Amazon Prime’s Fallout is the Post-Apocalyptic Escapist Comedy We Need

Stock up on your mutfruits and Nuka-Colas because Amazon Prime has dropped all eight episodes of its live action adaptation of Bethesda’s hit video game, Fallout. Hole up in your bunker and binge on the series as it follows the intertwined adventures of plucky and hopeful Vault Dweller Lucy (Ella Purnell), brash young soldier Maximus (Aaron Moten) of the Brotherhood of Steel, and the morally ambiguous mutant cowboy known only as The Ghoul (Walton Goggins). Even if you know absolutely nothing about the video game, Fallout’s phenomenal world building will transport you to the gory yet funny wasteland of post-apocalyptic alternate history America. 

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Fallout’s retrofuturistic aesthetic translates so easily to live-action that it would’ve been easy to stop there and come up with a skin-deep adaptation, but showrunners Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner take everything great about the game and turn it into something truly special. Fallout is funny without being silly and serious without being severe, playing most of its absurd concepts with a straight face and trusting its audience to be in on the joke.

Fallout works because it puts storytelling at the fore, even when it gets sidetracked by, in the show’s own words, bullshit. The premise is simple: it’s 200 years after nuclear bombs turned America into a barren, radioactive wasteland and most of the survivors are holed up in underground bunkers called Vaults. It’s the alternate ending to Oppenheimer, and the frozen-in-time Americana underground societies are inspired by an obscure black comedy from 1975 called A Boy and His Dog. The show even pays homage to the Don Johnson starrer with a giant poster of A Man and His Dog featuring Hollywood star Cooper Howard, the Clint Eastwood of the world of Fallout.

The show plays up on Western themes and the three main characters are a remix of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, with the optimistic Lucy as the show’s unerring good, while Maximus and the Ghoul take turns being bad. The irradiated, noseless mutant that is the Ghoul, of course, will always be the ugly. The effects of radioactive fallout on the human body are a literal curse in the case of The Ghoul and a metaphorical dilemma in the case of Lucy, whose naïveté and sunshine-y worldview is challenged by a dog-eat-dog (or ghoul-eat-ghoul, as it were) world with no rules.

When Lucy ventures out of her vault—very much against the wishes of her superiors and peers—to look for her father (Kyle MacLachlan) who’d been kidnapped by a mysterious raider named Moldaver (Sarita Choudhury), she unwittingly sets out on a journey of discovery. Fallout’s brilliance is in allowing us, the audience, to be part of the journey as we discover things at the same time as Lucy. She’s as clueless as we are, if a little more optimistic, having lived all her life in a controlled environment where she learned all manner of things from gymnastics to fencing to American history and ethics, which she professes is her favorite.

Lucy is the beating heart and vivid soul of Fallout, and it’s as important to see if and how a cruel world changes her as much as it is to uncover the myriad secrets of a post-apocalyptic world, not least of which being how it all came about. The video games never quite bothered with the story of how the apocalypse happened, so it’s satisfying to see a pre-Fallout world fleshed out. The show even gives an origin story to its mascot, the retro cartoon style, Monopoly man-inspired Vault Boy and his iconic thumbs up. It’s an Easter egg for fans woven so seamlessly into the story that it not only makes perfect sense, it adds unexpected depth to one of the characters, too.

A central conceit of the show is how an environment shapes the individual, such as how a resource-starved, lawless surface world gives rise to self-preserving, lawless creatures. It’s made evident again when Lucy and Maximus stumble into another Vault that happens to be just a wee bit different from the one where Lucy was raised. The Ghoul, who has survived for over 200 years and is one of the few beings who remember America as it was before the bombs dropped, is a grotesque mutant with flayed skin in a tattered cowboy’s longcoat. He is both visually and morally a corrupted version of his former self, the result of two centuries’ worth of exposure to America’s wasteland. 

Maximus, on the other hand, was raised by a fanatical, quasi-religious order called the Brotherhood of Steel, which is kind of like the atompunk lovechild of the Catholic Church and Iron-Man. Having lost his family and everyone he’s ever loved to bombs, Maximus has a lot of unresolved issues and is basically not the kind of person you’d want piloting a two-ton power suit. But just as environments change people, people change people, too, and this underpins Fallout’s sublime storytelling.

Lucy, Maximus, and the Ghoul all start to change the moment they come into each other’s lives. Lucy is told, several times, that in order to survive, she needs to think and act more like a Surface Dweller than like a naive Vault Dweller. But in today’s world of gritty television, where realism equates to being terrible people, whether it’s an incestuous family of dragon riders or baseball bat-swinging zombie killers, the characters of Fallout are a breath of fresh, radioactive air. It speaks volumes about the show’s storytelling that the repugnant, trigger-happy Ghoul is a truly likable character or that Maximus, who is unlikable by design, ends up as someone to cheer for.

And then there’s Lucy. Fallout begins and ends with Lucy, and her growth is marked by how much—or how little—she changes throughout eight episodes of dadnapper-chasing, gulper evading, killer robot thrashing, mutant colony escaping, and Knight-embracing. “Okey Dokey,” is Lucy’s mantra and battle cry; a defiant proclamation of buckling down to work, to do what needs to be done. With stellar performances from its leads, a clever and compelling storyline, and a lightheartedness that tempers all the gore, Amazon Prime’s Fallout is one of the best shows on television today and one of the best video game adaptations of all time.