The Ringer-Verse - ‘Fallout’ Season 1 Reactions | Button Mash

Episode Date: April 16, 2024

Ben Lindbergh and Van Lathan leave the Vault to discuss the entire first season of the latest hit TV video-game adaptation, Prime Video’s ‘Fallout.’ After they give their high-level reviews of the series, they react to the story trailer for ‘Star Wars Outlaws’ (9:00) and then dive deep into how ‘Fallout’ functions as both a game adaptation and a standalone show, how it is and isn’t like ‘The Last of Us,’ and their lingering questions and sources of excitement for a probable Season 2 (21:00). Host: Ben Lindbergh Guest: Van Lathan Producer: Devon Renaldo Additional Production Supervision: Arjuna Ramgopal Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Because of the golden rule. Do unto others as you'd have done unto you. No, no. What about the head? I need the head to get my dad back. Yeah, well, the wasteland's got its own golden, isn't you? What's that? Now shall get sidetracked by me.

bullshit over goddamn time. Hello and welcome into the Ringerverse, your Nexus podcast feed for all things fandom. I am Ben Lindberg, a senior editor for the Ringer. Joining me today on the Brotherhood

of Button Mesh, you know him as a midnight boy, but today he's a vault boy. Van fucking Lathen is here. Love Vennam. Falkin Lathan, what's up? I left my pit boy. I don't have my pit boy. I guess I need it,

right? You got to have your pit boy. You can't get in the vault without the pit boy. Very true. Love your Lindberg impression, by the way. Can't believe you outed my real life persona like that. That's what I am off mic in person. I'm just cursing like a sailor, just obscene, offensive, foul-moused.

But on podcasts, I code switch. This is my mild-mannered alter ego that everyone knows. And now you spoiled it. Now everyone knows the real Ben. I'm like Lucy's dad on Fallout. I'm hiding the real me. Nasty New York, Brooklyn, Ben. Yeah.

That's who you are. Yeah. Pizza splotches on the wife being. Fuck out of here. That's your whole thing, bro. But yeah, man, look, I'm excited to be here. The Brotherhood of Budmash to talk about this is fantastic stuff that we got lined up for the people. It's amazing, brother.

Yeah, excited to have you. So people put on your pit boys and your power armor, crack open a can of Nuka Cola, eat some ass jerky. Because today we're talking about season one of Fallout. on Prime Video, the latest blockbuster TV adaptation of a beloved video game franchise. And guess what? It's a good one. Maybe we should be past the point of being surprised when we get a good game adaptation these

days. But you know what? We waited so long for them not to be bad that this winning streak is still sort of shocking. So we're devoting this Midnight MASH crossover pod to talking about fallouts first season, which dropped last Wednesday. Be warned, we will get into spoiler territory today. So you may want to finish binging before you listen on. But before we dive any deeper, let's just tease what we thought of the show.

And here are three texts I got from you about Fallout over the past few days. Text number one, it's fucking brutal. Text number two, show is great. Text number three, this show is bonkers. So brutal, bonkers, great. That sort of sums it up. Absolutely. The lore and the backstory for Fallout is so deep.

in terms of all the rules of the world, the alternate history, all of that stuff, the steam punky way that the technology comes at you, which kind of gives the world its vibrancy. But this show is able to actually capture the tone of the games

in a way that I think a lot of other video game adaptions don't. Yeah. Yeah. I think the quirkiness, but the brutality and the sinisterness of the world of fallout where you don't know what's going to happen next. Things are creeping around you.

Technology isn't your friend. Community isn't your friend. Your friend is only the truth. And seeking that truth is part of the danger. This show really gets that across. Yeah. And a lot of people have been making comparisons to The Last of Us. It's inevitable.

This is also a big budget bid for prestige TV attention. But just because it's based on a storied game franchise with a post-apocalyptic setting, this is a different beast because The Last of Us is a very linear game. It's very consciously cinematic and prestige TV-like. Fallout is a very gamey game.

It's more of an RPG or an action RPG. There's a lot of freedom for the player to determine how the game goes. And in that sense, it's much more difficult to adapt. I'm not going to say it's better than The Last of Us, but as an adaptation, I think it might be more impressive because this is much more of an original story that is very grounded in the game world. It's also more fun than The Last of Us.

It's just a totally different vibe in a number of ways. But if you want something accessible, something that will go down easy and won't leave you traumatized every week, even though it does get gory, I think this is maybe kind of an easier lift, right? You know, maybe there's a little less lasting import to it. Maybe it doesn't stay with you quite as much. But it goes down easy. This is a fun watch. Yeah, it is a fun watch, despite the fact that sometimes it's hard to watch. As you said, fucking brutal.

Yeah, there's always something happening that lids itself to intrigue. With The Last of Us, you are diving so deep into the realistic stakes of this world. And everyone is living in the same part of it, basically. Fallout is really about this mishmash of different approaches to the apocalypse. The vault dwellers, the destroyed town of Shays' ends, the Brotherhood, the ghouls, the ghouls, there are just lots of different factions and ways of approaching the wasteland that have to sort of be contended with. And, of course, like any post-apocalyptic show, frequent flashbacks to before the things went shit.

Of course. Which in this show are just, to me, way, way more integral to the storytelling than they are on any other show of the like. Maybe besides Station 11, which is a, you know, kind of

being told from the two different point of views. Anyway, what I'm saying is, fallout is fun, man. Like, the last of us is, like you said, it's a trip into how are we going to figure this out and how you're going to protect what you love. Fallout stays in a struggle for truth, a power struggle.

There's already so much technology. It is the end of the world, but it doesn't really feel like it. It feels like it almost takes place on another planet because there's still somebody who's eating good. There's still someone who's clean. There's still someone. It's like kind of a competition for what the world is going to be. I have more fun watching Fallout so I can stop blathering than I did watching The Last

of us. The Last of Us is better, but Fallout to me, I'm more looking forward to the second season of fallout. I am to the second season of the last season of us. I'll be honest. Yeah. Yeah. Well, having played The Last of Us part two, it doesn't get a lot lighter in season two, let me tell you, but I'm with you. So before we break down Fallout in full, we're briefly going to give you our thoughts on the new story trailer for Star Wars Outlaws, which is coming out on Windows, PS5 and Xbox later this year from Ubisoft's massive entertainment. In this trailer, we get a longer look at the protagonist, KVess, some details about the story and setting, and a release date, which is surprisingly soon, August 30th. Van, I made you watch this trailer.

What do you think you're going to get into this? KVess, the underworld's favorite new scound. Fuck! We meet it last. What do you want? Zerick Besh, their new. rich and lethal. You cross their boss, Sliro,

and now he wants you gone. Rob his fortune by your freedom. This job, it's a death wish. Yeah, I'll give it a try. Look, anything that has to do with the Star Wars universe and the world that I've devoted so much time to over my life, I'll give it a spin. Interesting.

