Fallout and Old World Blues
The computer role-playing game Fallout chronicles the turbulent centuries after a nuclear apocalypse that has left America in ruins. As the end of the world becomes a distant memory, civilization rises from the ashes, while new factions become embroiled in dialectical conflicts deciding the future of the wasteland. If ever there was a discussion about what the Great American Game is, a game that so all-encompassingly captures the American spirit, Fallout (1997) would be a prime contender. It stares deep into the vast American abyss that is the country’s legacy, and uses the culture of the atomic age as a touchstone in dissecting the core of America’s ideals from capitalism to its eugenicist past.
The problem is that Fallout is a series decisively split into two philosophies. Bought by games industry titan Bethesda, the Fallout series is now a franchise, with merchandise, live-service games, and a popular new streaming series on Amazon Prime. Two visions of Fallouts exist simultaneously: Fallout: the politically-charged damnation of the United States, and Fallout: the brand. As an introduction to the core of Fallout, how does Amazon Prime’s Fallout preserve fidelity to the original 1997 game?
Fallout (1997) begins with a television unit displaying news of the US annexation of Canada. A power-armor-clad soldier who is waving to the camera executes a prisoner, while interspersed are commercials, advertising cars, and self-autonomous robots. The camera proceeds to zoom out, revealing the sprawled dilapidated Californian wasteland, as Ron Perlman’s gravelly voice utters the very first words of the game.
“War. War never changes.”
From the outset, it establishes the iconography of the nuclear wasteland as representative of the future of American imperialism, a perpetual engine fueled by blood and an inability to recognize its misdeeds. Like ants crawling along a Möbius strip, we’re unequivocally lost; we can’t make heads or tails of the carnage until it's too late, blinded by our selfish needs and wants. Rarely has a game captured its thesis so succinctly, and the question becomes how its silver screen adaptation converses with that thesis.
Fallout (2024) makes a unique decision that only Fallout 4 (2015) had made in the past: To visit pre-war America before the bombs dropped. Rather than taking the propaganda posters strewn across the wasteland seriously, the show does not revel in the comfort of an undestroyed America. Instead, it interrogates the insidious business culture hiding behind the facade of comfort, the lack of empathy that sealed America’s fate. The show follows Cooper Howard (Walton Goggins) as he unveils the truth behind Vault-Tec, the company responsible for constructing vaults meant to preserve the bloodlines of America before the bombs drop. He discovered that the outcome of Armageddon wasn’t sealed when the keys twisted and the launch buttons were pressed. Armageddon was guaranteed by the decisions of a select few businessmen sitting around a table, arguing about how to profit from the war effort. True peace is impossible to achieve because someone’s stocks will plummet. Armageddon is guaranteed when a parent is willing to sell the rest of the world out for their family because if they didn’t do it, someone else would. The apocalypse will come because of a simple reason: we have the vast capacity to be a sick and cruel species. America is rotten to its core.
Fallout (1997)’s sequel, Fallout: New Vegas (2010) coined an apt phrase: “Old world blues”, referring to those so obsessed with the past they can’t see the present, much less the future. Chipper to a fault, Lucy (Ella Purnell), the protagonist of the 2024 adaptation, has a bad case of the “old world blues”. Thrust out of the sheltered life within the vaults into the Californian wasteland, Lucy is the ghost of American idealism come to life. She stares into the what-was like a deer in front of headlights, frozen as reality barrels through her at 90 miles per hour. Her life thus far has been characterized by the belief that there’s nothing a good-natured talk can’t do to ease a brawl. In venturing to rescue her father, revealed to be a pre-war corporate puppet, Lucy is chasing the specters of America, a tunnel-visioned obsession that would utterly destroy the world twice over. From a macro perspective, Fallout (2024) is a show about beating Lucy’s optimism within an inch of its life through violent act after act. It’s only through seeing the world for what it is that Lucy can survive the perils of the wasteland.
Yet, there is some truth in Lucy’s naivete. While her father plans for a second nuclear holocaust as a definitive end to the warring factions of the wastes, resetting the cycle of war, Lucy’s can-do attitude is propelled by the belief that humanity has an innate ability to grow from their mistakes. In the end, by rejecting her father, she tears down the old world flag of America so perhaps something new can take its place. She rises above the selfishness that sealed humanity’s fate simply because it’s the moral thing to do.
War never changes because every faction has a new idea about how to save the world. Each one possesses an inability to look to the past and recognize where we went wrong. Lucy’s decision to forsake her father, to instead confront the powers that wrote this bloody set of laws 200 years ago, displays the potential for breaking from this cycle that the original Fallout set forth. She sees a world outside her own, redefining “old world blues” from a phrase referring to a sad, broken-down nostalgia to something that means hope and the potential of the future. While lovingly recreating the atmosphere and style of the Fallout series in ways that will encourage fan engagement and increased game sales, the show remains loyal to the rebellious spunk of the original isometric RPG as art instead of IP. It’s a surprisingly faithful reflection of the series for a show produced by the harbingers of the apocalypse.