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PORTSIDE CULTURE

FALLOUT SEASON 1 FINALE: CAPITALIST MIDDLE MANAGERS MURDER THE WORLD
 
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William Hughes
April 19, 2024
AV Club
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_ A messy sendoff is anchored by the series' best, darkest, and most
grimly funny scene _

Fallout, Photo: Courtesy of Prime Video

 

When I started this little post-apocalyptic journey seven episodes
ago
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it was with a question about tone. Was _Fallout_
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comedy or a tragedy? But it’s a false distinction, in a lot of ways.
As our old pal Bud Askins might tell us, either in his flesh body, or
trapped with his brain rolling around inside an off-brand Roomba for
all eternity: The difference between the two is often only a matter of
time.

The worst thing you can say about “The Beginning,” the final
episode of what will almost certainly be merely the first season of
Prime Video’s _Fallout_
[[link removed]], is that its best and
most affecting scene not only comes only halfway through its run-time,
but 200 years in its past. That’s the sequence in which Cooper
Howard, having infiltrated his wife Barb’s workplace at Vault-Tec,
eavesdrops on a meeting between her, her co-worker Bud, and the heads
of the other biggest tech giants on the planet, as they pitch them on
getting in on the Vault experiment themselves.

Bud’s pitch is typically messy, Michael Esper deploying enthusiasm
to grim ends as he lays out a picture of a future that consists of
middle managers giving the human race performance reviews—forever.
But it’s Barb who actually lands the sale. Barb who taps into the
fear underlying everything that Vault-Tec does. Barb who breaks her
husband’s heart, Frances Turner and Walton Goggins again
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the series’ best performances, this time completely isolated from
each other in multiple senses of the word.

REVIEWS [[link removed]]

"The Beginning"

A-

SEASON

1

EPISODE

8

How do you sell bomb shelters to the public, despite ongoing peace
negotiations? How do you ensure that, when your Dwellers emerge into
the future some centuries down the line, they won’t be eaten alive
by the other survivors? How do you ensure that the people _you _love
are safe? Easy: By making sure the people _you _love are the only
ones left. “By dropping the bomb ourselves,” Barb announces with
perfect conviction to the (metaphorical) ghouls in the room. It’s a
punchline that isn’t funny, a tragedy you can’t help but laugh at.
As Bud waxes enthusiastic about a sort of terminal form of capitalism
and his dreams of breeding a culture of “super managers,” and the
other executives—there’s more on them down in the strays—begin
getting excited about all the fucked-up experiments they can run with
their own private vaults, Barb Howard lays out the disturbingly simple
logic for killing the world: Once everyone else is dead, she and her
family will finally be _safe_.

It’s an idea that kills her husband, albeit slowly, Goggins looking
more horrific here than when he’s walking around, two centuries
later, with a big open hole instead of a nose. It’s also an idea
that’s been core to _Fallout_’s journey so far, especially for
Maximus, the only one of our three leads who grew up out in the
Wastes. His feelings for Lucy are clearly genuine, but she also
represents that safe place he’s been looking for all his life—the
same one Elder Cleric Quintus dangles in front of him shortly before
the Brotherhood Of Steel invades Griffith Park to horrifically bloody
effect. It’s what Hank MacLean peddles to his daughter as he tries
to lie her back into proper daughter shape; what Lee Moldaver is
avenging with the torch she keeps burning for Shady Sands. It’s even
what drives the Ghoul, under all that cynicism and badassery: the
search for something, someone, safe enough to call home.

Unfortunately for “The Beginning,” though, things are a little
messier on either side of that central, perfect scene. We open, for
instance, with the Brotherhood themselves, who remain unpleasantly
generic—even if it is nice to check back in with Dane a bit this
episode. (They confirm to Maximus that they booby-trapped
their _own _boot, out of a desire not to get dragged out into the
Wastes.) We know enough about the Brotherhood, by now, to realize that
they’re fascist, power-hungry jackasses—but not enough to care
about them as anything more than target practice for other characters.
Maximus has steadily grown to be an important part of the show’s
three leads despite starting off in the weakest position. But that’s
only because we’ve gotten to know _him_, not because he’s given
us any kind of window into the group he ostensibly represents.