Star Wars outlaws looking at the world through the sphere, of the people who are hustling in the galaxy. You know, I'm for it. There's a big galaxy out there. A lot of stories that need to be told, I think as we spend away from more of the Skywalker-centric stuff or even the Jedi-centric stuff, it presents both a unique opportunity

for the storytellers and the crafters of this games and this story, but also a challenge as well. When you look at this trailer, you see some familiar faces, you see Java in there, you see solo encasing carbonite, You see some things that are going to bring you back in and go, I'm assuming that was so low. I guess it. Yes, not just some other random guy.

Some other dude, yeah. You see things that bring you back into it. But at the same time, it does seem like they're going for some novel storytelling and a novel gameplay approach here. What about you? Is that trailer, does that get you off the couch? Yeah, they've shown some gameplay before, which looks promising. We've been waiting a while for a good underworld game, just exploring that seedy underbelly of Star Wars. There have been some earlier efforts like Project Ragtag and Star Wars 1313 that a lot of people were excited about and then they got canceled.

And I like that there don't seem to be any Jedi here. No force users on the screen. I'm excited for a full-on open world Star Wars game. And there aren't a lot of AAA titles slated for the second half of this year. So this is one of my most anticipated games. My main reservations, aside from the Ubisoft's of it all, sort of a good, not great track record for this developer, you said it. So it takes place between Empire and Jedi.

And we see Jabba, we see Han, we see Tatween. And when I see those things, my instant reaction is I feel fatigued. As much as I love this universe and that part of it, I really want to get away from that tiny slice of the Star Wars timeline, which is one reason I'm excited for the Ackleite, just like break out of that box, you know, whether we go forward, whether we rewind, give me something new.

at least we get some glimpses of new settings here. We get some totally new worlds. We get some less explored ones like Kanto Bight and Kajimi from the sequel trilogy. Also, Kira is in this game, Kira from Solo, not played by Melia Clark anymore. But if you read the comics, she's up to some interesting stuff at this point in the timeline. She's trying to take down the Sith. She starts a syndicate war among all the criminal organizations. So I hope you get to explore that.

I hope it's not too tied into the Skywalker saga stuff, the good versus bad. And also, I'm sort of sick of scoundrels with hearts of gold. You know, like, I want the truly bad ones. It sounds like Kay wants to pull this one last heist so she can be free and maybe change her ways. And I just wish we could play as someone who has no interest in changing their ways. I just want to live the ruthless, scoundrel criminal life. I don't want to leave my life of crime behind. I want to be the biggest, baddest criminal.

So I hope Kay is a killer. You know, I hope you kill lots of people as Kay, but then she doesn't have a moral code in the cutscenes. I want her to be bad. Too soon to say. Star Wars is afraid of its villains in that way. Yeah. Star Wars has great villains. They have these huge forces that sometimes act in direct opposition to what their heroes want.

But because essentially, Star Wars is about like. versus dark, there's a balance that they always want to strike with their villains. They always want to strike a balance to where, I mean, Papalty might be the exception to that because he just has been completely corrupted. Look, if you read enough Star Wars, there are plenty of just bad motherfuckers in there. If you read enough Star Wars, there's, but I'm talking to like a casual fan that might be looking around and saying, okay, well, who are the truly bad guys in there? Well, Maul wasn't a truly bad guy.

when it was all said, done, here. Everyone gets redeemed, right? Everyone gets redeemed. I don't want redemption. Right. You want somebody that's like, yo, I mean, and that's your Palpatine, right? Palpatine is like, like, lusting for power and influence and trying to put everybody under his thumb or under his life.

Yeah. I'm not here to defend Papatine today. But they don't give you that a lot. They want you to read between the lines for some of these people. I think they're afraid of it a little bit. It's like, you know, once again, it has to be palatable for kids. So they always want you to like kind of. see the good in someone. Yeah, I don't want to see the good in the character I'm playing.

You want everybody shooting first, the whole bullshit. Exactly. Yeah. No recconning of anything, no special edition in that way. Even though like when you do get a choice in Cotor or whatever to choose bad or good, sometimes I will be good anyway. But I want the protagonist to be an antagonist. I want an anti-hero, a true one. So we'll see. I doubt that's what this is going to be. But I'm looking forward to it either way. They'll never make a protagonist. They'll never give you a protagonist that just says, fuck it, let's shoot some people with a blaster. They won't do that.

They'll give you an opportunity to make someone feel good at the end of the entire story. Yes, it has to be a role model, ultimately. By the way, I know this is sort of a slow year for Star Wars, but bad batch into Tales of the Empire, into Acolyte, into outlaws, into skeleton crew, I don't know how good all those things will be, but that's not bad.

Like even the slow years now would have seemed like a, dream when we were young and almost no new Star Wars stuff was coming out. This would have seemed like not a slowdown, not a step back. This would have been a deluge. This would have been an onslaught of Star Wars. Kids today, they don't know. No, they're up to their fucking eyeballs in Star Wars. I was just another podcast talking about Phantom Minis. And, you know, my affection towards Fancy Minnis, the movie being what it was or what it is, part of it has to do with the fact that that was 99 and the last Star Wars movie

had come out unless you I guess count whatever that Ewalks, Force, Moon, the indoor movie, whatever that was. I remember when it came out. Yes. It's 1983. Before we had had an event, you know, you had had the re-releases a couple of years before, just the year before or whatever. Yeah, you had

books, but yeah, on-screen, slim pickets. All that stuff, it just wasn't a lot. And so now to be in this era, I guess the question is, like, what's the happy medium between being drowned in Star Wars content, some of which you wonder if you need, and keeping the lore going to the point

that people feel satiated for their love of what we've been reading since we were kids, you know? Right. Well, we'll be all over Outlaws later this year, but here's what's coming up on the Ring ofverse in the short term. On Wednesday, we've got a new episode of The Midnight Boys. Poo-Pew!

And my schedule doesn't say what it will be about. So, Van, Van, what are you guys talking about this week? We're going to be talking about X-Men 97 and Shogun. I mean, those are the two things that we're on right now every single week. Ben, man, we are getting, we're about to get fucking waylaid, bro. We got fucking the boys coming up. We got House of Dragon coming up. We got the Akely coming up.

We're about to get deep into it before you know. And we're going to begin going to screenings of fucking Deadpool and Wolverine. We're about to get fucking crack. Are you ready, Ben? I am ready. I can't wait. The bear will be back too. The bear will be back.

