I’ve finally finished the Fallout series on Amazon Prime, and it exceeded my expectations in a big way. I’m always skeptical going into something based on a video game, as a lot of movies have been absolute stinkers. But I should have known to reign in my skepticism, because while movies based on video games haven’t gone over well, TV series’ have. The Witcher, The Last of Us, and Castlevania just to name a few.
One thing I’ll tackle right away is to say, NO, you don’t have to have ever played any of the games to understand what’s going on. The show certainly has plenty of references and Easter eggs from the games that long-time fans of the franchise will love. But the show does a well enough job explaining itself to the point that people who’ve never experienced the franchise before can understand and enjoy it.
For those who’ve never played the games, the idea of Fallout is centered around the idea of a post-apocalyptic wasteland after the “Great War”. In short, the world’s major superpowers unleashed nuclear war on one another, leaving the entire world in nuclear fallout (hence the title). It’s never stated in the games who fired the first nuke, leaving who’s to blame ambiguous.
Without spoiling anything, I’ll tell you that the show works somewhat like an anthology, with different sections of an episode concentrating on different characters. In the very first episode, we’re introduced to 3 of them. Lucy, a vault-dweller; Maximus, a young soldier for the Brotherhood of Steel; and The Ghoul, a non-feral ghoul who was present when the bombs dropped.
This franchise has spawned over 5 games following separate protagonists, and in different time periods. So there’s an entire universe to explore here should they continue the series, which we now know will at very least bring us a 2nd season. But the sky is the limit on how far this series can go.
Now we wait for season 2, and the next video game installment from our friends over at Bethesda studios.
