Review
Fallout TV Show Teaser Drops

This weekend our patience was rewarded by Amazon Prime finally dropping a teaser for their new show…one we’ve all been (some with trepidation) looking forward to… FALLOUT. Some are excited, some are skeptical. I, myself, am undecided, and there are reasons for this that I will get into. 

At a length of 2 minutes 33 seconds, this feels more like a full trailer than a teaser. We do not, however, get any story, so it counts as a teaser in my mind.

What we saw…

The teaser opens with a look at a Vault hallway that looks like it’s straight out of Fallout 4 with the Vault number in the distance.. 33. So already, we know this is not a retelling of an existing Fallout story we’ve seen in the games. We also get to see the show’s Vault suits, Vault 33 entrance, and door. All are iconic pieces of the Fallout games, all instantly recognizable; and I must say, so far, so good.

Next we see a woman leaving Vault 33 and her reactions to the world outside the Vault. Her fearful reaction to the tumbleweed made me smile. We also get to see a radroach! And is that Dogmeat? All this is seen while we hear a Wastelander warning the Vaultdweller to either go home or, if she wants to survive, adapt.

Now smash cut to an outpost in the desert and our first glimpse of the Brotherhood of Steel. The vertibirds and spot on! And as is typical with all Fallout trailers, our introduction is punctuated by pre-War era music. In this case, “I Don’t Want to See Tomorrow” by Nat King Cole.

We see a veribird taking off while inside is an unsuited soldier of unknown rank looking at another…in Power Armor! It looks fantastic! It even has the Brotherhood emblem painted on the front! For those who are Fallout nerds, you’ll notice that this is “a full suit of cherry [T-60] Power Armor.” 

But here’s where we have our first problem… where our “immersion,” as it were, into a live action Fallout TV show gets a little broken. All the sets of Power Armor we see look too clean. The textures we’re used to, in Fallout 4, at least, show a high level of rust, wear, and tear, giving them a well-used look. It’s a small problem, I’ll grant you, and one I’m willing to let go, considering the fact that the Power Armor otherwise looks like a faithful replica. For comparison, here’s an image from the Fallout fandom page of the original:

And here’s one from Vanity Fair:

Nat King Cole continues to sing as we smash cut through some fast images of violence inside a Vault, the reveal of a Wasteland City that looks an awful lot like Megaton from Fallout 3, an unknown ghoul in a cowboy hat and bandolier, some unknown house and occupant out in the desert, and more violence in the aforementioned Wasteland City. Seems the ghoul is some kind of gun toting bandito or law man; there’s no context for why he’s in the middle of town throwing lead up into the surrounding multi-tiered structures.

The music pauses as we smash cut back to a man in a vault suit doing a spit take. Immersion breaking number two, inbound! Our supposed vault-dwelling heroine appears to be in an overseer’s office, who appears to be a cyclops?!

Without any time to register this, the music continues and we jump cut to the wasteland as a Mark 1 Turret is firing on someone. If it’s the same scene, Dogmeat is very brave and has fully 10 stars in his luck trait as every bullet from the turret is missing him and the person he’s guiding.

We get to see a Mr. Handy pushing an unconscious vault dweller across the screen in front of an old-world billboard. As the music intensifies we see more battle. We see what I’m guessing is supposed to be a Yao-guai trying to bite into a suit of Power Armor. An unknown creature (someone help me with this one) with a big mouth full of, um…we’ll call them fingers. More fighting inside a vault, focussed on a vault dweller with a fork in her eye as she’s angrily spraying machine gun fire. Finally, we get a glimpse of the Prydwen–oh, wait, that’s not the Prydwen, but another air-ship (we’ll call that immersion break number three).

The music slows at this point as we get a shot of the same person in a cowboy hat we saw previously, but this time as a human as he’s mounting a horse while buildings collapse in the background. We get a long pan of an old-world city getting pummeled by nuclear bombs while some is on horseback in the foreground. Do we mayhaps have a background story here? Could be…

The trailer ends with the Fallout logo in all its fiery glory as the music ends.

Audience Impressions

From my small sample size of the Laggin’ Out community, I can report that there is excitement for this show. There is also skepticism and X’s to Doubt. The look of the show is definitely going in the right direction. There’s nothing spitting in your eye to make you think the recreation of sets and costumes isn’t faithful. Todd Howard is involved after all. 

The only real offense, visually, seems to come from the ghoul. He’s not nearly nasty looking enough. To argue this, though, I and others point out that from Fallout 3 to Fallout 4 the ghouls did get milder. One reason for the ghoul in the show looking as mild as he does is so that the make-up doesn’t hide the actor’s features. I can see this; I know the more prosthetics there are, the harder it is for an actor to emote. Look at any Sci-Fi show where you have an alien and most of their face is covered in prosthetics.

The skepticism comes into play, with reason, because of Hollywood’s history of taking well-known book, movie, comic, and video game franchises…things we nerds love… and making them their own thing. Amazon by itself is known for doing this with The Lord of the Rings and The Wheel of Time. So… that begs the question:

Is it canon?

That’s a loaded question. Todd Howard has come out and said, “We view what’s happening in the show as canon.” Vanity Fair reports that, “Bethesda was careful to make sure the scripts could coexist with previous storylines from the gaming titles.” Well, Bethesda- and Amazon- I look forward to your explanation for a couple of things. 

One, you appear to have lifted the town of Megaton (Fallout 3) from the Washington, D.C. area of the east coast and dropped it into the deserts of the west. Renaming it “Philly” is not going to disguise the source material. We know this show takes place in the west because that Vanity Fair article mentions that “Philly” is “in the remnants of greater Los Angeles.”

Two, how is the Prydwen…no, sorry…the Caswennan in the west. This is another design lifted from Fallout (Fallout 4, this time). On this subject, I defer to one with superior knowledge, the Youtube King of Fallout Lore himself (my title for him, Hi Oxhorn!). I recommend seeing his video breakdown of the Vanity Fair article here.

My Indecision…

I’m undecided on the show at this point. I declared, upon hearing this show was in production, that I was going to sit back, wait and see, and (if it did get released) give it a wary eye. I’m still waiting.

I’m encouraged by what I’ve seen, visually, in this teaser. As I don’t know what the story is supposed to be–nothing in this trailer is giving me any inkling of an overall Fallout story–I’m waiting for more information. The fact that Todd Howard is involved is both encouraging and discouraging. He’s done good with Fallout so far (Fallout 76 notwithstanding), so if he’s guiding the ship of the show, we’re not bound to run aground. The disappointment of Starfield makes me think he’s sort of lost his way a bit, though.

I mentioned above that Amazon has not attributed itself well when adapting known-and-beloved books with plenty of lore (also known as ‘source material’) into television. The common argument being, “We wanted to tell our own stories.” To this I, and others, reply, “Then make your own thing! Don’t take our thing and proceed to [explicative] all over it!” And Fallout is definitely ours. As Nerdrotic is fond of saying, “We’re the paying customers.” We’re the fans, we paid for it, it’s ours.

Now, has Amazon taken Fallout merely as a platform to tell its own stories? Well, we’ll have to see.

Read the full Vanity Fair article I referenced here.