June's going to be nuts. Ready. Crazy, man. Crazy times. Well, over on House of R this week, Mal and Joe are doing a spring mailbag episode, followed by their own X-Men 97, check-in later in this week. And next week, we've got a lot of Avengers Endgame

five-year anniversary content coming your way on both beads as we look back to a time when all was well in the MCU. No signs of anything going awry whatsoever. The Midnight Boys will be revisiting Endgame. next week, House of R will be inducting Ironman and Cap into its Hall of Fame. And ButtMesh will be back next week, too, with coverage of yet another TV video game adaptation, Knuckles. On Paramount Plus, you're going to check out Knuckles, man? I will. I like Knuckles.

I always feel like Tails gets, like, left behind. I like Tails. Sidekick, yeah. But, like, I wish there could be a crossover, just Tails and Luigi and somebody's going to be just talking shit. I like Tails. I've always fucked with Tails when the game first came out even with Sonic and Tails. I love Tales, man. Yeah.

Why did Tails get his own show? A lot of Luigi fans out there, too, just like the character that's not in the spotlight, that's always getting bodied by the big mascot character. You like to root for them. You want them to get their moment in the sun. So speaking of Endgame, Sonic is entering its own Avengers era, according to the EP of Knuckles recently said that they're building up to Avengers level events

with the whole sonic, cinematic, televised universe, which I don't know, relax. I'm not sure it's going to be as big a phenomenon, but we'll get forward to all this stuff. Kianu just cast his shadow, so that's exciting. I don't know, is shadow eligible to be a black character? I guess not now if Kianu's playing him. Yeah.

Otherwise, I would have said, you had a chance at least. You think shadow's black? I think you could make that case. Why? Why? Well, just based on skin tone alone. I know that's not always.

We got to fuck that. We got to stay here. We got to stay here. Let's look. Let's look at Shadow. Yeah, check out Shadow. I mean, he is black. It's hair color, I guess.

We don't know what he looks like under the hair. Yeah, I mean, he is black. It's just, it's what I like about This is, let me tell you, this is a kind of take that we were fucking flame Steve for, right? But because it's you and we fucking trust you, I'm looking at this situation. I'm going, you know, he's got kind of crazy kicks on. He's got some, you could have made it. But here's the thing, though.

You know who's black? Who? Fucking Knuckles is black. Oh, wow. Because they got Knuckles voiced by Idris Elba. Yeah, that's true. Based on actors, we got to go the other way here. Here's a rule.

Whoever voices the character makes the character black or white. Okay. Yeah. Like if there's your voice coming through, some of these characters that are voice, boom. But I will say this.

We will do a whole midnight voice on whether or not shadow is black. I'd be honest with you, Ben. They got Shadow with a gun in his hand here. This take is getting more controversial by you. Yeah. You got to have. I have neon-lin's black superheroes of fandom.

He got a diamond. My voice is the one that's been missing. Look, he got a diamond right here. Okay, I've been. I'm not. This could be stereotyping. Sorry if I've waited into dangerous territory. I don't know.

I don't know. I'm going to say sorry now. You have to come on the midnight. Okay, this is what you have to do. This is what we're going to do. You have to come on the midnight boys because we haven't had you on yet. We have to come on the midnight boys and defend this take. Okay.

You have to defend the take of Shadow being black. Okay. All right. So that's what we're going to do. Yeah. Next Midnight Boys, we're running by the guys. You have to come on the Midnight Boys and defend the take about why you think Shadow is Black. Would have been easier before Keanu got cast. That kind of hurts my case.

But you have to make it work, Ben. This is what you have to do, all right? All right. Any time. Either way, Jess will be here with me next time to talk about Knuckles and also possibly whether Shadow is Black will get her take on this important. matter and maybe we'll talk some stellar blade too. And remember, you can email us at ringerverse gaming at gmail.com. This episode is brought to by Viori. When it comes to close, that score high and both comfort and style, Viori is my MVP. Sunday performers, strongers, oh yeah, they have the

perfect. I could watch a game and then go out to dinner vibe. And the metapant, that's my number one. I need to look like I tried option. Get 20% off your first purchase at viori.com slash Simmons and discover the versatility of Viori clothing. Exclusions apply, visit the website for full terms and conditions. This episode is brought to by the active cash credit card from Wells Fargo. That's a mouthful, but that's because it packs a lot in. Earn unlimited 2% cash rewards on purchases with it, big or small. So whether it's buying tickets to the game and grabbing a coffee, it earns unlimited 2% cash rewards on purchases. Say it with me, the active cash credit card from Wells Fargo, be a 2%er. Learn more at Wells Fargo.

Welcome.com forward slash active cash terms of play. This episode is brought to you by Two Good and Company coffee creamers. Howdy take your coffee, piping hot, ice, strong, frothy. But if you love rich, creamy goodness and delicious flavor in every sip, try Two Good and Company creamers. They're made with farm fresh cream and real milk. Each serving has just three grams of sugar, 40% less than the leading coffee creamers. Two good creamers are available in sweet cream, roast of vanilla and lavender.

So which one are you trying first? Find two good creamers at your local retailer in the creamer aisle. All right, Fallout. Let's talk about Fallout first as a game adaptation, and then we can talk about it as a show on its own merits. So for those unfamiliar with Fallout, where have you been? This franchise originated in 1997, though it's sort of a spiritual sequel to the 1988 game Wasteland,

so this series goes back a bit. There are four mainline games. the first two developed by Interplay, the most recent two developed by Bethesda. There are also several spinoffs, the latest of which Bethesda's Fallout 76, came out in 2018, and maybe the most beloved of which, Obsidian's New Vegas, came out in 2010. So right now, the game series is sort of on a break, on a hiatus between Fallout 76, which was pretty poorly received and very buggy at first. They kind of fixed it later.

And Fallout 5, which won't be out for quite a while, because Bethesda's busy with the Elder Scroll 6. You've played some fallout in your day, right? Yes. What did you get into? How long has it been for you? It's been a while. New Vegas was my favorite wine.

Okay. A lot of people love New Vegas. New Vegas was fantastic. It was during the time of my life where I was very stressed out and I would actually use the game to transport me into another world. The game itself, I was doing a better world necessarily. Not a better world, but like, Like, you know, you cut the lights out.

You sit down in the living room on the big TV. You cut on New Vegas. And it was a creepy transformative experience. And it was the type of game, which is the reason why I knew that Fallout would be very entertaining if it ever got adapted into a series. It was the type of game that if somebody was watching you play it, it was almost as entertaining for them to watch you play. than it is for you playing it because so much freaky, crazy, creepy shit is happening. The world is so unpredictable. The steampunk sort of mix of futuristic slash, oh, why is that in the 50s and 60s type logo situation?

