Genre – Drama Series
Movie Total Runtime – 7 Hours 31 Minutes
Spoilers – Yes

So we come to a new category of media not covered in the pilot article – Stuff I acquired after starting this series. I have picked up a few pieces after I began writing these which were thus not part of the backlog but I can still call “Unwatched” as I hadn’t watched them prior to the review. This category will give some more legs to the tail end of the review series, as I do periodically acquire new media. This particular review is also an emergency substitution. This slot had been reserved for an anime (Mad Bull 34), but I realized I didn’t actually want to review it. I’m also fairly sure that I would not be able to maintain the family friendly rating of this website if I gave it an honest review. So I’m going to put the ultraviolent, occasionally borderline pornographic cringe fest from 1990 back on the shelf and look at something made in a more puritanical age – 2024.

Before I even watch the content, I have to address my own background and biases. This is the BluRay of a streaming series set in a video game setting currently controlled by Todd “It Just Works” Howard, the biggest videogame liar who hasn’t made Fable. The video game series has had a bunch of entries made by a pack of different companies, these being 1, 2, Tactics, Brotherhood of Steel, 3, New Vegas, 4, and 76. Of these games, I have played three to completion (3, New Vegas, 4) and failed to complete three others (1, 2, Tactics). I have not played Brotherhood of Steel (console only) or 76 (multiplayer only). I do not have any fondness for the isometric titles (1, 2, Tactics), because, quite frankly, I suck at them. If I can’t make progress in the game, the story makes no difference. That said, I did soak in a lot of the story of those titles secondhand, so I am not ignorant of what happened in them for the most part.

On the topic of my biases, I have seen Amazon ruin franchise after franchise in pursuit of the mythical modern audience and contempt for my demographic. This reputation makes me despair when anything I even remotely like gets near their fetid morass of failure. Which is why I have not watched this offering before. I go into this full of dread, but hoping to be surprised. I was going to joke about the season being made up of only eight episodes, being accustomed to thirteen and twenty-six episode seasons. But on a rational basis, a limited run might be a blessing. Well, I’ve procrastinated long enough, time to hit play.

We start in a retrofuturistic 2077 where the first indicator that it is not the 1950s is a robot in a glass case not being used for the birthday party going on. This is at least visually consistant with the established prewar United States from the games. The divorced white guy with the mixed-race kid would normally not raise my hackles if not for my aforementioned biases against the studio. I will try to judge on the merits. So far, there is no reason to get worked up. At around the six minute park, the nuclear bombs start to fall. Now I only knew the year as 2077 from the games, the show hasn’t mentioned that part explicitly yet. It didn’t even have anything to indicate that it was October. After all, this is Los Angeles, and the weather doesn’t really show October.

After the title card, it is “219 Years Later”, or 2296, or, after all of the entries in the video game series by a decade. We are introduced to Lucy, our Vault Dweller for the show. Vaults are underground long term habitation complexes sold as places to live out the post apocalypse in some semblance of civilized state. The secondary purposes of the vaults vary by production company to production company. Early on they could realistically be described as doing amoral science for the development of long term spaceflight of the sort needed for evacuating a nuclear-scarred Earth. As the games went on, the concepts became sadism for sadism’s sake as often as they had any scientific relevance. So immediately, my brain was asking “What experiment is being run here?” because I doubted they would use another Control Vault. (As in Scientific Control where no special variable was introduced).

From dialog, Lucy is trying to get married, but the population of Vault 33 is too closely related to her. Though they do appear to have underground connections to Vaults 31 and 32 and do periodic exchanges for this purpose. However, my “Something doesn’t add up” alarm pinged. If it’s been 219 years, and even with the population exchanges with the other two vaults the population is barely above inbred, then it should be fairly well homogenized genetically regardless. But they have the typical modern day Diversity casting. Unless, of course, one of the rules the vault abides by that puts this pressure on the population is strict non-miscegenation. I’m going to go with that as head canon – because it is funny and certainly not what the film makers intended.

