My Fallout With Fallout
and the long half-life of TV tropes
Ah me, the stars, the ratings.
A cavalcade of happy viewers it seems has been wending its way down the boulevard of TV offerings, with streamers flying and confetti in the air in high praise of Prime’s Fallout—the stuff of Emmy awards, 8.5 ratings and a second season.
Then there’s me with my raised-eyebrow skepticism.
I admit I’ve been sitting on this essay for quite a while, but I want to weigh in however belatedly. I’m still wondering if the high ratings are a bandwagon fallacy1 thing, or if I’m just being a big rain-on-the-parade doomer.
Let’s see some of the specific things that don’t work for me…
[SPOILERS AHEAD]
Tone - so, which is it: jokey, tongue-in-cheek satire, or strange, dystopian menace?
Imdb has this classified as a drama. Fallout opens at a kid’s birthday party, interrupted, not by some drunk uncle, but a huge honkin’ mushroom cloud. Cut to two hundred years later, we’re introduced to the happy-camper residents of Vault 33, replete with cutesy-retro set design and a fake mid-western sun, gingham picnic tables, and no cussing. In the first of many borrowings from its betters, Fallout posits a world frozen in the fifties, catapulted into the future à la Brazil (1985) and its forties vibe.
If this really is a drama, it’s not, say, Silo (2023-), adapted from the book series, and which takes place in exactly the same scenario but with dead serious stakes, a.k.a. real drama. No, Fallout is a live-action cartoon, the point of which is fun, fun, fun.
And I’m not saying Fallout isn’t fun and entertaining, or that I didn’t laugh because, you know, it’s all fun and games in this version of the post-apocalyptic world. It comes to us via “Fallout” the video game. Nuclear holocaust? Yep. Giant cockroaches? You betcha. Survivors underground (the good guys?) Mad Max wasteland above? All present and accounted for. Throw in Zombies who look like meth addicts prior to reconstructive surgery, and a head. Voilà, you have a straight up Amazon banger. Sort of. It’s amusing, as long as you don’t realize how derivative it is.
That head had me reminiscing about the 70s film* :
*(Sorry, but when it comes to head-shaped Macguffins, nothing compares to the one in this Sam Peckinpah movie.)
Fallout the TV series starts out being action-packed but cute, humorous and sort of jazzy. It has silly rubber monsters threatening a young girl who just wants to find her papa. In trying not to bore the kiddies, it forgoes making anything feel real until the season finale, where Lucy is crying, her father is lying and the baddie-turned-goodie is dying. Walton Goggins as the pre-apoc actor, Cooper Howard, and post-apoc antagonist, The Ghoul, is the only one who means business throughout, but even his role gets soggy.
My point is, I’m not sure you can weave in and out of the two tones without ruining both, and yet Fallout tries to do just that: to mix naivete with violence and existential menace with keeping shit tap-dancingly humorous without the sarcastic bite that Terry Gilliam knew you need to pull that off. It seems to me that the best work in any genre is made with a respect for tonal consistency. The Life of Brian or Shaun of the Dead are great examples of that.
Pastiche-o-rama World-building
If you are a film/TV buff, the show will remind you of many, many things. The use of 50’s pop tunes to contrast the violence has been roundly admired, as if this idea hadn’t become sort of standard for this genre. One of the most iconic scenes in movie history, the finale of Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964) was probably the first.
In Brazil, Terry Gilliam turns the 1939 samba, Aquarela do Brazil (Ary Barroso) into a leitmotif that returns throughout the soundtrack in a variety of styles to signal changes in tone. Brilliant work there. ICYM-them, here are other amazing uses of incongruous music accompanying distressing or violent scenes to convey irony:
Singing in the Rain", (Gene Kelly/Stanley Donan) sung by Alex the droog, during an assault/rape scene in A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick, (1971)
“Layla” outro, (The Kinks) Dead bodies turn up all over town, as a Noir voice-over explains what’s what; Goodfellas, (1990)
“Stuck In The Middle With You”, (Stealer’s Wheel), Torture scene, Reservoir Dogs, (1992)
Hip to Be Square’, Hughie Lewis and the News, ax murder scene; American Psycho, directed by Mary Harran, (2000)
“Don't Stop Me Now” (Queen), Shawn of the Dead (2004) ; the zombie bar fight scene
Oh, yeah and Mr. Sandman. (Back to the Future, also 1985) So yes, the music in Fallout is great, but on top of what I’ve just said, the music style decision happens to come straight from the video game design, (purloined from the above) so this is strictly reheated, two-day-old refried beans.