It invokes curiosity from people as I struggle to find my words right there. So the game itself was very addictive, addictive in a way where I spent way too much time playing New Vegas to where, when the game after that came out, I was so busy in life that I didn't want to dive back in because I was afraid of getting hooked on it again. And you guys have seen me. I've talked about this, Spider-Man 2 all of these games

when I start playing them, I can't fucking do anything else in my life. But Fallout definitely, definitely had me going crazy for at least five or six months. What about you? Which games have you played? I like playing a post-apocalyptic thing or immersing myself in a post-apocalyptic setting

when things aren't going so great. Because it's like, at least it's better than that. Right. It could be worse. You know, like I wrote about this for the Ringer during the pandemic, the real life pandemic. You mentioned Station 11 earlier. And we were into that then. And a lot of people were like, I can't watch this now.

I can't watch a show that's about disease and illness and the apocalypse. And there were a lot of things like that at the time, The Last of Us Part 2. That was tough, but that would have been tough tonally at any time. I like watching those things because there's always like an uplifting message to them, usually, at least. Sometimes it's like, you know, the real monsters or humanity. But sometimes it's like we come together in difficult times, probably more so than we actually did during the real life pandemic, which is just even more divisive in polarizing. But in fiction, sometimes it's like everyone gets together to ensure the survival of the species. And, you know, even if a lot of people died, not everyone died.

So it kind of cheers me up. You know why we didn't come together during the pandemic like that? Why? Because it didn't get bad enough. Yeah. It wasn't quite an existential threat. It was really bad, but it wasn't survival of the species at stake. Right.

And so, like, and a lot of these things that we're talking about when we see people, and look, in all of these different post-apocalyptic depictions of humanity, they're factions, there are people that are hoarding resources, there are people that have fallen victim to their baser instincts and don't even comport themselves like human beings anymore. Even in this show, there's an interesting argument of who is the protagonist and who's the antagonist, you know? Who are the good guys and who are the bad guys?

You start off with a pretty good idea of who the bad guys are just based upon the fact that they run into a spot and kill fucking everybody or as many people that say, hey. And then as far as the further you go along, you realize that things aren't what they seemed. So I'll have to say that. There's always an element of who are we going to be when abundance is taken away from us, when our bodies, which don't know that McDonald's is across the street,

like your body doesn't know that. Your body is operating much the same way that it did thousands of years ago. So if you feed it too much, it stores what it doesn't need. So it doesn't know that you can just go get some more food. Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah. But when we get back to times that are a little bit more strung out to where it's a little bit more animalistic, like, what will we respond with?

We respond with reason or brutality. It's just fun. Yeah. It's super fun. And in this particular world, we think that the vault dwellers are the ones that have responded with reason when they are 60 million times more brutal than anything that we've seen, you know? Right. And a lot of them at least are in the dark. They don't know how they got there.

They don't know what they're really doing there. And I've spent a fair amount of time with at least the latter day fallout games. I have not played the first two fallout games. So there's sort of a divide in the Fallout fan base between the interplay people and the Bethesda people. So Fallout 1 and 2, a little more hardcore RPG, whereas the latter ones, a little more action RPG, first person, arguably a little more more accessible. So there's kind of a divide about what's the real fallout sort of this fight for the soul. of Fallout and plenty of people who like both. And this is, I think, mainly pulling from the latter ones,

but there's elements of all of them, and it's the same setting regardless. And this series borrows a lot from the games. You've got the post-nuclear annihilation setting. You have the look and the sound of the games, as you said, just this retro futuristic atom punk aesthetic. You've got the primitive vacuum tubes, meet the advanced nuclear devices.

You have the 50s fashions and vehicles and needle drops, seemingly less racism in the 50s fallout world. I don't want to talk about that. Yeah. What did you think of that? So it's an interesting choice, right? Because one of our protagonists or not one of our protagonists, because he's not a protagonist, is the ghoul, play by Walton Goggins. And scoop back in the day, it's an interesting choice that they made with him. Yeah, interracial couple.

knowing bats and I? Absolutely, right? And tell what I thought about it. The first thing I thought about was they're trying to show you that inherently this guy's a good guy. Because as soon as you see the 50s, I'll be honest with you. When I see the 50s, I think how are we getting fucked over right now. No matter how good the white characters in the 50s are, I go, we're going to get back to their house. And somebody named Hattie is going to be fucking putting burgers on the grill and clean up the house.

And I'm going to go, fuck them. I don't care what happens. They don't do that, right? Or everyone gets fucked over in fall out, I guess. Right. They don't do that because, okay, this guy's married to a black woman. And then you start to see something that it's not just him. She's very prominent, a black woman high up in this company and really dictating things.

So there's the idea that whatever alternate history that we're in right now, that either technology or the fact that they've mastered, nuclear fusion, that it's led to different outcomes in America. And even that is like super fucking fascinating. When I first saw him at the thing, I'm going, oh, that's his kids biracial. His wife must be black. Or like the mother of the child must be black. I'm thinking, well, where are we? Like, where are we?

What are we doing? And it adds to the otherworldliness of the 1950s, 1960s America that you think that you know. And he's this sort of smoking guy in a suit, big shot actor. You think he's going to be maybe a chauvinist type, you know, but he turns out to be the good guy, the righteous guy, kind of a wife guy. And meanwhile, his wife has nefarious aims. She is hiding things from him, right? So, yes, it's more advanced, more equitable in some ways.

And then in other ways, it's even worse because we've ended up not just with a Cold War, but with all the bombs actually dropping. And over the course of the series, we find out how that happened. But just the look, the factions, the locations, the fashions, the vehicles, the needle drops, very prominent in this show from the era. All of that taken from the games rendered really faithfully. The dog is named Dog Meat, of course. So if you're a fan of the Fallout Games and you're watching the show,

you're constantly going to be doing the Leo DiCaprio point at the screen meme. You're going to recognize everything. It looks like you're used to it looking. What it doesn't take from the games is a specific story or specific characters. You have the Southern California setting of the first couple games. You have sort of a Fallout 3-esque structure of the vault dweller protagonist, leaving the vault to search for a father figure. You have the cryogenic freezing from Fallout 4.

It's kind of pulling in elements of all the games, tons of references to the game's monsters and products and food and stim packs and shop menus and RPG rule set and weapons and water chips. I mean, we could do a whole pod on just the Easter eggs. You know, when Hank unlocks the cold fusion device in the finale, the code is 10-10-97, which is the release date of the first fallout game. So just lots of little nods like that. But it goes beyond Easter eggs.

It's just the same universe. So you see all the stuff you expect to see. But if you haven't played the games, it's not hitting you over the head with it, you know, because that's a mistake that a lot of video games. adaptations make. It's all about the look, this thing you loved from the video game. Here it is. We put it in the TV show or the movie too. Isn't that cool? And that's completely lost on everyone who hasn't played the games. And for people who have played the games, it's like, all right, well, that's kind of cool. We're seeing the same thing in a different medium now, but you've got to give the people something

they haven't seen before. So I think, as you said, it's kind of a mishmash. It's just like a jumble of lots of elements from Fallout, but it's not exactly following the same path as any particular Fallout game. And I think that's the way to go generally with these things. It's not to retrace the path of a particular game that you've played before, unlike The Last of Us, but the Last of Us is different because it's just so linear.