I do have to give credit to the production designers. The Vault sets look like they lifted the tileset from Fallout 4 and brought it into the real world. While that may not be everyone’s preferred vault aesthetic, from a technical standpoint, credit where it is due. I have no doubt the directive was “Make it look like the current games,” and they did so. There is one shot where you can tell CGI was used to add some floors to the physical set, and it doesn’t look quite right. In another case of something not looking quite right, the delegation from Vault 32 is unusually unkempt and *gasp* lacking in table manners. One even sports a quite extensive neck tattoo. Even if I didn’t have meta-knowlege from other sources (for these reviews I want to go in blind, but don’t have the luxury all the time), I’d be going “these don’t look like Vault dwellers.”

The shifty looks and reaction to the overseer’s speech pretty much confirms it in my mind. Though It’s not long before the show confirms that 32 has been overrun by raiders, and the entire delegation is simply wearing the clothes of the now-dead 32 dwellers. In case the name wasn’t obvious, raiders are marauders living entirely off the fruits of plunder. Often disfunctional, internal or external stife usually prevents settling down into a more organized society. An intact vault or two would be a gold mine. Though the show immediately makes a mistake by name dropped the term “Raiders” from Lucy when she realizes one is carrying more radioactive load than would be expected of a vault dweller. The behavior thusfar would not suggest the name from historical context.

Another point of credit. in her unarmed brawl against raider she just married, Lucy loses handily. No sudden girl bossing, this man clearly lived a lifetime of violence, and it was not even close. She only escapes when weapons get involved, though not without getting stabbed. At that point the attack on the vault is in full swing, and there is carnage galore. Another point of credit to the makeup artists. Though not the people throwing strawberry jam “blood” splatter. Raider queen could have used an actor with gravitas. The character was not intimidating when the show runner intended. Raiders kidnap Lucy’s father and blow up the tunnel they escape through.

We smash cut to Maximus, our Brotherhood of Steel representative for the series. On paper, the Brotherhood of Steel sounds like an interesting concept. You have a militant order founded by military men around the time of the nuclear exchange who are of a mind that the unethical use of technology was the cause of the war, and that they, as the righteous, are the only suitable people to decide who can use advanced technology. They seek out and hoard remnants of the past, and are extemely insualar – except when they’re not. A lot of problems with the Brotherhood comes in the execution. First, the depiction is exceedingly inconsistant from installment to installment with the degree of adhereance to those precepts being quite variable. Second, they are overused, being shoehorned in to geographic areas and time periods where they have no business being. 76 is the most egregious, contorting themselves into knots trying to doctor up a reason to include a faction that should have no presence in its time and place. To top it off, if I recall correctly, the west coast Brotherhood had been kicked around quite a bit in the time leading up to when this show is supposed to take place.

So we see Maximus getting beat down by a multiracial clique of fellow aspirants until they get bored of hitting him and wander off. There is no indication of why they decided to pummel him. Maybe they think he’s a witch. Anyway, his only friend, the androgynous ‘Dane’ shows up to see if the beating has knocked the witchcraft out of him. Given how superficial the injuries are, the clique didn’t put much effort into it. The next few scenes go by fairly quickly, but not fast enough to be a montage. We learn Maximus has no technical aptitude, is antisocial, and ends up on latrine duty. So when ‘Dane’ gets picked for elevation to squire and he is not, Maximus beats up a toilet. Cut to ‘Dane’ screaming in pain and bleeding because someone fitted a boot with internal razor blades. Given the way he’s dragged off, we can only assume the higher ups assume Maximus did it. We get no more character development as it goes back to the vault where the survivors are patching things up.

While they’re still picking up corpses and spackling bullet holes, Lucy wants to go outside after her dad. The others point out that opening the outer door isn’t something they do. So she goes anyway. We do not get the popup asking if we want to change any of our character appearance or SPECIAL stats. I suppose the player modded the question out.