Other leftovers. The above ground world is an extended joke about how crude and brutal existence has become. But a few breakfasting skeletons, and a bullshit post-apoc souk with flat-joke spare parts and roaches the size of a Jack Russell is just meh if you compare that with what George Miller has done. Not comedy, I’m aware of that, but still.
Before I launch into the next point, I’m hereby exonerating Michael Emerson and that wonderful, tremulous voice of his. He is funny in this, but TBH, he has such an advantage as a character actor. You’re rooting for him before he even does anything or opens his mouth to speak. My theory is that it’s because he’s a call back to Mr. Peabody. (Who didn’t love that guy…) Dr. Wilzig sets things up just fine and then turns himself into the aforementioned MacGuffin.
Underdeveloped Characters
Here is where the trope machine is whirring at top speed, mixing, blending, spitting out characters that seem as automatic as E25, or what you press in a vending machine for an egg salad sandwich.
LUCY (Ella Purnell)
The game Fallout offers gamers the Lucy character as a telekinetic-dominant and photo-kinetic, a “psyker”, which, according to one of the many wiki sites dedicated to the video game, is a person who possesses paranormal and psychic powers that are products of the latent radiation and FEV, an artificial virus created by West Tek, and found in the environment of the post-nuclear world. That would have been so cool!
Instead, the TV show sticks with the narrative where Lucy is a naive newcomer, fresh out of the vault, willing to raw-dog it above ground while maintaining the best of her Vault Values, which turns out to be a kitschy kitchen sink cocktail of:
The wide-eyed idealist/the skilled, but naive newcomer/the future badass/50s Daddy’s girl/Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Maybe even the Girl Next Door, from over in Vault 33. And last name, MacClean, yeah right, we get it, as in squeaky.
That’s a lot of tropes. I mean, is this a strategy? Something like, if you can’t help using a hackneyed trope, just use ‘em all and see what sticks? We could invent a new name for this one: the Déjà Vu Girl trope.
LEE MOLDAVER (Sarita Choudhury)
This was such a waste of talent. This character is off-screen for practically the whole season, basically your busy spouse who you pass in the corridor with a “Hi—Bye”. Problem here: the Hi part wasn’t really threatening enough because we don’t get a clear idea right away of how taking the Vault 33 Chief ups the stakes, so when Moldaver is hastily revealed in the LAST EPISODE as a good guy, and then gets killed just-like-that, you can’t really get too worked up about it. You have nothing invested there.
MAXIMUS
Aaron Moten is stuck playing an anti-hero of the feckless variety, an ineffectual good egg. Victim of circumstances. I couldn’t sympathize with or believe in him, and when the love interest develops, I found it both rushed and contrived. Like kids making the two dolls kiss, we got some kind of romance thing tacked on to an arc that wasn’t going anywhere. It’s the script and perhaps the actor. I don’t imagined he could triumph with the writers in the room going, “What can we do with this guy besides killing him off?” Poor guy! The quest for the head was not a strong enough thread.
OTHER GRIPES
Maybe this is a pet peeve of mine, but I don’t like when characters change their stripes with no arc to support that. Ebenezer Scrooge goes from rotten bastard to angelic humanitarian, but the meat of that story is showing how that happened. If you’re bad, stay that way, FFS. I want to believe in what I’m wasting my precious time watching. I’m referring to:
THE GHOUL (Walton Goggins)
Terrific work here, and like a great bass player, he’s actually the one holding up the whole shebang, so, another pass on my part for him. There’s just that one thing: I never saw Schwarzenegger’s Terminator character team up with any of his victims…
MY BIGGEST QUESTION FOR THE SHOWRUNNERS:
Who are we meant to root for?? The Vaulters? The star-crossed lovers, Maximus and Lucy? The baddy-turned-revolutionary-hero, Moldaver? Oh wait, she’s dead. Just Lucy?
Heck if I know.
Maybe S2 will make everything less criminally disconnected, but I’m still fuming about Tokyo Vice. That’s a drama. Silo is a drama.
MY BIGGEST CONCERN WITH SHOWS LIKE THIS ONE:
Like Twister, which is a fun-and-games film with tornadoes and zero mention of climate change, Fallout is in the business of getting us comfy-cozy with the idea that the end of the world as we know it is funny.
And it is, right? Hilarious.
If it get great ratings, it MUST be good.
Thanks much for this. I’m glad you were able to put my Fallout disappointment into words better than I.