You know, there's just a ready-made story there for adaptation. You really could only tell the same story in a different way, whereas here it's much more open-ended, because Fallout's kind of what you want it to be when you play. So it's a tougher assignment, I think, for the people who made this series. Yeah, I mean, spot on. So the theme that video games do super well that a lot of times television shows don't do well or struggle to do is world building. Yeah.

The characterization in a video game is less important than the world building because you're the character. So you're making decisions. You don't necessarily need to grow. You need to accomplish objectives. The world, though, in order to keep you invested, has to continuously get bigger and change. So it's a different way of kind of looking at it, right? Yeah. And so the world has to change, get bigger.

You have to do more things. You have to have the ability to do more things. You have to look different ways. You have to, you know, make different decisions. You don't have to change as much as the world does. You might require more stuff, but the world has to change a lot. So the world building in Fallout is fantastic. Mm-hmm.

The fact that there's no central character to orient that world around actually is a blessing for it because you can then launch multiple stories at once. Yeah. I mean, obviously, Lucy's the protagonist here, but Maximus has as much of an arc as Lucy does as does Coupe slash the ghoul. Those are the three stories that orient our world here. And at the end, obviously, Lucy and the ghoul slash coop are together. I'm just going to call him a coop. Yeah, go ahead. The ghoul and the coop and Lucy are together.

But there's still on different journeys. We didn't know to the last episode that he was trying to find his family. We really had no clue about that. Brutal bounty hunter who seemed, who just was so cynical that he'd kill anyone in front of him. but it's not until the very last episode that you realize that it's been 200 years and he's trying to find his family or find whatever remnants of them would be left or why they would still be around. We now know that you go into cold storage when you're inside of the vaults and so because his wife was management, she might still be around. Anyway, but what I'm saying is that those characters being new, they allow you to play with what the brotherhood means, play with what it means to be a vault dweller, play with what it means to be a ghoul. and build the world around them.

It just works better. It works better that I'm not waiting for something to be recreated from a video game necessarily with a character. It works better that they're able to drop these characters into this vast world and watch that world sort of form around them than us have to form our vision of the world around the characters. It's free in a way, but it's also not without risk, you know? Yeah.

And that's another way it's different from The Last of Us. That's the Joel and Ellie story. You're sticking with them. almost the entire time. Here, as you said, there are three, arguably four different storylines. If you count Lucy's brother Norm, who's still stuck back in the vault and trying to figure out what's going on there. And ultimately, yeah, they do all tie together.

At first, it's like Lucy's doing her thing, Maximus is doing his thing, the ghoul's off somewhere else. What do they all have in common? Ultimately, though, they all get wrapped up in the same sort of pursuit of a Mcuffin and their paths cross and it all kind of makes sense in the end. I think it's like The Last of Us and I don't mean to keep harping on this. I mean, the people who create the show invoked The Last of Us too. Co-creator, co-show runner Graham Wagner said, because of The Last of Us, now there's an expectation of no video game adaptations can actually be great. I watched some good ones. He said, in a perverse way,

I wish there was more snobbery so that we could have been the first. He kind of wants the credit for snapping the drought being the first great video game adaptation. There have been more than just the Last of Us, to be fair. But they have kind of made the show in the shadow of The Last of Us. And some of the ways that it was made, I think, are similar. You just have a big budget. It's a high-profile network. You have the game creators involved, which I think is important if you want to sort

of honor the original canon and storyline. So Bethesda's Todd Howard is an executive producer on this series. You also have big name TV creators who know and care about the source material. So that was Craig Mason for The Last of Us. Here it's Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy of Westworld and in the peripheral, etc. They executive produced the series two. Nolan directed the first three episodes. So it's not just someone's like, oh, I heard that these are popular games.

Let's make a show out of it. It's people who played the games, who understood the appeal of the games and want to sort of honor it in the thing that they make. And obviously, similarly, it's a TV show. There's been talk of a fallout movie for years, just as there was talk of a Last of Us movie. But when you have eight or nine episodes to play with instead of a two or three hour movie, it really helps with that world building issue. As you said, I mean, that's one of the strengths of video games. Arguably, it's also one of the strengths of TV. So time after time, it seems like the natural home for video game adaptations is television.

Because imagine trying to make this thing in a movie. I mean, there'd be so much lore to dispense. There'd be so much backstory just to familiarize everyone with the setting would take a ton of time, let alone to introduce all these new characters and their quest. So I think this is the natural home for most video game adaptations. And this is just another example of that. Totally agree. I think movies are for contained stories for something that's sprawling.

You need nine or two. hours. And Nolan said that this is almost like Fallout 5 in the sense that it tells its own standalone, ambitious story. Later, it came out that the creators of Fallout 5 actually kind of warned them away from certain things that are going to be in that game so that they're not stepping on each other's toes. But it is canon. So it's not like Halo, for instance, where the show canon is separate from the games canon. And it's not a direct adaptation like The Last of us, but it is canon, and that has some interesting implications for Fallout based on the finale here, which maybe we can get into a little later. But that makes it feel like there's sort of

stakes to this if you're someone who played the games. This is not just kind of borrowing from that world, but it's also revealing some pretty big things about the nature of that world. And you can see how it benefits Bethesda to just as the Last of Us benefited Nottie Dog. all of the Fallout games have seen their player count spike since the series came out. People are playing all the Fallout games now, in some cases, more than ever or more than they have in years. They're also on sale, which has helped, but that's just part of it. Plus the next gen update for Fallout 4 comes out next week.

So synergy, you know, like you want one of these projects to come along and then you capitalize it and you hope that people who haven't played these games before are going to want to dive in, you know? Like, are you so into Fallout that you're thinking, I want to check out Fallout 4. I want to check out Fallout 3. I want to check out the ones you missed. Or are you too worried because you know it will consume your life? Well, no, I'm definitely going to do it now.

The show fucked me. Because what happens with the show is that you end up making different decisions than the characters would make. And that's where the video game beats the television experience. The video game allows you to. like you said before, write your own television show, make decisions that are different than the characters might make. Lucy is standing there at the end with her father, and she has to make a decision about how she moves forward.

Like that type of thing is something in a video game. There's other, there was one fallout, and my friend was telling me about it. I'd never played it, but he was like, at the end of the game, you had to make the decision whether or not you were going to go into some kind of situation and sacrifice yourself to end the game or then send somebody else into that you have been riding along with

and then they would die. Yeah, Fallout 3, I think. Right. And so those are the types of things that in a show they have to give you and lets this fucking Netflix is, you know, Bandersnatch. Yeah, Blasier Adventure. Yeah. The show has to give you that.