Moldaver’s community is more interesting, a thriving society with
access to agriculture, childcare, and egalitarian attitudes toward the
inhabitants of the Wastes. (Note that one of the ghouls Lucy saved
back in “The Ghouls”
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there, receiving help.) Moldaver herself, despite her apparent
propensity for setting up _Bond _villain-esque lunch tableaus, turns
out to be sane, measured, and possessed of a completely rational goal:
using the MacGuffin in Wilzig’s head, combined with Hank’s
Vault-Tec personnel password, to activate a cold fusion reactor to
provide power to the Los Angeles boneyard. (_Fallout _gets its second
jaw-dropping L.A. vista of the series late in the episode, as Moldaver
turns all the lights in the destroyed city back on with the press of a
button.)

As with the Vault 4 residents in “The Radio,” though, Moldaver and
her people are just so unambiguously _good _here that it feels a bit
like _Fallout _is putting its thumb on the scale for any final
decisions Lucy might have to make. (Where’d Moldaver get those
raiders from the first episode, by the way—and why? Everyone in her
camp certainly seems capable of using a knife and fork.) The reveal
that Hank is not only a Vault-Tec stooge from before the War, but that
he nuked Shady Sands personally, in a fit of paranoid jealousy after
his wife left him for the surface, feels like _Fallout _abandoning a
decent chunk of the moral ambiguity that’s made these last eight
episodes such an interesting trip, in favor of sorting characters
safely into boxes for the road. That same patness applies to
Cooper’s storyline, the show employing huge stretches of
coincidence—notably, his connection to Henry/Hank—to get all its
characters in one place for the finale. It smacks of unconfidence, of
an effort to wrap everything up neatly before the show departs for
parts unknown.

Weirdly, Lucy gets the shortest shrift here out of anybody, her
choices essentially boiling down to picking which of the several
people yelling at her she’ll decide to believe. That she’s
ultimately left with no decision but to choose someone else to follow
might be weirdly true to the _Fallout _games (along with the
conflicts and connections between parents and children that make up a
key part of the plots of both _Fallout_s _3 _and _4_), but it
still feels like giving a great character surprisingly little to do
with the climax of her own life’s story. That said, Ella Purnell can
sell an “Okey dokey” like nobody’s business, and she’s the
character we’re most excited to see grow and evolve as the series
inevitably continues, she and the Ghoul hitting the road on her
father’s trail. (Maximus, meanwhile, is doomed to get the
recognition he no longer craves in the worst possible way.)

“The Beginning” does serve up simpler pleasures, meanwhile,
whether it’s the bark-laugh fun of seeing some poor Brotherhood
schmuck falling vertically into a rotating propeller during their
assault on the Observatory, or just the sight of Kyle MacLachlan,
Space Marine, as Hank hijacks an abandoned set of power armor to make
his eventual escape from his vengeful daughter. (It’s always fun to
see MacLachlan go full villain, his eternal boyishness shading into
deluded petulance at the ways the Wastes have “corrupted” his
daughter.) And then there’s the pleasure of watching the Ghoul do
his own version of the dark room gun-kata fight from _Equilibrium_
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crew of power armor-wearing Brotherhood Knights in a way that, yes,
feels genuinely, authentically badass. There’s fun to be had here,
because _Fallout _always knows how to serve that need, even as
it’s driving elegantly toward some deeper purpose (or fumbling it a
bit, as “The Beginning” manages to do both at different points,
after all).

