Fallout (2024)
I found myself with more free time than I was expecting last weekend, and as I was also lacking in appropriate supervision, I “accidentally” watched all eight episodes of the new Fallout tv show.
I liked it! I liked a lot. It was fun, exciting, funny, great cast, looked amazing. But I’ve been wrestling with this post a little, because this is one of those weird bits of art where I genuinely liked it, I enjoyed watching it, and yet find myself with mostly only critical things to say.
Let’s get my biggest surprise out of the way first: Ron Perlman wasn’t in it. It’s a weird omission, considering how closely his voice is associated with the source material. Without getting too heavy into the spoilers, there was a scene near the end where a character looks over at a shadowy figure, and I thought to myself, “this is perfect, Ron is going to lean into the light, look the camera right in the eye and say the line.” And instead the shadowy figure stayed there and that other character looked the camera in the eye and said the line. Maybe it was a scheduling thing, and he was too busy teaching people how many ways there are to lose a house?
But okay, what did I like?
I liked the three main characters very much. Lucy, the most main of the main three manages to hit the very tricky spot of being “naïve”, but not “stupid” or “incompetent.” She’s just got a different set of experiences and skills than everyone else, but she learns fast and she figures out how to apply those skills to the new situations she finds herself in. She also manages the equally tricky maneuver of being a genuinely good person who stays a genuinely good person as the world around her gets weirder and more complex. She pretty much consistently finds the right reasons to do the right things, no matter how morally gray the world around her gets. She also looks remarkably like the starting model for the player character in the first game.
Maximus, on the other hand, manages to covey a sense of always being morally ambiguous and compromised no matter what he’s doing. It’s also a tricky performance, a character whose always likable despite the audience never really knowing why he’s doing what he’s doing. He’s always thinking, but you never know about what.
Rounding out the triptych of leads is The Ghoul, who is clearly designed to be everyone’s favorite character—the sort of hyper-competent amoral badass gunslinger thats always fun to watch. In addition, he’s played by Walton Goggins, who dials the goggins-o-meter all the way up to 11 and seems to be having an absolute blast. Goggins effectively plays two roles—the Ghoul in the post-apocalyptic present of the show, and Cooper Howard, the fading western actor-turned Vault-Tec spokesman in world before the bombs drop.
But the rest of the cast is outstanding as well. Everyone is great, they get the tone they’re supposed to be going for. And then, special mention for Kyle McLachlan—that’s right, hero to children Dale Cooper himself—who shows up for a tiny part right at the start and again at the end, and just absolutely owns the room. I’m not sure any actor has ever “understood the assignment” more than Kyle does in this.
My favorite parts of the show were those flashbacks to the world before the war—a world where there are robots and futuristic cars, but it’s been the 50s for a century. The production design here is outstanding; at first glance it’s the 50s, trilbies, poodle skirts, but with just enough high-tech stuff around the edges to produce a subtle dissonance. And then the show opens with every nightmare we had as kids growing up in the cold war.
Mostly, the show is those three out in the wasteland, paths intersecting, running into weird stuff. Their relative goals are less important—and frankly, underbaked—compared to them bouncing off each other and the various dangers of their world. The maguffin itself feels almost perfunctory, we have to have one for genre reasons, so this’ll do. The star attraction is the wasteland itself, a Mad Max meets spaghetti western desert full of monsters, mutants, skeletons. Whenever the show was about those three out having crazy sidequest adventures, following “the golden rule”, it sang.
But let’s step back and talk about Fallout as a whole for a sec. To recap: Fallout is a series of CRPG video games. The first kicked off the late 90s renaissance of “western-style” CRPGs. Fallout acts as kind of the “parent dojo” for a lot of the CRPG world; the leads for the first game would go on to form Troika Games, the team that made Fallout 2 would form the nucleus of Black Isle studios inside Interplay, which also worked with and helped launch Bioware with Baldur’s Gate. A Fallout 3 was in the early stages, but cancelled as Interplay finished going out of business.
After Interplay imploded, Bethesda picked up the rights to the series in the fire sale, and ten years later published Fallout 3. Meanwhile, many of the crew from Black Isle had reformed as Obsidian Entertainment, which would then work with Bethesda to make Fallout: New Vegas with a team composed of many of the people who worked on the original cancelled Fallout 3, and using some of the same designs. Finally, this was all capped off with Fallout 4 once again by Bethesda.