But in the game, I'm looking at all of these different things, decisions that, you know, Maximus is making when he's taking over the guy's body and all that stuff. And I'm like, wow, this video game. This really, really works. And it makes me excited to play the video game. Last of Us is different in the fact that like, it's just not the same. You know what I mean? Like, it might make you more curious about the video game. And I have played the first Last of us a little bit since I started to watch it. Just wanted to kind of get a sense of what was going on with it. But Fallout is just, it seems like this limitless world, I don't know that I wouldn't choose to be a vault dwelling.

I'm involved. You know, the dog thing is kind of hard, but... That is tough. Yeah. Other than that, I'd love to live in a vault. I don't need to see this. Yeah, I think I'd probably be in a vault, right? Just give me my meals.

Yeah. It sounds great. Everybody's fucking down there. It seems like, you know what I mean? So, like, I think... Even cousins? Yeah, so I think, you know, that all deal. So I'm not surprised you know that it's canon.

It means that they're going to be... implications on these games from this show, which is super fucking exciting. I don't remember ever looking at something that did anything like that, Jenna. Yeah. So let's talk about it a bit as a show. So this was co-created, co-show run by Graham Wagner, who I mentioned, and Geneva Robertson touret. Wagner has worked on Portlandia, which is probably why you get the Fred Arbison cameo in

Fallout, plus Silicon Valley, the office, baskets. He's coming from a comedy background. Robertson Dwarrett worked on Captain Marvel and Tomb Raider and has been connected to a bunch of other sci-fi or superhero stuff. So you can see the synthesis of those two sensibilities here. You got sort of the comedy background, the humor side of the series. And then you also have the world building. We're building a gigantic sci-fi epic series here

that has lots of lore and implications for the canon. And Fallout does a decent job of, melding those two sensibilities, I think. Would you call this, I mean, I guess it's a dromedy, right? Anything with comedy elements, drama elements, but it's somewhere between like twisted metal, which is just full on comedy and sort of satire and then The Last of Us, which, you know, has some lighter moments, but is really like dark, gritty prestige drama. Where would you place this on that spectrum?

Shit got not funny real quick. The absurdity of the world is very funny. Like losing herself, the pluckiness of her character. Perfectly cast, by the way. Yeah. Big, beautiful eyes that like look like they're always in wonderment, especially at the beginning. I was going to say, Ella Pernell, right? I don't know who has bigger eyes.

Ella Pernell or Anya Taylor Joy. They both look like Alita. It's just like a little, a little bigger than. it seems like a human should have. Right. But it's striking. But the show is just met with this, like, extreme visceral violence. The stakes of the world get shown to you so early that there are funny things that happen,

but it's just difficult to laugh when there's danger lurking around every single corner. And particularly the backstory. We start off with a grand old nuking scene. They sent three nukes at downtown L.A. Shit, they give us a fucking chance. The Nolens, they can't get enough of nukes. Yeah, there's some nuke crazy motherfuckers. And when a kid is holding up her thumb and going, it's like, shit, this is really, really, really serious.

So, but there's this, the show is weaking at you a little bit, and there's a lightness and still a cleanness to it. that gives you space to laugh at some of the more absurd points. And the 50s are like a funny time. I mean, they're not funny time when you actually think about them, but they're oftentimes talked about, well, not funny. There's a, even though we are aware of the social strife that existed during the 50s and the 60s, there's still an element of innocence that we look at the time with. Yeah, like that pleasant bill type of situation.

And it comes through. So it disarms you a little bit. Even the soundtrack, it disarms you a little bit until those same songs sound morose. And like, you know what I mean? Yeah. As they play over, you know, certain scenes. But yeah, like I laugh at parts of the show, but around the middle of it, I stopped laughing because the stakes just got too high. Mm-hmm.

And the gore, the brutality that you mentioned, I mean, I was trying to compare it in my mind to the boys, is just sticking with another Amazon show. And it's not played for laughs like it is in the boys and Gen V, right? Where it's sort of over the top, gruesome, Corey, just buckets and buckets of blood. In some ways, it's more brutal. It's kind of tougher, right? It makes you wince more in fallout because maybe it's used like a little bit more in moderation. There's plenty of blood.

Don't get me wrong. There's a very violent show. but I think because it's not quite as over the top as the boys where you're just supposed to kind of like giggle at the body count and just how gruesome it is, it kind of hits harder here for me. It does. There's one scene that I remember that I literally,

even thinking about it right now, I'm not even bullshit in you. And it's not even one of the ones. Just the scene with the razor blade in the boots just makes me fucking, bro, like, it's just fucks with me so bad, bro. Yeah. But yeah, so the show is obviously very fantastical, but it's a place where you can lose an arm.

The boys is different. The boys is superheroes. And so superheroes just reminds you of kids. It reminds you of what should be happening. The boys is more what should be happening. When Superman hit somebody, their fucking face should explode. You know, if, like, all of this stuff should happen. If the figs are all the same, all that,

stuff, I guess shit happened. I guess Superman doesn't punch regular people very often, but you know, Spider-Man, I push the shit out of you. He's holding back, but still, that fucking will probably hurt. But with this show, there's war, and there's human war, and there's things that are meant to kill people, and there are things that are meant to injure persons, and there are guns that have been retrofit with this different weaponry

that are used to, that should be used to inflict damage on other human beings. and because of that, they're shooting teeth at each other. You know what I mean? So because of that, there's just this disgusting authenticity of how they fight and what happens to them after that grounds you a little bit, you know? Yeah. Yeah, the violence is very convincing. And the whole show is, the whole setting is,

because I don't know the exact budget for this show. I don't think it's been reliably reported. You have to be up over a hundred-something million dollars, right? Oh, yeah. I mean, we know Amazon has dropped hundreds of millions. trying to create its own thrones-level phenomenon. And with the boys, and to some extent, invincible, that's worked. With successful series and multiple spinoffs, the whole works,

with the non-superhero stuff, Citadel, rings of power, wheel of time, the peripheral, the results have been a little less than they bargained for. I mean, there are things to like about some of those shows, but they haven't caught on in the culture the way that Amazon wanted when you're dropping that much money. And here, I don't know whether this will catch on to the same extent, but it looks great. And part of that is that just tons of practical effects. Obviously, there's some CG, there's some VFX, but I think it's like 90% or more practical effects. You know, the power armor looks lived in.

