Having watched a lot of post-apocalyptic television over the last few years, the thing that keeps popping into my mind again and again is the question of how, and where, I would want to live in those worlds. I can appreciate the care that goes into building the horrible aspect of sheer survival, resource scarceness, violence becoming the main way in which humans interact – they provide compelling storytelling, be it in the more realist context of The Last of Us and Y: The Last Man or in the comedic over-the-top sequences (as dictated by the video game it’s based on) in Fallout. But regardless, I find myself more moved when shows embrace the idea that humans, even stripped down by world-changing events, seek community and build meaningful and safe havens to exist in, not to deny what has happened but because it is impossible to exist long-term without having those basic needs of safety and connection met. In The Last of Us, I’m torn between the instinct to built a safe nest, surrounded by fences and traps, that Nick Offerman’s character creates in the stand-out episode Long, Long Time: his competence and love of detail (and appreciation of good food) appeals to me, as does the idea of creating a bubble untouched by the outside world with his partner, with occasional connections to the outside with trusted friends. The commune run out of Jackson feels appealing too: it has the small-town charm, collective decision-making and shared responsibility that seems like the best possible way for people to come together again in light of what has happened. Y: The Last Man has Marrisville, which resembles Jackson: it’s hard to imagine large cities to still function after cataclysmic events, as they feel too complex and contain too many variables, but maybe you can still lead a life resembling what we now comprehend as ordinary in smaller communities (they feel like the closest places to Becky Chamber's writing about community after the end of the world). Maybe the only way is to be on the road: the fantastic Station Eleven imagined a traveling utopia, following the maxim that survival is not enough, that art still has an inherent role to play in humanity’s future even if survival seems like a difficult undertaking by itself.
It's a more difficult question to answer in Fallout. I’ve never played any of the games, so my knowledge of the source material is very limited. It feels like there are two options here: it’s either one of the less fucked up vaults (a sliding scale) or Shady Sands, the capital of the New California Republic, apparently the first attempt to build a functioning city with a working administration outside of the vault system. The problem is that Shady Sands, in the television show, is only a crater in the ground when we first see it: the sole hope for existing topside outside of the dog-eat-dog world of the other desert cities (Wild West-esque) is a distant memory. The puzzle of how Shady Sands came to be destroyed, which is a foundational childhood memory for Brotherhood of Steel aspirant Maximus (Aaron Moten), one of our main characters, is one of the keys to unlocking the season, as is the question of how the vaults came to be in the first place. As I understand it, neither of those questions are answered (or need to be answered, as they are imagined for the show alone) in the games: instead, creators and producers (among them Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy) had free reign over the central mystery of the show. I mention Nolan and Joy because many of their previous endeavours feel instructive in thinking about Fallout. Comparisons have been made between Walton Goggins’ Ghoul and Ed Harris’ Man in Black, although I’d argue that Goggins’ character is a lot more interesting than the misogynist, furious Man in Black ever was, especially his backstory which takes us to a time before the bombs fell. Cooper Howard, famous Hollywood actor, finds himself caught up in the Cold-War-inspired (it’s a hot war, in this alternate history) paranoid preparation for a nuclear catastrophe, becomes the face of the ad campaign of Vault-Tec’s technology, and slowly realises what is really going on when he begins mistrusting his wife Barbara, an exec for Vault-Tec, when a charismatic scientist (Lee Moldaver, very compellingly played by Sarita Choudhury), accused of being a “Red” in the McCarthyesque hunt for communists, warns him that it is all a great capitalist conspiracy. It’s interesting to follow this bifurcation of timelines in light of the Nolan and Joy’s previous project, the unfortunately cut short The Peripheral, which looked at a different apocalypse (The Jackpot) from similar before/after timelines, with a bit of multi-dimensional time-travel thrown in (it’s not quite that, but for the purpose of the argument, it works). In Fallout, the outcome is decided, and it’s only a question of why it happened, and whose decisions created the new world: it’s a world that we mainly discover through the eyes of Ella Purnell’s Lucy (I’m happy for Purnell that she’s landed on her feet after Yellowjackets, on the other side of the cannibalism this time). Lucy has spent her entire life in Vault 33, which is raided in the first episode, and is now trying to find her father, overseer of the vault, in the post-apocalyptic wastelands of the surface that she’s never ventured into before. Vault 33 is the kind of place that may qualify as least-troublesome vault: it’s an agrarian community, run as a pretend-democracy (we find out later that the outcome of the election is pre-decided, but maybe the illusion of choice matters), resulting in happy, corn-fed occupants whose first encounter with violence reveals how unprepared they are for the reality outside. Lucy brings a lot of naivety to her journey that the show breaks down almost cruelly over the course of her experiences outside (having her finger chopped off, discovering unconventional food sources, learning about the balance between needing water but also having to avoid radiation, a repurposed med-bot that wants to harvest organs for its owners while talking in the soothing voice of What We Do in the Shadows’ Matt Berry) , but unlike Dolores in Westworld (another Nolan and Joy venture), the goal here isn’t to make her as cruel or cynical as the world she finds: she just gets tougher. Lucy’s insistence on a worldview that still allows for hope contrasts with that of the Ghoul (now 200 years away from whatever person Cooper Howard used to be, who maybe mirrors her naivety in his first encounters with Vault-Tec), and wouldn’t work if Purnell wasn’t so great in the role: her wide-eyed optimism, gained in a sheltered life, somehow doesn’t grate even if it is at odds with all the horrors she finds, and her attempts to do good when given the option is a relief after witnessing so many atrocities.