The point to all that is that the series is five games, each made by different people, at different companies, starring different characters, all with different tones and takes on the material, across nearly 20 years. I think it’s best thought of as an anthology series riffing on the same concepts rather than any sort of single vision or viewpoint. There’s a few core pieces—that mad max–meets–westerns wasteland, vaults full of elites waiting out the end of the world, mutant monsters, and a tone described as “satirical” by people who think that’s just a fancy synonym for “dark humor”—but otherwise, each game does its own thing.
How do you adapt all that in to 8 episodes on Amazon Prime? This adaptation makes a really interesting choice, in that rather than directly adapting any of the plots of the previous games, or mix-and-matching elements from them, it tells a new story with new characters in the same world. It’s effectively “Fallout 5”. This turns out to be a great idea, and it’s one I can’t believe more video game adaptations haven’t done.
It also, in a pleasant surprise in this age of prequels, is set after the other games, so those stories are vaguely treated as having “happened” and then here are some things that happened next.
As such, the show gives itself the flexibility to pick and choose various bits from the games to use or not, as well as threading new new inventions. It manages to hit a sort of “median-value” Fallout vibe, equidistant from all the games, which is a harder accomplishment than it makes it look.
Tone-wise the show settles on something best summed up as “Diet Westworld”. Because, of course, this is made by the same team that made the “stayed on too long” Westworld for HBO and the “killed too soon” The Peripheral for Amazon.
It has a lot in common with Westworld: multiple characters stories interweaving, a story that plays out in two time periods, The Ghoul is who Ed Harris’ Man in Black wanted to be when he grew up, a sort of jovial nihilism. It’s not simplified so much as streamlined, the time periods are obvious, the list of characters is shorter.
It definitely inherits Westworld’s desire to have everything be the result of one mystery of another, it’s a show that constantly wants to be opening locked boxes to find another locked box inside.
And this is too bad, because for me, Fallout is one of those settings that works much better when it’s operating a vibes-over-lore mode. You’re out in the wasteland, and it’s full of weird stuff that no one can explain, because anyone who could died before we were born, and we’ve got better things to do than speculate. Why are these vaults here? Grandma’s notes don’t say. Rad scorpions, huh? Yeah, they seem bad. Super-mutants? Yeah, don’t get near them.
Unfortunately, the games, and now the show, have trended more towards the “explain everything and fill in every detail” school of design, which… sure. It’s fine. I bring this up because the show leans hard into my single least favorite corner of the setting, namely that Vault-Tec, the company that built the vaults, was Up To Something, and Dark Secrets Abound. And this has always made me make a kind of exasperated sound and throw my hands up in the air because, really? “A third of a percent of the population decided to wait out the end of the world in luxury apartments while everyone else did the work to survive and the rebuild, so their grandchildren could emerge and take over” wasn’t enough satirical payload for you? You had to also make them Lex Luthor? And this is probably because this happened during Peak X-Files, and wheels-within-wheels conspiracies were cool and trendy in the late 90s, but now that just makes me tired.
The show even kisses up against the Thumb Thing. Let me explain. The mascot of both the franchise and Vault-Tec is the Vault Boy, a 50s-esque smiling cartoon character usually shown throwing a thumbs-up. No matter how bad things get, there’s the Vault-Boy, happy as can be.
There’s this urban rumor meets fan theory that the reason the Vault-Boy has his thumb up is that this is a way to gauge how close you are to an atomic bomb going off; if the mushroom cloud is smaller than your thumb, you have time to get to shelter. And, this is the most Lore Brain thing I’ve ever heard. Of course that’s not why he has his thumb up, he’s doing that because it’s funny to have a relentlessly optimistic cartoon character in the face of the terrible horrors of the aftermath of a nuclear war. But the people poisoned with Lore Brain need everything to Mean Something, so this rumor persists, until the show dances right up to the edge of endorsing it. And this drives me crazy, because not everything needs to have some complicated explanation you can read about in the wiki, stuff can just be thematic, you know?