This looks like a hundreds-year-old, just kind of worn-down place that I find very convincing. You don't necessarily want to spend time there. It's post-apocalypse, but it feels like it could be a real place. And so however much they spent on this, I feel like they put it to good use. So I'm looking at Variety right now. And Variety says $153 million is what they spent. For season two, right? There's some rumors already about season two.

They applied for a California tax credit to film. So it's not how much they actually spent. It's there. No, but it could be more for season one when they have to get it off the ground, right? So it's not going to be less than that, I'm sure. So it's a fortune, but it looks great. I mean, I don't know how you can complain about the effects here because, I mean, this looks very much like, you know, you want, say, Star Wars to look.

This is not the volume. You know, it's got kind of that dusty, everything's beaten down kind of look, but it was filmed on location in the real world. So it feels like that. sets that you can see that there are obvious sets, obviously. But those places that, remember, a lot of what we're talking about here, particularly we were in a vault or some other places, these are places that are confined. You know, like they have to be confined because of the realities of the world.

But when they're trekking around looking after each other, their scale, their scope, man, look, not to this, but there's a part in Obi-Wan. I think it's like Obi-Wan like the second episode or something. Yeah. Where Obi-Wan and a young layer, you know, like right before they get picked up by that guy played by Zach Braff

who is like an empire sympathizer. You remember that? And they're walking along. It's obvious that they walk in somewhere in Ventura or in Thousand Oaks like in California. It doesn't look like Star Wars. It doesn't look like Star Wars is good or was good and giving you, this is not me just shitting on

Obi-Wan for no reason. It's okay. Yeah, you could sit on multiple Star Wars shows for the same reason if you wanted to. I'm just saying, Star Wars used to give you this feeling of, look, they obviously shot this somewhere on Earth, but it looks like they're on another planet. Even when Luke is at his Jedi Temple in

Last Jedi, that doesn't look like it's on Earth. I never said no shit that doesn't look like that. But like now we've got these places where there's a big grass field that can be anywhere. Yeah. But with this show, They do a good job of really, really making it feel like you're in a wasteland of Los Angeles. And it's fun because when I see signs that are pointing at different places, I think, okay, where are they at? Like, are they off LaBrayo?

The observatories there. When she comes upon that big infested pond, there's a sign that says Hollywood Boulevard. Okay, so where is this stuff up? And they remember, it's the 50s. So some of the things that might have been built in the last 20 or 30 or 40 years. years might not be there yet, blah, blah, blah, blah. But it never takes you out of it, is what I'm saying. Yeah.

People in L.A. love to talk about L.A. geography. So I'm not going to get you started on that. I love L.A. geography, maybe. Yeah. The cast is incredible. This is a great cast. Ella Pernel is amazing. I mean, she's kind of becoming a nerd culture queen at this point with this yellow jackets.

She's in Arcane. She's in Star Trek Prodigy. She had a cameo on Invincible. But this is, this feels like kind of a star turn. This feels like kind of a coming out, you know, vaulting her, no pun intended, to a new level of stardom. And then, of course, you know, the always great Walton Goggins. He's the best in everything. And then Aaron Moten, who I really hadn't seen much of him before as Maximus, he's really good, too. I think especially when he gets to embrace the comedic side a little bit, because Maximus is this

interesting character. He's kind of like a man child, you know. He's like a rambus. He's like a rest of adolescents. He's been, you know, rescued and raised by the Brotherhood of Steel. So he just doesn't really know any other life, doesn't really know how to relate to people. And he's also like, it's kind of like we were talking about with Star Wars and Cave S and the protagonists where you actually want people to be bad sometimes. And in Star Wars, you know, you get like the gray Jedi idea and Asoka and she's not really a Jedi. But, you know, come on.

Like she's still mostly Jedi. She's still mostly good. And on the light side, here you have Maximus, who's kind of like, you know, sometimes very sympathetic, sometimes doing the right thing. Sometimes not at all. He's like nakedly power hungry. He wants his knight to die so he can take his power armor. You could say the same thing about the ghoul who's killing fools too. And yet also, as we see in the past, is sort of sympathetic.

So that core three, I think, is really strong. And then the supporting cast, whether it's Sarita Chowdhury as Moldaver, Francis Turner, who's very menacing as Barb. You know, Johnny Pemberton from Superstore is Thaddeus is pretty funny. Some of the other vault guys, Zach Cherry, Dave Register. And then the cameos like Matt Barry shows up and is Mr. Handy, you know, Michael Emerson as the doctor whose head gets cut off. Chris Parnell as an overseer with one eye. Cyclops. Yeah.

Like, this is a really strong cast top to bottom. Very strong cast. The gentleman who plays Maximus, I'd never seen them before. And it was a fantastic, fantastic debut performance. Yeah. Because he comes across when you first meet him as like perfectly cast. It's not particularly strong and is almost green in different ways. And he is.

He is. He's lived a life of indoctrination. by the brotherhood. But the more situations he's put in, the more you see how resourcefully is. Yeah. He's sort of like blends at first. He's like a blank slate.

And then he kind of comes into his own. Right. He kind of grows up right in front of your eyes. And it's always difficult to do with the character who's already in adulthood as he starts to understand more what the brotherhood is, more what the wasteland really is about. But remember, he's way, way, way more initiated. than Lucy is, but still less initiated than someone like the ghoul would be, you know?

Yeah. So, like, watching him is fantastic. I, at first, I was kind of, when I first started looking at it, and I watch again, I really enjoyed the show. I was kind of a little bit bummed out a little bit that we were going away from her story to go to his story. Yeah. But later, yeah. He fucking, after a while, it was like, oh, shit.

Well, that character became a lot more compelling to me. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. When he goes to the vault, when they get captured slash rescued by that other vault that's experimenting on people, and he's at first, he's like, let's go. But then suddenly he's got the bathrobe on. He's like trying caviar.

He's having eggs and fish. He's talking about his cock exploding. Like when he starts to really be funny and lean. into that and you get to see that side of the actor and also the character, then I was really with him. Then I wanted the best for him. I wanted to stay with him on the screen. So, yeah, there's an evolution, I think, over the course of the season.

And, you know, like, it reminds me of Westworld. Did you watch Westworld at all? I made through the first two seasons. Okay. You made it a little further than I made it. I built midway through season two. Yeah, I made it through the first two seasons. I can't put forward with Westworld like that, right?

No, sorry, Joy. I know she's stuck it out to the end, but I couldn't. But it does kind of remind me a little bit of Westworld season one where you kind of have like Coop as the man in black who is like changed and you see him as the younger man and then you see him as the older, just hard-bitten, jaded guy. And then Lucy's kind of a Dolores at first where she's sort of sweet and innocent and then she realizes, you know, her true nature and becomes more resourceful and a leader and realizes that she's been deceived.