Having not played the games, I found the mystery of what exactly the purpose of the vaults is, beyond preserving human life in the nuclear fallout of the bombs, pretty interesting, especially as it is unravelled along with Lucy’s journey through the wasteland and Cooper’s past. In the past, Coop is an ardent defender of the US, reluctant to follow his actor friends who have turned into “reds”, and unquestioning believer in capitalism even after experiencing the shortcomings of it in the war he fought in (his knowledge about weaknesses in the armor that The Brotherhood has adapted from the army he served in helps, later). In the present, Lucy is a product of the Vault: a believer that her small community is going to repopulate the country with the American values she was raised with, stuck somewhere in the 1950s but also profoundly dedicated to the pioneer spirit of the frontier. None of these worldviews will prevail: Cooper listens in on a corporate presentation Vault-Tec gives to other companies, finding out now only that the vaults are sold with the promise that the owners can conduct whatever experiments they want on the inhabitants, but also that the nuclear bombs will be deliberate friendly fire to bring about the (temporary) end of the world: what better way to destroy the competition than to bomb it into oblivion, survive the fallout in ideologically aligned shelters or cryopods, and then emerge victorious to no resistance. It’s telling how quickly after the suggestion the other companies come up with the vilest, most ethically questionable scenarios for their potential vaults, like they’re 1960s psychologists getting their most depraved fantasies passed by non-existing university ethics boards. The show itself doesn’t show a lot of examples in the present time: there’s the triumvirate of 31-32-33, an attempt to breed a managerial class by mating the cryo-preserved ideologically prepared eager young managers of the pre-apocalypse (among them, Lucy’s dad) with the goal-getters of 33, who have been raised for optimistic leadership – as long as you’re not in the doomed Vault 32, the life you’d end up with as an occupant is still fairly okay, at least before the raid, but you wouldn’t want to be Barb’s grating former colleague Bud Askins, who is now a brain-on-a-roomba, alone for eternity with his thoughts of capitalist domination and optimisation. There’s Vault 4, designed to be a science experiment, divided between scientists and captured wastelanders who were genetically altered, in brutal and horrifying ways, either to create a topside-ready future human race or just for the heck of it (there are many videos online that detail other gory vaults in the games’ history, some ideas which I’m sure will show up in future seasons). As a positive note, the Vault 4 guinea pigs revolt against the scientists and create what is possibly the best example of an inclusive and livable community, even if it comes with a solid dose of xenophobia (but at least they accept refugees, and have caviar and popcorn). There is also a genuinely funny moment when Maximus and Lucy find themselves in Vault 4 and commence trying to convince each other that they’re in a cult, all the while denying that their respective roots are not also in cults (The Brotherhood of Steel is a scary example of a theocratic military with confused tech-focused ideology, that I’m sure will get fleshed out in future seasons). The realisation that the vaults were created both to run depraved experiments and to breed some kind of capitalist managerial class ubermensch race to repopulate the Earth shocks Cooper and Lucy equally, as they both find that their loved ones, who they trusted, are deeply involved and have no apparent moral qualms about it. They are linked through the realisation, and make their way into the wasteland, looking for the man in charge (I assume), together.
I thought the twist was satisfying, if perhaps predictable, especially for viewers familiar with Nolan's Person of Interest, in which a similar twist – the call is coming from inside the house – creates a far-reaching AI surveillance regime that dominates the show (it’s also interesting that these episodes were written before Edward Snowden’s leaked documents detailing what the NSA was doing with Prism). Fallout applies the same logic to a Cold War environment, in which fears about a nuclear conflict along with a ideological struggle between two worldviews creates an environment of paranoia, ripe to be exploited by interested parties, and heightened by technology (I kind of wish the sidestory of Moldaver/Flame Mother discovering cold fusion, a source of reliable energy that negates the need to compete for resources, a technology that Vault-Tec patents so nobody else can use it, and wanting to use it to build a sustainable community after the destruction of Shady Sands, had gotten more prominence). The scenes with the most emotional pay-off, for me, were Moldaver’s love for Lucy’s mother, who she kept alive even after the turned fully into a feral ghoul: she is trying to create something in the memory of the woman she loved that benefits all, and is far removed from the capitalist logic that has created this wasteland in the first place. But then, both are dead by the end of the season, so it’s hard to tell where Fallout falls on the alignment chart, if Lucy or the Ghoul have it right in their views of the world. That being said, within the show, I hope we get to see more of Lucy’s brother Norm (Moises Arias), who was raised in the same environment as his sister but shares none of her wide-eyed optimism: he just wants to find out the truth, even if it makes his life so much harder. Maybe Fallout isn’t so much about where you’d want to be, but who.