The show also picked up Westworld’s (and The Peripheral’s) grim sense of humor. I preferred the Fallout games when they were on the funnier end of the spectrum, and I could have gone with a funnier show. It’s not not funny, but it’s also a show that cast Matt Berry in a fully serious part, which feels wasteful.
And a final thing Fallout inherited from Westworld is the “adult-ness” of the content. I promise I’m not one of those weirdoes that thinks movies shouldn’t have sex scenes, but my hottest take is that most movies would be better one rating lower than they are. And normally, this wouldn’t bug me, except I have a 12-year old at home who loves Fallout, and I can’t in good conscience show him the show.
Because I lied up at the top, I didn’t just happen to watch it over a weekend, I previewed the first part to see if I could watch it with the kids, realized that the answer was “…probably not?” and then jammed the rest of the show to see if I was right.
And what really grinds my gears about that is the content is only barely over the line into that TV-MA / R level, it wouldn’t have taken that much to knock it down to a stiff PG-13. And, like, if you’re going to go “adult”, go all the way, you know? I kept grumbling “pick a lane!” under my breath while watching it; it kept feeling like one of those 80s movies that threw one dramatic stabbing or topless scene in just to get their PG movie up into R so the teenagers wouldn’t think they’d gone soft. If you’re not going to let my kid watch it, go full Robocop, you know? Or, more to the point, full Westworld.
Because, unlike Westworld, none of that stuff mattered! Whereas Westworld was fundamentally The Writer's Barely-Disguised Fetish (In Color!), here it’s all basically frosting. You could have cut around it, or panned away, and really not lost anything. On the other hand, if I’m honest, it wasn’t the mild sexy stuff or the CG gore that tipped it over the line to “nope, wait til he’s older”, it’s that there’s a sequence halfway through the first episode that’s every nightmare he’s ever had about a school shooting. And in fairness, that part is key to the plot the way the sexytimes and cartoon gore is not, so this is where I throw my hands up and say Libya is a land of contrasts, and that I get it, I really do, but I would have really preferred watching this show with my kid than not.
And my final gripe I’m going to air out here is that the show ended up with a worse case of Surf Dracula syndrome than it originally looked like it was going to have. She gets out of the vault in the first episode, but then the last episode ends on a note that’s clearly supposed to tease the next season, but instead feels more like they’ve finally arrived at the premise of the show. There’s a much better version of this show that got to that set of plot beats at the end of the first hour and built up from there.
Or to put that a different way, it feels like the show ended at the end of the first act of the main quest-line, after mostly draining side quests.
TV is in a weird place right now, and Fallout reflects the current anxiety over the form. It’s certainly not a old-style traditional episodic show, but nor is it the “badly-paced 8-hour movie” so many streaming shows tend to be, nor does it manage “heavily serialized but every episode does it’s own thing” as well as Westworld did. Instead it lands somewhere in the middle of all of that, and ends up feeling like a show that’s both very busy but also killing time until the next season.
And I don’t think dropping the whole show at once did them any favors. Whereas Westworld dominated the conversation for weeks at a time, this show is almost impossible to talk about, because everyone has seen a different number of episodes, so instead of talking about anything interesting, the web swirls around Vault-Boy’s thumb and dates on chalkboards. There’s a lot to talk about, and I notice every website that might want to talk about them already have the quality of walking back into the room saying “…and another thing!” long after the conversation was over.
I’m getting dangerously close to saying “I wish they had made a different show,” but I wish they’d leaned a little harder into the 50s aesthetics and had each episode be standalone new wacky adventures every week with the premise explained by the words to the theme song.
And this is all the nature of the medium here in 2024, but I really wish that last “okey-dokey” felt earned, that it felt like a punch-the-air climax to what had come before, instead of feeling like Dracula was finally getting his surfboard out.
“And Then My Reward Was More Crunch”
For reasons that are probably contextually obvious, I spent the weekend diving into Tim Cain’s YouTube Channel. Tim Cain is still probably best known as “the guy who did the first Fallout,” but he spent decades working on phenominal games. He’s semi-retired these days, and rather than write memoirs, he’s got a “stories from the old days” YouTube channel, and it’s fantastic.