Outside Lucy finds a wasteland of ash and skeletons and… plasterized voids? The outside location has a number of ‘corpses’ designed to resemble the ‘bodies’ at Pompeii. That is, the plaster casts of the voids in the ash left by the bodies. Those Pompeii bodies are not directly the product of the volcano, but of archeologists pouring plaster into the spaces left by the bodies. But apparently someone decided that flash heat turns humans into dust mummies. Take away a point of credit for “Did not do the research.” Lucy wanders and sees the sea, along with a bunch of ruins and a somehow still standing wooden peir with a Ferris wheel. Not sure if this is supposed to be Santa Monica or not.

Switch back to Maximus being interrogated by the Brotherhood. He denies using witchcraft to summon boot razors. And I am severely irked when the elder uses a plural pronoun to refer to the androgynous ‘Dane’. Minus one hundred credit points for leftist fuckery. The worst part is that if the tone hadn’t been ruined by this, the scene and following sequence were well done. Just leave your stupid modern audiences garbage at the door. My tolerance is very, very low. Maximus is assigned to replace the now lamed ‘Dane’ as a squire to a power-armored knight, and they go off in search of an Enclave scientist on the run with an unspecified “something”.

This mission brief bugs me in a different way. It grates on my pedantry. They say it comes from “the highest clerics in the commonwealth”. There are no clerics in the Brotherhood, only Elders. Why deviate from established terminology? They then refer to the group as “this legion”, also new terminology deviating from standard. And the Commonwealth in-universe typically refers to the Boston area. Okay, I can rationalize that part away. While there was no Enclave presence in the Commonwealth, they were a major player in the Capital (DC) wasteland, where the east coast brotherhood was before heading up to Boston. If there were Enclave bases which escaped the purge after the events of Fallout 3, there might therefore be an escapee whom they are concerned about. How said person ended up on the west coast is unknown. Or if they started on the west coast, why this missive came from the Commonwealth is unknown.

It’s past time to revisit the cowboy from the opening.

But that was 219 years ago, how is he still alive? Well, he’s been turned into a ghoul. In Fallout, ghouls are the result of radiation exposure for a certain subset of the population. They’re effective immortal and immune to radiation, but their minds degrade over time. And they tend to be ugly as sin. Our ghoul friend is apprently repeatedly buried by someone we’ve not met and gets dug up by a trio of unknown new characters looking for a payday. They’re interested in a bounty on the same enclave scientist the Brotherhood is after. Rather than sign up with the trio, the ghoul kills them and takes their weapons. Roll credits on episode one.

I’m past 2k words after one episode. I’m not sure how much rambling I’ll get into with future episodes, so I will try to get more onto a single article. But to summarize the initial episode, the technical teams – set design, makeup, wardrobe – they did a great job. The writers and the casting director could have used a few slaps upside the head.

Addendum – The pronoun game kept gnawing at me, and I had to rant on why it makes no sense in-context. To start with, the real world people who play the pronoun game are the results of pampered excess – the non-contributing people of a society so rich in surplus that it can afford to support millions of unproductive people with nothing better to do than to try on new identities like they are outfits. In-universe the Brotherhood lives in a brutal wasteland that will end you if you make even a minor mistake, or even just get unlucky. There’s no time to waste pandering to this inanity.

On top of that, we’re talking about a militant order whose precepts do not lend themselves to catering to deviant ideas or individuals. Their primary response to any ghoul, mutant, synth, or other non-purestrain human is to end it. An actual intersex person would be taken for a mutant and shot. Convincing them not to is the hard part. Even in the same episode, during the annointing ceremony for Maximus, they repeated a set of priorities – Brotherhood first, Mission Second, Superior Third. None of these say “we will pander to your preferred pronouns”. Then there’s the game lore. In New Vegas, a lesbian couple was split up, and the first thought of everyone else was that it was to allow for a more reproductive union. (I was unclear as to whether one of the couple was thrown out of the order, but research says no.)

If there were any uncertainty, ‘Dane’ would be pantsed and the pronouns would match whatever was found there.