“So, you wanna give that thing to a good person so they can save the world. I understand. But in order to save that good person, you’re gonna have to give it to a really bad person. In all my years, I’ve only ever seen one man come out on top in Vegas. We go to do it like he did. He rigged the game.”
I know what you might be thinking. It was going through my mind as well. It sounds a little bit like “Save the cheerleader. Save the world.” Admit it, that’s exactly where you were going with this thing. Even at its best … or worst, Heroes was never as intense or dark as the video game television series adaptation of Fallout on Prime. With all respect to Zachary Quinto and his portrayal of Syler, Syler would be running home cryin’ to mama if he ever came across Walton Goggins as The Ghoul in Fallout. Don’t believe me? Now’s your chance to find out, because Alliance and Prime have teamed up to bring the second season of Fallout to home video. And they aren’t messing around here. It’s the ultimate television series release, because you can grab it on UHD Blu-ray in the full glory of 4K and Dolby Vision. One caveat before we move on. If you haven’t seen or bought the first season yet, you’re going to have to run, don’t walk, to wherever you get your home theater goodies and pick up Season 1 first. You’ll be lost without it. That’s the danger I was facing. I fixed that right quick.
“There’s a lot of earning potential with the end of the world.”
… And don’t I know it. When Fallout‘s second season arrived at my doorstep, I was excited but on the horns of what I considered a significant dilemma. I have never played a single version of any of the games in the franchise that goes all the way back to October of 1997. Not only have I never played the games, but I had also missed seeing the first season of the series. I had to take steps to fix the situation. There wasn’t enough time for me to jump into the video game franchise, so I asked a lot of questions of gamer friends who are huge fans of the games. I know one guy who claims to have played them all on various game platforms. So now I knew the general idea of the franchise, which is this: It’s hundreds of years after the bombs fall, and you are there trying to survive either on the surface wasteland which is more like the old frontier West or in one of a vast collection of underground vaults that were set up by a mega-corporation called Vault-Tec. The games are quite famous for how open-ended they are. They each take place in vast open worlds where there are likely hundreds if not thousands of side missions or paths of discovery you can travel. It makes the franchise high on the re-playability list because you likely have not done all there is to do or seen all there is to see. I’m looking forward to trying my hand at the franchise while I wait along with all of you for the third season. Dilemma one covered.
The second thing I did was to immediately head over to Amazon and buy the UHD-Blu-ray release of the first season. Yes, I could have streamed all of it on Prime, but I’m telling you buying the discs was the best possible choice, and we’ll be exploring why. Here’s what I learned in the first season that is important for the second.
“I got a little show-biz secret for you. A good bad guy doesn’t see himself as a bad guy.”
The largest advantage to catching the first season is that you’ll get introduced to the characters, and I’ll pretty much limit myself here to those who play a significant part in the second season. Fallout has a huge cast of very talented actors and some great characters, but we’ll be here all day if we talk about them all. There are a handful of characters you really, really have to know, and the first season does a wonderful job of introducing them to us. The number one attraction is Walton Goggins. If you love quality television shows, you know the name. He was the awesome good guy/bad guy Shane in The Shield. Michael Chiklis was the show’s star, but burning just as bright was Goggins, who had the most nuanced and detailed character on the series. From there I followed him to Justified. There he played another larger-than-life villain as Boyd Crowder. Again he wasn’t the “star”; that job fell to another wonderful performer, Timothy Oliphant, but there was Goggins burning up whatever screen time he had. Just in case the world might have just considered him a one-trick pony who could play a great villain, he appeared in two comedy shows: Vice Principals and The Righteous Gemstones. Again he was great. But it had to happen. It was time for Goggins to become the kind of character he was born to play. Here he plays the 200-year old Ghoul. Now, there are hundreds of other ghouls in this world. but trust me when I tell you he plays The Ghoul. Radiation has allowed him to survive over 200 years, but it has mutated his look so that he now looks as terrifying as he really is. But, and here’s the compelling nuance again, he wants to do what’s right in his heart. He’s looking for his wife and child who are stored somewhere in cryochambers, and he’s had to grow as tough a skin internally as he has on the outside. We also get to see Goggins as pre-apocalypse Cooper “Coop” Howard. He was a cowboy movie star, and his past turns out to play a huge part in how all of this nuked world happened in the first place. I could stop right here, because Goggins alone is worth the price of admission. But we have other great actors/characters.
British actress Ella Purnell plays Lucy. Her life has been the direct opposite of The Ghoul. She has grown up in the protected and naive world of Vault 33. Her father (MacLachlan) was once the vault’s overseer. That’s the name given to the leaders of these vault communities. The first season began on her wedding day, where she was matched with a guy from vault 32. The idea is to offer some genetic diversity. Incest is actually a casual thing here, but survival dictates some diversity. The wedding turns into a disaster when it was merely the distraction for an invasion by surface dwellers. Lucy’s father is kidnapped, and she ends up sneaking out of the vault to find him. But she is very unprepared for the law-of-the-jungle existence on the surface, which is called the Wasteland for good reason. The Wasteland is a place right out of Mad Max or a hundred dystopian future worlds. They use bottle caps for currency, and usually people don’t bother with the “caps”; they just take what they want through sheer brutality. This is the world of The Ghoul. The two encounter each other as Lucy’s belief in being a “nice person” is about to get her killed. The first season was about a quest to find her father and deliver an artifact. Things went pear-shaped, and this season finds Lucy and The Ghoul on a mission to find her dad, who she now knows is one of the truly bad, bad men. The Ghoul tags along because he sees an opportunity to find his family.
