fusion tech could have ended the war over resources. Vault-Tec, however, bought the research and shelved it so it didn't threaten their genocidal masterplan. Years after the nuclear holocaust, the tiny settlement of Shady Sands formed out of the ruins. The settlement expanded into a city over time and the city expanded into the city-state of the New California Republic (NCR). Between Fallout 1 and Fallout: New Vegas, close to 35,000 people had made Shady Sands their home. Until Lucy's dad Hank, also a Vault-Tec exec, nuked the city till it was nothing but a crater. Because it didn't fit in with the company mission. Beaten but not broken, NCR resident Moldaver rallied together the survivors and allies, promising salvation as their Flame Mother. Out of the ruins of the LA wasteland, she hopes to use the recovered code for cold fusion tech to power a new society in her vision.
'War never changes,' the franchise's repeated refrain about mankind trapped in a destructive pattern, comes across as a crude rationalisation for the self-serving agendas of the capitalist class. To suggest scarcity makes conflict inescapable is a way to mitigate blame for their starring role in bringing about the end of the world. Seeing as he has lived through plenty of conflicts for more than 200 years, when Cooper delivers the through line, the words take on an even bleaker tone, like the skies will always be thick with ill omen. Flashbacks reveal it was a younger Moldaver (then named Miss Williams) who helped Cooper open his eyes to his wife and Vault-Tec's monopoly games. Cooper was the company spokesman at the time. Learning about Barb's involvement in the Vault-Tec conspiracy, however, created a rift that culminated in a divorce. Moments before the bombs fall on Los Angeles, he is seen working as a cowboy-for-hire with his daughter at a children's birthday party.
The show finds clever ways to ditto the gameplay. Pip-boys, in the games, are like smart watches that display player stats, radiation levels, inventory and maps. The show adds a few communication features. The council sends marriage approval and vault reassignment notifications via the device. A pre-War Cooper uses it to spy on his wife. Slow motion recreates the effect of time freezing to allow players to take more precise headshots and bodyshots. The camera follows the trajectory of a bullet fired from the gun all the way to the target.
Underscoring the retro in the retro-futuristic world of Fallout is a soundtrack of classics from the 30s, 40s and 50s. Action set pieces unfold to the sounds of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Some Enchanted Evening, The Platters' Only You and Nat King Cole's I Don't Want To See Tomorrow. The needle drops on I Don't Want To Set The World On Fire — which could very well be considered the unofficial theme of the franchise — when Lucy fires up a chainsaw for a gory undertaking. We Three (My Echo, My Shadow, And Me) bookends the season as the closing images set the stage for whatever comes next.
The history of Fallout emphasises a truth about our own world: corporations are not in the business of saving the world. The first order of business is always more profits, which means constant expansion in a world of finite resources. Our anxieties today may not stem from a threat of nuclear annihilation. But a cloud of panic mushrooms over climate change, pandemics, artificial intelligence, societal polarisation, economic insecurity, you name it. That such a system is inherently unsustainable doesn't concern the overlords because they have got an escape vault ready and waiting in the event of conflict. The competitors, whom Bud describes as 'every other human who isn't us', don't matter.
The good news is Season 2 of Fallout has finished filming and is expected to drop next year. When that happens, remember to grab yourself a bottle of Nuka Cola and stream the end of the world on Amazon Prime Video.
Prahlad Srihari is a film and pop culture writer. He lives in Bangalore.