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By: Sonny Woody
The popular video game series Fallout was brought to life earlier this year in a live-action television series produced by Amazon MGM Studios, Graham Wagner, and Geneva Robertson-Dworet. Jonathan Nolan, creator of Person of Interest (2011-2016) and co-creator of Westworld (2016-2022,) Lisa Joy, and Bethesda Game Studios producer Todd Howard also joined the production as executive producers. The show was formally announced in 2020, and casting took place in 2022. Despite the hesitancy often associated with video game adaptations, the show was immensely successful and well loved by old and new fans alike.
I watched the show basically knowing nothing about the Fallout universe.
I knew it was post-apocalyptic, I knew about Vault Boy and Nuka Cola, and I knew about ghouls as a concept. After watching the show, I was immediately enamored– both by Walton Goggins and the entire universe of the show and games. I’ve since become a big fan, and I’m making my way through Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 simultaneously (yes, I know 76 gets a lot of flack but I’m from West Virginia, okay?)
After watching through the show a second time with one of my best friends, I found myself just teaming with things I wanted to talk about. I had been fangirling about the show for about a month at that point, but after rewatching it– I came away with so much I wanted to appreciate about the writing. I think this is definitely the kind of the show that lends itself to multiple rewatches. It enhances your experience, if for nothing else but noticing the intricacies the writers slipped in throughout the 8 episode run.
With that being said, I’m going to dive into some of the things that stood out to me and what I got from them. BEWARE: THIS IS AN IN-DEPTH ANALYSIS! SPOILERS BELOW! PROCEED WITH CAUTION!
Let’s start with this: the first time we see Barb, protagonist Cooper Howard’s wife. The first time we see her is Cooper (Walton Goggins) getting distracted from a conversation he’s having, and then going over to approach her. We do not know that these two people are married yet. It looks like this could be their first meeting. He’s teasing her about taking all the taffy from a craft table, and she starts trying to sell him on the flavor of said taffy (lavender.) She says it’s subtle. She says it’s flirty. She says “it’s like someone touching you for the first time.” Cooper is entranced by her. He says “may I?” She hands him the taffy, he puts it in his mouth, and… his face twists. He can’t swallow it. He spits it out.
Why is this important? Because this is perfectly paralleled in Barb selling her lies about Vault-Tec to him. He trusts her enough to try Vault-Tec to the point that he does something he doesn’t want to (promoting the Vaults and becoming the face of their commercialization.) When he begins to question her and what’s going on, it’s clear he can’t swallow the truth. And when he learns the undeniable truth about what Barb and Vault-Tec are planning, he spits it out. What somehow feels so right to her, Cooper can’t possibly stomach.
The writing around Barb and Cooper is so rich. This is just an instance of the way the entire thing is literally presented to us as a lie, as dishonesty. So when Cooper (now known as The Ghoul) meets another one of our protagonists (Ella Purnell’s Lucy MacLean,) and he sees her “be kind, and good, and fair” attitude– he’s amused by it but he also thinks it’s utter horseshit. He isn’t going to give her a chance to trick him like Barb did. Their interactions are harsh. He hits her. He uses her as bait, and as a means to an end. But then during an altercation, she bites his finger off. His reaction? “There you are, you little killer.” He’s thinking “yes, I knew Vault-Tec couldn’t make something that is actually good and pure. I know better.” And because he will not be made a fool again by some doe-eyed Vault-Tec lackey thinking she’s doing the right thing, he makes it even. He cuts the same finger off her hand. He then says “this is the first honest exchange we’ve had so far.”
My favorite part of this line is that he doesn’t just mean between the two of them! Her entire life was built on a lie, and so was his. They are truly two sides of the same coin, and Cooper is able to see that so quickly. What he isn’t able to see at first though is that Lucy IS kind. Even after everything he puts her through, she gives him drugs he needs to keep from going feral as a ghoul, and reminds him “golden rule, mother fucker.”
Even after she had to fight her way through the abandoned supermarket The Ghoul brought her to to trade her in for the drugs and become this forever changed, hardened version of herself– she still sticks to her principles. Walton Goggins himself has discussed the way Lucy’s act in that moment completely throws The Ghoul through a loop, and gives him a “new lease on life.” I think that comes through in the writing when The Ghoul takes Lucy’s words, and he abides by them. A posse of criminals asks him about what went down at the supermarket, clearly looking to find whoever was responsible for letting a bunch of ghouls go free, and he takes the fall for Lucy. As he’s protecting her because she helped him, as he is practicing the Golden Rule, he sews Lucy’s finger onto his hand. He spiritually and physically ties a piece of her unto himself. He’s saying “okay, I won’t forget this real act of kindness the same way I will not let myself forget the cruelty I’ve faced” by never changing out of the clothes he “died” in.
Circling back to Barb, played fantastically by Frances Turner, I just want to say that she completely dominates that role. Every little movement of her face is so calculated. It’s easy to miss the signs that Barb will be such a betrayal to Cooper and the audience the first time you’re watching, but once you know? It’s so obvious the way she’s manipulating him. You know her intentions at least started from real love and desire to protect her husband and child, but it’s clear that not drawing a line has changed her. She becomes less and less unsure of her actions and the actions of those above her. We SEE it. When she delivers the line that shatters Cooper’s view of her, “by dropping the bombs ourselves,” she sounds SO confident. It’s like “okay, everything I’ve worked for has led to this. I did it. There’s no turning back now. This is how the world will move forward with or without me, so I’ve done what I can to protect the things I care about.” It’s a fascinating moral conversation that I think we see in a lot of media, and it makes for excellent character work. You know Barb isn’t a good guy, but you also understand that she wasn’t always some evil mastermind. She’s not. She was a wife and mother, and she became ruthless to the point of cruelty. Again, Frances Turner just plays her so well, and I don’t see her getting enough credit for it. That kind of moral ambiguity is hard to nail in a way that keeps the character somewhat sympathetic and likable, and I think she does it excellently.
