The picturesque adaptation of the video game saga mixes irony, moral dilemmas, gore, and increasingly cruel and eccentric villains.
It seems to have become vitally important for TV series producers to create the best video game adaptation, and with Fallout, hopefully, we have a winner. The second season, available from December 17th on Prime Video, manages, at least in the first half of the episodes provided for viewing, to maintain the distinctive irony and picturesque iconography balanced between retro sci-fi and Western, but also benefiting from the bizarre chemistry of the dynamic duo formed by the cynical two-hundred-year-old Ghoul (Walton Goggins) and the naive and optimistic Lucy (Ella Purnell) dealing with old and new enemies aligned in fierce factions.
The first season of Fallout was a surprising success: American television targeted video games – practically the only source left after the studios had plundered literature and comics, and made remakes/reboots/prequels/sequels of everything – and then launched into the challenge of who could produce the best adaptation, among The Last of Us, Halo, The Witcher, and so on. Fallout is, among these, the most original and the only one that extensively adopts ironic tones.
Fallout is also strange, very strange, and this could have been its strength – especially compared to its competitors with the usual zombies, the usual all-killing soldiers, and the usual fantasy landscapes with magic – or the cause of its downfall. Fortunately, the eccentricity of this absurd show about the horrors of the nuclear holocaust and its characters prevailed. Shortly after the events that concluded the last episodes, culminating in the escape of Hank MacLean (a diabolical and gleefully evil Kyle MacLachlan, the true star of the season), his daughter Lucy and the Ghoul are both on his trail.
The two team up to find the villain and bring him to justice. Lucy grew up in the peaceful and utopian environment of the Vault, never experiencing hunger, surrounded by a positive atmosphere built on a lie: her father is a monster who nuked an entire country out of jealousy and has no qualms about experimenting with deadly devices on living beings, including humans. The Ghoul is the opposite of Lucy, another survivor of the apocalypse, hardened and cynical by two centuries of survival on the edge in a world reminiscent of Mad Max.
Together, Lucy and the Ghoul are a riot: hilarious and irresistibly mismatched. However, as we delve deeper, we discover they have more in common than it seems. Lucy isn't simply good: goodness is an exercise of will, and she does everything to protect it as her most precious possession. The Ghoul, too, doesn't admit it, but he also tries his best not to be evil. Their bickering and occasional encounters with disgusting creatures and talkative robots are the most entertaining parts of a show, simultaneously immersed in a terrifying reality. The second season allocates more screen time to the new character of Maximus (Aaron Moten), his moral dilemmas, the techno-fascist military order of the Brotherhood of Steel to which he belongs, and the plot related to the relic.
Other factions from the game, such as the idealistic New California Republic and the ridiculous Caesar's Legion, return or make their debut. A real gem is the appearance of Macaulay Culkin as a fanatical centurion with difficulty understanding the consonant rotation of the letter "C". The series interweaves various contemporary storylines with extensive flashbacks to the pre-nuclear war era, focusing on Cooper and the season's key character, the sociopathic Robert House (Justin Theroux). The dapper villain is an emblematic figure of today's sadistic and deranged billionaire tech bros, as well as the founder of the evil lair of New Vegas, a crucial location in the video game saga.
The new episodes are on the verge of camp but without crossing into the ridiculous; the tone is balanced between comedic and dramatic; the values of the individual, morality, free will, and redemption are effectively contrasted with the greed and cruelty of unscrupulous leaders. All of this is delivered with effervescent vigor and a healthy taste for gore (never before have so many heads exploded in a series). The narrative structure of the second season is more complex: at times, it falls victim to a certain conceptual dispersion, with the scattered characters seemingly destined never to cross paths again.
The fleeting appearances of some characters and their storylines (see the eccentric Xander played by Kumail Nanjiani) could easily be omitted, but not Macaulay Culkin's character. The important thing is that our favorite wasteland pilgrims, Lucy and the Ghoul, have ample screen time and that their intriguing dynamics are deepened and continuously evolve. You will love watching how Lucy's goodness slowly erodes Cooper's cynicism and vice versa, and you will hope that their journey continues for a long time.