“Plans are hard. Chaos is easy.”
There are factions on the surface working for their version of good. One of them is the Brotherhood Of Steel. They are a somewhat religious-zealot group that believe themselves to be the saviors of the future world. The character we want to follow here is Maximus, who is played by Aaron Moten, and he’s kind of the balance between Lucy and The Ghoul. He wants very much to be a knight and “earns” this distinction by letting the knight to whom he was squire get killed and stealing the armor. The armor are these super-soldier suits that are completely mechanized and armed to the teeth … literally. He goes through moments of doubt. He wants to be a good guy but often allows his own baggage to get in the way of this. He’s worked his way into a position of strength but ends up betraying the Brotherhood. He also encounters Lucy, and she has brought out the bravery and good that he possesses.
The season has a theme of civil war as many of the surviving factions are starting to fight each other for control with splits even within those factions including the Brotherhood. There’s the Legion, who have fashioned themselves on the Roman Empire and are led by a Caesar, played by of all actors Home Alone’s Macaulay Culkin. Where is Joe Pesci when you need him? It’s a great departure for the guy, and he’s a brute.
The season is very closely based on a recent release of the game Fallout: New Vegas which turns out to be where all of these factions are meeting up for a confrontation that sets the table for the next season. Through The Ghoul’s flashbacks as Coop, we learn how this corporate world manipulated things to bring about the nuclear destruction. Coop has to deal with the fact that his wife might be one of the manufacturers of this nightmare world. I have to say Goggins does not share great chemistry with Frances Turner, who plays his wife. She’s an awkward character, and I suspect much of that is intentional. It still makes those scenes hard for me to watch even though very key pieces of the puzzle are being revealed here. Both Goggins and Moten share wonderful chemistry with Ella Purnell. These scenes are compelling and truly drive the narrative forward no matter how important the other stuff might be.
The series also deals with various dramas playing out in the vaults, but honestly the series always slows down when we are there. The relationships don’t really work for me, and every minute we spend there is another minute I want to head back to the Wasteland. And why not?
“I saw the same thing up on the surface. People fighting over the most petty things, like bottle caps. Is that what you saw when you were there? But, you know, some things just never change. People just wanna kill each other, don’t they? I think that’s the only way for people to feel safe. It’s ironic. To feel safe, we have to hurt people, even kill them.”
The Wasteland is another star of the series. The visuals are breathtaking. The attention to detail should not be a surprise when you consider that Jonathan Nolan is in charge here. He’s not the showrunner or the creator, but his fingerprints are all over the crime scene, and you’ll find shades of Westworld here, and in the extras he pretty much represents the production team here. He’s a self-confessed fan of the games, and his passion for the show is off the charts compared to any of the others. He’s delivered a spectacular world here, and it’s worth exploring. The production value is one of the best I’ve ever found in a television show and even most films. The games might have been created by other folks and he might not be the guy in charge, but he’s why this thing looks as good as it does. If you’ve only seen the show through streaming, trust me when I tell you that as good as you think it looks, it’s better on these discs. I’m told that vintage songs are a big part of the games, and that’s also very true here, so we have a terrific audio presentation to go with these visuals. I know I’ll be revisiting these episodes again and again.
What about monsters? Throughout the first season we’ve seen some cool creatures like rad-roaches, but nothing compares to the deathclaws. These guys are amazing monsters, and we get to see a ton of them throughout the season. Watching Maximus go up against them in his battle armor is again some of the best production I’ve ever encountered. These creatures dominate their Wasteland world.
Finally, I can’t tell you about all of the great cast members, but one of the remaining stand-outs is Kyle MacLachlan. He’s a character that was really a background player when all of the evil plans were being made, but he’s out of his mind and manages to sleep his way to the future where he is obsessed with these chips that take over the brains of their subjects. Watching him zoom around in his golf cart trying to perfect his technology is some fantastic dark humor. The expressions this guy delivers are priceless. His insanity is compelling. You’ve got to see it to believe it. There is one flaw associated with his character, and it’s a rare complaint with the show, but the de-aging CGI for his younger self is pretty bad. MacLachlan’s performance more than makes up for it.
You get all eight episodes on three discs. There are a ton of extras, but they’re all under three minutes. They are obviously promo pieces played on Prime, because they all end with “Watch on Prime”. Don’t do it. You gotta get the discs. There’s so much to unpack here I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface of these eight episodes, and it’s going to be a year or more before we see the next batch. My final plea: even if you avoid physical media, make this an exception. If you are watching this on a 3-inch cell phone screen, “That’s just madness.”