There’s a lot of editing and promotion done around “Cooper Howard’s descent into becoming a monster.” Jonathan Nolan wrote a line in The Dark Knight, the 2008 blockbuster superhero movie directed by his brother Christopher, that he says is prominent in Cooper’s arc. The line, of course, is Harvey Dent’s “You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” Nolan, Goggins, and Wagner have all talked at lengths about the character of The Ghoul and how the role he occupies in this world is not easily defined by words such as “hero” and “villain.” It’s far more complex than that.
There’s a reason this show starts with showing Cooper at his most vulnerable, his most human. He’s already been beaten down by the knowledge he has of Vault-Tec. He’s just trying to get on, trying to be a good dad for his daughter because she is the thing that matters most to him and what he wants to protect in this world. He’s terrified, but he’s trying to be brave for her. The show opens on this, and that makes it the emotional crux of the whole story. If Cooper was JUST The Ghoul now, post the bombs dropping, I don’t think they would open like that. Cooper Howard as he was is still in there somewhere. Otherwise, I think they would have revealed Cooper much later in the story– after we’ve already become acquainted with The Ghoul as he is. The audience would form that opinion first. Think Star Wars prequels in a way. We already understand Darth Vader as a formidable antagonist, and then we see that tragic backstory and piece together the man that was Anakin Skywalker and how he changed.
But that’s not how Fallout introduces us to Cooper Howard. He’s the first character we see affected by what’s going to happen. The episode is bookended by him coming out of a coffin 200 years later, and us seeing The Ghoul for the first time. That progression looks like it’s the end of the line for him. Point A to Point B. He was a movie star and loving father, and now he’s this. He’s a heartless gunslinger and bounty hunter. A beast. But again, nope. The season itself also bookends on Cooper. He’s walking off into the sunset to find answers about his family, and he’s not alone. He extends an invitation on this journey to Lucy– somebody’s whose humanity he literally engrained on himself.
There’s another parallel I like a lot between Cooper and Lucy, and that’s the way the audience experiences the respective betrayals they face. We see Barb’s downfall the same way Cooper does. We go through the whole season, watching the seeds of doubt get planted and how they eventually come to fruition. His suspicion. His anxiety. His desperate need to be wrong. We see it, and we feel it all with him. We want to believe that she isn’t hiding something, and that Vault-Tec’s bad intentions are also unknown to her. But as Cooper starts seeing the cracks in the foundation of trust with his wife, we do too. We feel those things for him, with him. So when she makes her big reveal, we as the audience are like “damn, that hurts” because our worst thoughts have come true. Yes, we knew Cooper got divorced from the first episode, but the journey to fill in those blanks was an emotionally taxing one. And it was slow. Cooper and the audience spent time in those feelings, and then (pardon the pun) the bomb dropped.
We also learn about Hank MacLean’s (Kyle MacLachlan) betrayal the same way Lucy does! All at once! Everything we learn about Hank throughout the season is veiled in shadows up until Moldaver tells Lucy point blank who he is and what he’s done. Lucy, and the audience, had no idea. Sure, we’ve started to understand the secrets of the vaults because of Lucy’s brother, Norm’s, story. We see Cooper react to Lucy’s last name. We can infer Moldaver has a personal past with him. But all of those things don’t necessarily lead to us thinking Hank is bad, or even that he actually is. But in that same heavy, fraught moment that the show reveals the truth about Barb and Hank, we are feeling everything Lucy is and everything Cooper has been. The writers had us live those moments with them so perfectly. We see the same broken expression on Lucy’s face now that we see on Cooper’s from centuries ago. Lucy is drowning in those revelations, and Cooper has been grappling with them for 200 years.
“I’m you, sweetie. Just give it a little time” The Ghoul says to Lucy in Episode 3. And it is just a little time. So quickly does Lucy, do we, watch all of Lucy’s world fall to sand. Cooper was right. They are the same because they’ve been through the same thing, and now Lucy has to come to terms with that. The last thing we see her do (besides walk off with Cooper towards New Vegas) with any semblance of clarity is shoot a feral ghoul, revealed to be her mother, in mercy the same way she had seen Cooper do earlier in the series. When she watched Cooper shoot Roger, a ghoul that Cooper seemed to be friendly with but who is going feral, she was horrified. She couldn’t understand how that could possibly be an act bearing any goodwill. But now she does understand, and she hates him for it. She hates herself maybe too, but he was right. Now they need to find the same people to understand the same things.
I am so excited to see the second season of Fallout when it comes out. There’s a lot of things I’m looking forward to seeing be fleshed out, what else from the games they’re going to bring in, what other unique story beats they come up with, etc. Particularly though, I am so excited to see how Cooper and Lucy’s little road trip goes. How will Lucy react if she finds out who The Ghoul really is? How will she react if she sees her finger on his hand? How will Cooper react to knowing more about Lucy’s life in Vault 33 and the events that led to her leaving? There is so much delicious potential in that dynamic, and I trust the showrunners, Goggins, and Purnell to deliver.
You can stream the entire first season of Fallout (2024) on Amazon Prime.
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