(courtesy IMP Awards)
Apocalypses are not generally laugh-out-loud affairs, what with all the death, destruction, end of civilisation hanging over everything and such, and Fallout, based on the role-playing video game of the same name, is not, for the most part an exception.
Set roughly two hundred or so years into the future after humanity has nuclear bombed itself into near oblivion, Fallout is, as you might expect, often very bleak and dark, with the worst of what’s left of the huamn race on graphic display.
It’s not pretty, and that holds for peoples’ hearts as much as a dessicated dead environment, and its full of weird militaristic cults, weird mutated lifeforms (including giant cockroaches; start stockpiling that jumbo bug spray now people), sociopathic lifeforms calls Ghouls who have outlived many of the people around them and have the surly attitude to match and vaults full of survivors who survive in 100 or so locations across America and are super polite and caught in a retro ’50s time warp.
It’s strange, its dark and as the eight episodes of season one go on – season two has already been confirmed so rejoice and be radioactively glad – all of them filmed in Namibia, but it’s also very, VERY funny.
Hilarious, in fact and often at point where you’d expect there is not a giggle or a guffaw to be had.
Much of that weird juxtaposition of death and hilarity comes courtesy of the liberal use of retro songs like “Orange Colored Sky” by Nat King Cole, used in the first episode as world-ending bombs fall, “Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall” by The Ink Spots featuring Ella Fitzgerald, a wry piece of musical commentary on life getting far more than a little bleakness poured onto it, and “I Don’t Want To See Tomorrow” by Nat King Cole which underlines, in the finale, after a slew of deathly awful revelations to protagonist Lucy Maclean (Ella Purnell) that going on in a world this terrible requires a huge amount of pushing back on just giving up.
The genius in the way series’ creators Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dwore use humour to punctuate some truly horrific moments in the show’s narrative is that, far from making light of something quite terrible, their dark humourous musical placements actually accent the sheer dreadfulness of what’s going on.
They also play up that for all the bright and happy talk of the vault dwellers, who have lived underground for two hundred years in jelly cake eating bliss waiting for the moment they can re-populate and re-civilise the Earth, there’s some real darkness at work in the hearts of humanity still, and that no amount of mindlessly happy waves and use of deliberately cheery jargon is going to obscure that.
Fallout initially presents the vault dwellers as the very best of us but then rather cleverly begins to reveal that something is extremely rotten in a post-apolcalyptic state of Denmark, or irradiated L.A. anyway, and that maybe all that bright and shiny talk of better tomorrows etc is nothing more than a smokescreen for something quite awful lurking just below a glittery, PR-heavy surface.
Just how dark things are is given a real reveal assist by judiciously-used flashbacks to the 21st century, 2077 in fact, where we see what led to the current state of bombed-out affairs, and how far from being victims of realpolitik happenstance run disastrously out of control, that humanity, and specifically capitalism as mercenary religion, has much of the blame to shoulder.
Without giving too much away, and honestly the reveals are brilliantly done, with all that mystery swirling around the vaults and life above them given all the answers you could ask for, suffice to say that if you have wondered just how far shareholder-driven businesspeople could go in pursuit of every greater profits and control, then Fallout and its broken, orange-baked world is your terrifying answer.
The one who finds out how different reality is from spin is Lucy, who leaves the relative safety of Vault 33 – everyone wears jaunty blue jumpsuits with 33 emblazoned in eye-catching giant yellow on the back – in search of her kidnapped father and the vault’s overseer or leader, Hank (Kyle MacLachlan) who is taken by raiders who enter Lucy’s once-impregnable home and shake the underground dwellers sense of security to its once-solid, idealistically-rooted core.
She’s been told there’s nothing up there at all but there’s plenty – lawlessness, hellish living conditions and people like The Ghoul (Walt Goggins), a noseless horror of a corpse-like soul who roams the wastelands of once-was-California as a bounty hunter and who is what’s bitterly left of onetime Hollywood star Cooper Howard whose wife, Barb (Frances Turner) is an executive at Vault-Tec, the company behind the vaults who may, or may not, have had something to do with engineering the world simply to turn a profit.
Crucially Howard/The Ghoul was once a much-loved bigscreen cowboy, dispensing justice to those who wreaked hell in the cinematic Wild West, and while he initially comes across as a bad guy, it turns out he may be actually one of the few people with an admittedly twisted moral code still in place.
Also making claims to some sort of future human purity of purpose is the Brotherhood of Steel, a militant cult that has taken the robotic soldiers of a near-future Earth and used them and a whole lot extant tech from 2077, which is all Fifties retro fabulousness until it’s not, to enforce their unforgivingly brutalist rule on the harried populace of what remains of a near-barren California.
While all of this is happening, back home in Vault 33, Lucy’s brother Norm (Moises Arias) is digging down deep into the underbelly of his squeaky, shiny happy world and discovering that all those cheery bon mots and giddily happy socialising mask a world rotten right to its very fetid core.
While Lucy thinks she’s walking into the world promised by vault spin as empty and lifeless, she’s actually strolling, ideals still held firmly in place, into a battleground between The Brotherhood, a gang led by the name of Moldaver (Sarita Choudhury), who has a strange connection to Hank, and those behind the vaults who have rather more blood on their hands than any of their spin doctors would like to admit.
It’s this collision of idealism and reality which powers Fallout, a show based on a video game that turns the apocalypse on its head by reasoning that for all the existential threats we are facing right now that it might just be us, and our love for capitalistic parlour games of profit, that could be the biggest dagger of all hanging over our heads.
Lucy eventually gets some help from Brotherhood of Steel dissenter Maximus (Aaron Moten) in her quest to find her dad, which involves a rotting head, some giant salamander fishing and exchanges with surface-dwelling survivors who don’t favour politeness like Lucy does as much as sneaky gunfire, but what seems like a simple snatch-and-grab soon becomes way more complicated, way darker and way more bleakly, fantastically clever and thrillingly imaginative.
The thing that makes Fallout so damn compulsively watchable is that it adroitly balances dark, twisty mystery and behind-the-scenes plotting on an epic scale with revelatorily funny moments that serve to amp up the darkness rather than lessen it, and some truly moving moments that underscore that for its neo-Western weirdness and far-future strangeness that not much has changed in the broken hearts of humanity and that what might have been a new beginning, a nuclear reset of sorts, is really just more of the same, sad story that got us into this whole mess to begin with.
Fallout streams on Prime Video.