Totally rad

The latest video game treatment to reach our screens is Fallout, Prime’s take on the beloved postnuclear RPGs. Ben Allan puts on his PipBoy and runs a scan.

IT’S 2024 and we’ve had the criticallyacclaimed prestige TV of The Last of Us, a Super Mario Bros Movie that made 1.3 billion US dollars, and an incredible Netflix show that people somehow made out of League of Legends of all things, and yet each new video game adaptation still tends to arrive as something of a dicey prospect in the minds of gamers and non-gamers alike — perhaps because we remember the likes of the previous Super Mario Bros. movie (hey, at least Bob Hoskins’ moustache looked right). So the announcement of a big-budget treatment of the venerable post-nuclear-holocaust RPG series Fallout from Prime caused some excitement, but some trepidation too. But hey, it’s here, and it’s really pretty good! Maybe we’re finally laying this collective video game curse of ours to rest.

Fallout starts with The End: in the game series’ retro-futuristic world of 2077 (think the politics, morals and aesthetic of the ’ 1950s, with a sprinkling of Jetsons- style robotics and other technology), former screen cowboy Cooper Howard (Walter Goggins, as arresting here as he generally is in everything) has been reduced to entertaining at children’s birthday parties. International tensions are evidently high, but the revellers would rather tune out the grim geopolitical circumstances — until suddenly the bombs start landing, and blissful ignorance is very definitely off the menu. It’s no-holds-barred, every-man-forhimself nuclear war, and the sight of Cooper scooping up his daughter and riding away from the mushroom clouds on horseback is the first of several indelible images we’re going to be treated to across the course of the series.

Cut to: some time later, and we’re in Vault 33, a vast underground shelter designed for people — and then, their descendants — to ride out such an apocalypse in relative comfort for centuries. It’s an insular, practical and very chipper society, frozen in the ‘‘golly-gee!’’ mode of the era of its founding. Inhabitants dutifully up-skill in a range of pursuits, mindful of their wildly optimistic collective mission to eventually refound apple-pie America on the surface, whatever state it may be be in.

Naive though they are, they haven’t survived without practical consideration of the realities of their circumstances. “Messing around with your cousin is all well and good for kids. But it’s not a sustainable long-term sexual practice, y’know?” Lucy (Ella Purnell) kindly tells her romantically-disappointed relative.

She’s decided it’s time to contribute to the vault with a family, and seeks permission from its council, led by her dad, vault overseer Hank (Kyle MacLachlan, doing another in his line of ‘‘upright Americanism with a hint of a dark undercurrent’’ roles) to marry a citizen from an interconnected vault (so as to swim in a deeper end of the genetic pool).

Permission is duly granted, and a delegation arrives from the neighbouring Vault 32. But something is up with the new arrivals, and before long Vault 33 has had a very, very bad day. Hank is frogmarched away to the outside world, and Lucy is determined to rescue him, even if it means heading to — gasp — the surface.

Meanwhile, on said surface (surprise, vault-dwellers, there are plenty of people alive up there!) Maximus (Aaron Moten), a recruit of militaristic sect The Brotherhood of Steel, is having a bad time. He itches to be properly involved in the Brotherhood’s mission, which involves ritualising steampunky suits of pre-war power armour, and using them to restore order to the lawless, irradiated wasteland. But he’s at the bottom of the pecking order, and can only seethe when his one friend is promoted to ‘‘squire’’ a power-suited ‘‘knight’’ over him. But things change — under suspicious circumstances — and Maximus ends up on the road assigned to a knight (and a comically oversized golf bag for his guns), tasked with finding a scientist (Michael Emerson) that has something everyone wants.

Which is also why some chancers elsewhere go to look up — and dig up — The Ghoul, a wasteland bounty hunter with reputation so fearsome that his current employer keeps him buried in a coffin between missions. Preserved for more 200 years by mutations caused by radiation,

The Ghoul is effectively an intelligent zombie, and a gunslinger-like figure that bears a certain resemblance to our friend Cooper Howard (minus a nose, and plus a great deal of makeup for a game Goggins). The Ghoul is soon on the trail of the scientist too, but he has some deeper motivations at play as well.

Soon our main trio have all become entangled in a picaresque post-apocalyptic pursuit of this Macguffin; Lucy wants to trade it for her father’s life, Maximus, struggling internally to be good, is out for Brotherhood cred, and The Ghoul has reasons of his own — although they are slowly revealed to us, too, as flashbacks to Cooper’s pre-war days begin to clue us in as to how the world ended up in this mess.

The scene is thus set for a darkly comical satire with bursts of extreme violence that will be very familiar to anyone that’s played Fallout games. The series offers plenty of Easter eggs for those that arrive with that familiarity; stab wounds are easily sorted out with a Stimpak injection, rad roaches run free, and there are sly nods to the VATS combat system and the sort of moment-tomoment visual storytelling that abounds in the games, where stumbling across a scene of skeletal remains can tell its own wee tale. And yes, the line you are absolutely waiting for will show up.

But you don’t need to be a gamer to get into this show. It wisely eschews the requirement to re-tell a specific story from the games to instead use the already fullyformed Fallout world, with all its neat details, for a fun exploration of the series’ ongoing theme of naive optimism vs dog-eat-dog (or giant-axolotl-eat-woman) realism, embodied in Purnell’s excellent lead turn as Lucy, who refuses to let the newly-imposed survival requirement of a certain amount of hard-nosed pragmatism destroy her sunny outlook. The circumstances under which she can still deliver the phrase ‘‘Okeydokie!’’ are a delight. Moten and Goggins also deliver great performances that sell sweaty internal conflict and baddesthombre-in-the-room swagger, respectively.

There’s the odd weird transition choice, and very little sense of geography (although the sense of characters wandering randomly around a map could be said to be in keeping with the games too), but some compelling mysteries tie it all together, and the series final simply leaves you wanting more. Bring it on, please. Let’s just not all mistakenly get the idea that the actual postnuclear-apocalypse world will be this fun.

All episodes of the first season of Fallout are now available streaming on Prime.