Okay. Final verdict time. _Fallout _is, in the aggregate, a much
better television show than it ever actually needed to be, given the
popularity of its parent brand, and the ease with which executive
producers Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, and series showrunners Graham
Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet, could have just slapped a few
Pip-Boys on stuff, adapted the plot of _Fallout 3_, and called the
whole thing good. Whereas, say, _The Last Of Us_
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video-game adaptation solely by strictly recreating its source
material in a non-interactive form, this series opted instead for the
more ambitious path: wrestling with the themes and ideas that power
the _Fallout _universe, without slavishly recreating them. It has,
over these last eight episodes, been both heartbreaking and
laugh-out-loud funny, genuinely moving and horrifically,
gut-churningly violent. Structurally, it’s something of a mutated
mess, in desperate need of clean-up by some well-meaning Samaritans,
who we can only hope might tame its frequently meandering episodes
into more focused shapes. Even so, it’s a show of exceptionally high
highs and only the occasional outright failure or dull patch. Like the
games it pulls from, it has big, weird ideas about humanity, hope, and
humor, and it expresses them through a point of view like pretty much
nothing much else on TV, ragingly cynical in a way that never quite
curdles into despair. It’s not only a good adaptation, but a great
story in its own right—and it’s all enough to make us sincerely
hope this world won’t be ending any time soon.

Stray observations

* On the editing front: I thought the episode had ended at fully
four distinct points (starting with the “Okey dokey”), making for
a real _Return Of The King _experience.
* Great read from Aaron Moten as he describes Titus’ death: “He
died running.”
* Michael Cristofer, who genre fans will likely know from _Mr.
Robot_ [[link removed]], is great, here
and elsewhere, as Brotherhood leader Quintus. (He’s also a
Pulitzer-prize-winning playwright and wrote the original screenplay
for _The Witches Of Eastwick_. Learning: It’s fun!)
* Moisés Aran has basically spent the entire season off in his own
little show, but he’s been great, very affecting and intense—even
if Norm’s plot just kind of putters out to nothing after the big
reveal of Vault 31's secret.
* Speaking of our old pal Bud: “I don’t have kids myself, but I
do have a training program for up-and-coming executives, and that’s
basically the same thing.”
* _FALLOUT _GAME CORNER: Okay, this one is going to be a
doozy—especially since the location we see Hank tromping off to in
the final final _final _epilogue of the episode is the city of New
Vegas, central to the _Fallout _spin-off of the same name. (You’d
be excused for thinking it’s Seattle, but no, that’s a giant
roulette spinner atop a hotel, not the Space Needle.) At the same
time, all of the executives who show up at the meeting with Bud and
Barb are named characters
from _Fallout _lore—most _especially _RobCo representative
Robert House (a.k.a. the guy with the mustache). House, played in the
games by the sadly-late René Auberjonois, is a big deal
in _Fallout _world, having survived the fall of the bombs and
basically turned Vegas into his own personal fiefdom. Expect House to
be a big deal in season two.
* BONUS _FALLOUT _GAME CORNER: I get a happy little thrill every
time the show uses the Pip-Boy confirmation sounds from the games.
That is all.
* It’s kind of sweet that Barb has Coop’s posters up in her
office.
* Less sweet: her getting to drop the “War never changes” line,
as we cut back and forth between Moldaver’s troops and the
Brotherhood slaughtering each other.
* “I loved your mother. But she stopped being your mother when she
left home.”
* Counter-point: “Where’s my fucking family?”
* Okay, but seriously: What is up with Moldaver’s lunch spread?
Was she expecting Lucy to drop by, or do they just serve up a full
roasted mutant two-headed pig with an apple in its mouth for every
meal?
* Oh, and that’s a deathclaw skull on the ground as Hank’s
marching on, right? Can’t wait to see those nasty bastards in live
action.

* Unanswered mysteries: what the hell Moldaver is doing in the
future, why the Enclave had the who-sit (and who the Enclave are, at
least for those who haven’t played the games), and, most pressingly,
no Ron Perlman cameo. Really?!
* And that’s a wrap on the first season of _Fallout_! Thanks for
taking this journey through the Wasteland with me, folks; this show
massively exceeded my (admittedly dim) expectations, and I find myself
genuinely excited to see where it goes next.

* post-apocalypse
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* capitalism
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* professional managerial class
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* fallout
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* prime tv
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