Fallout is one of those bits of art that seems to accrete urban legends. One of the joys of his channel has been having one of the people who was really there say “let me tell you what really happened.”
One of the more infamous beats around Fallout was that Cain and the other leads of the first Fallout left partway through development of Fallout 2 and founded Troika Games. What happened there? Fallout was a hit, and it’s from the outside it’s always been baffling that Interplay just let the people who made it… walk out the door?
I’m late to this particular party, but a couple months ago Cain went on the record with what happened:
and a key postscript:
Listening To My Stories With Nuance
…And oh man, did that hit me where I live, because something very similar happened to me once.
Several lifetimes ago. I was the lead on one of those strange projects that happen in corporate America where it absolutely had to happen, but it wasn’t considered important enough to actually put people or resources on it. We had to completely retool a legacy system by a hard deadline or lose a pretty substantial revenue stream, but it wasn’t one of the big sexy projects, so my tiny team basically got told to figure it out and left alone for the better part of two years.
Theoretically the lack of “adult supervision” gaves us a bunch of flexibility, but in practice it was a hige impediment every time we needed help or resources or infrastructure. It came down to the wire, but we pulled it off, mostly by sheer willpower. It was one of those miracles you can sometimes manage to pull off; we hit the date, stayed in budget, produced a higher-quality system with more features that was easier to maintain and build on. Not only that, but transition from the old system to the new went off with barely a ripple, and we replaced a system that was constantly falling over with one that last I heard was still running on years of 100% uptime. The end was nearly a year-long sprint, barely getting it over the finish line. We were all exhausted, I was about ready to die.
And the reward was: nothing. No recognition, no bonus, no time off, the promotion that kept getting talked about evaporated. Even the corp-standard “keep inflation at bay” raise was not only lower than I expected but lower than I was told it was going to be; when I asked about that, the answer was “oh, someone wrote the wrong number down the first time, don’t worry about it.”
I’m, uh, gonna worry about it a little bit, if that’s all the same to you, actually.
Morale was low, is what I’m saying.
But the real “lemon juice in the papercut” moment was the next project. We needed to do something similar to the next legacy system over, and now armed with the results of the past two years, I went in to talk about how that was going to go. I didn’t want to do that next one at all, and said so. I also thought maybe I had earned the right to move up to one of the projects that people did care about? But no, we really want you do run this one too. Okay, fine. It’s nice to be wanted, I guess?
It was, roughly, four times as much work as the previous, and it needed to get done in about the same amount of of time. Keeping in mind we barely made it the first time, I said, okay, here’s what we need to do to pull this off, here’s the support I need, the people, here’s my plan to land this thing. There’s aways more than one way to get something done, I either needed some more time, or more people, I had some underperformers on the team I needed rotated out. And got told, no, you can’t have any version of that. We have a hard deadline, you can’t have any more people, you have to keep the dead weight. Just find a way to get four times as much work done with what you have in less time. Maybe just keep working crazy hours? All with a tone that I can’t possibly know what I’m talking about.
And this is the part of Tim Cain’s story I really vibrated with. I had pulled off a miracle, and the only reward was more crunch. I remember sitting in my boss’s boss’s office, thinking to myself “why would I do this? Why would they even think I would say yes to this?”
Then, they had the unmitigated gall to be surprised when I took another job offer.
I wasn’t the only person that left. The punchline, and you can probably see this coming, is that it didn’t ship for years after that hard deadline and they had to throw way more people on it after all.
But, okay, other than general commiserating with an internet stranger about past jobs, why bring all this up? What’s the point?
Because this is exactly what I was talking about on Friday in Getting Less out of People. Because we didn’t get a whole lot of back story with Barry. What’s going on with that guy?
The focus was on getting Maria to be like Barry, but does does Barry want to be like Barry? Does he feel like he’s being taken advantage of? Is he expecting a reward and then a return to normal while you’re focusing on getting Maria to spend less time on her novel and more time on unpaid overtime? What’s he gonna do when he realizes that what he thinks is “crunch” is what you think is “higher performing”?
There’s a tendency to think of productivity like a ratchet; more story points, more velocity, more whatever. Number go up! But people will always find an equilibrium. The key to real success to to figure out how to provide that equilibrium to your people, because if you don’t, someone else will.