So there's a lot of Westworld, I think, in the structure of it. But it's not like Westworld in the sense that Westworld always felt like it was withholding something from you and ultimately probably didn't deliver on most of it. Like there's a mystery here, but it's not really like a mystery box show where you're just watching to get the answers. You know, you just want them to reveal what's actually happening. What's the truth? There's some of that.

Like, you definitely learn things as the season goes on and you're enlightened to the true nature of the war and vault tech and everything. But I wasn't really watching for that, you know, just to like have little bits of plot dispensed to me. Because it was just fun on an episode by episode level. It wasn't like about the riddle or the maze or like what do these symbols mean. You know, you're just kind of having fun in this fallout world. And you're following these characters along their journeys. And yeah, you find some things. out as it goes and that's great, but that wasn't really the draw for me. So I don't have the same

feeling of like, were they going to stick the landing? I think they did. I think it was a great finale, but it wasn't all about like, will we get the answers that we've been desiring all season. Yeah, I think I didn't even realize there was a mystery to it. I mean, I'm sure I thought that there would be things that we were learning that we didn't know. Yeah, just like what's going on with the vaults and what's actually happening here. Yeah. I mean, the story was, pretty straightforward are so it seemed, you know, that when you hear the term Raiders in a post-apocalyptic film, you get this ghoulish image of people with... Yeah, mad-max style.

Yeah. Mollers around their neck for necklaces and they, you know, they're wearing people's bones and they got fucking skulls here, the mad-max type of situation. So I saw them, I was like, okay, those are the bad guys. And she's trying to get to her father in order to restore order or whatever. I knew that she would learn things when she was out on the surface in the waistline, but I did know exactly what she would learn. And by the time it got to the point to where you started to see characters pop up in the past, obviously the first clue of that is Coupe, the goal. Characters that will pop up in the past that you're looking at now, you're like, there's something that we don't know. Yeah. But that thought of there being something that we don't

know is not what buoys the storytelling. What boos is the storytelling is the storytelling. This happened, then that happened, then this happened. Look how dangerous the world is. Look how you have to get out of it. Look what you have to do to trust in the people that you're traveling with. Perfect scene. Example of this. It's little stuff that a well-written show does. They're passing those people that exist that are on the road with them, right? Those people that are out of the road with them. And he knows exactly how to talk to them. She does it. She still believes in a set of rules that society has long since antiquated from back of the day. He knows exactly how it's going to go.

Like those things right there enhance and evolved character. Now, she's learned a lesson about how she has to comport herself in this new place that she's in. And he's learned a lesson about how she sees the world. So she sees strength and savvy in him. And then in her, he sees this innocence and this. moral compass that restores some of his faith in who people are. That's the kind of stuff that I'm finding out during the show.

It's not like an X-Files thing to where the truth is out there. I'm not trying to just the X-Files. I fuck with the X-Files. I love the X-Files. Yeah, I love the X-Files. I'm just saying I was never like, well, shit, what's the, it's almost like everything that I learned, I was like happy to have learned it. Yeah.

They didn't telegraph it at all. Like, when I started to see that something was up with his wife. When you first meet his wife, you don't think she has any. agency at all. You think she's the wife of a star. He seems like the big deal. But the deeper you get to that relationship, you realize that she's actually calling the shots. Yeah. Yeah, he's the, he's the patsy. He doesn't know what's going on. Yeah. So she's actually calling the shots. And by the time you get to the end of the show, her character has been perfectly played for Sinister. Like they rolled it out like almost to a tee. The show is really fucking good,

man. It really is, man. Were there any negatives for you, any aspects that didn't work so well. Okay. So number one, it is hard to watch. It is. It's like, it's hard to watch. People get fucked over all the time. Yeah.

Like, fucked over, heads blown up, fucking feet crunched. Like, it's a lot. Okay? So it is hard to watch. That is one thing. Yeah. Other than that, I don't want to say fall out as a perfect show because it's not. Other than that, it is so inherently watchable that I didn't find.

very many problems with it. The first episode, if I was going to tell any person that you need, what you need to stick through, I would say stick through the first episode. I don't think that some of the Brotherhood stuff when you get to it, I was uninterested in, but even my interest in that, like, started to snowball the more I was into it. But even the first episode, it starts with a nuclear explosion. It's just like a fucking sick, kick-ass way to start a series.

I don't know. I don't have very many complaints other than I'm a little squabish sometimes. Yeah, I thought it opened and closed really strongly, just a great premiere, great finale, which is what you want. You want to hook people and suck people in, and you want to have them go home happy and leave them wanting more. I think all the strands and storylines did kind of tied together satisfactorily at the end. I think for much of the show, I mean, it meanders in the middle a little bit, you know, because there's, There's this MacGuffin, right? The cold fusion device is stuck in this scientist's head and everyone's following it around.

And you know, it's just a plot device to kind of get everyone in the same place. And that's fine. But, you know, I felt like there was a little bit. And some of it was like true to the nature of the games. And Walton Cawkins even says as much like, you know, you're going to get sidetracked in the wasteland. That's just what happens. And so they are kind of traveling from here to there. And, you know, it maybe is sort of slower in the middle.

not to the point where I was, like, tuning out. I think maybe there's, like, a lack of an emotional connection for me, at least up until the very end. I mean, I was riveted. I was entertained. I don't know that I was, like, you know, moved to feel anything really strong, I guess, you know. I'm not like fighting back tears at any point. That's not the type of show it is. It's not the last of us.

But if that's what you're looking for, maybe that's not what you're going to get. I mean, even with Coop to some extent, when you find out, like, his backstory and how he got here and everything. And, you know, when Hank kind of betrays Lucy or she finds out about the betrayal, that stuff connects. But I think for a lot of it, it was more just like, here's a fun adventure, you know, just come along for the journey more so than this is really going to leave a lasting impact on my psyche or something. You know what I think happens early on? is the idea of family is so subverted in the show and the idea of connection is so subverted. Yeah.

Like early on, I mean, they pretty much in the first episode revealed that she's fucking her cousin. Right. And she's going to get married via lottery. So it's just like, yeah. Right. So all of those things kind of like the relationships actually that you care about actually get formed.

Because by the time during the show, right? You never meet her mother. But her mother ends up becoming one of the most important relationships of the entire show and the impetus to plus, that you never really meet her mother, should I say? I mean a version of her mother. I guess you see two versions of her mother. Yeah.

And then her dad is as much of a mcuffin as the fucking head is, right? Surround for a little bit. And then he's gone. So for me, watching it, I knew straight up that I wasn't going to. to feel the same way that I would feel like the same. I didn't even, I didn't even really, I never really wondered where the ghoul's kid was. Yeah. Like I stopped, at some point I stopped hearing about that.

Right. Because we barely spend any time with the ghoul's kids, right? We see her, you know, again, it's not father, daughter, Joel, and Ellie. I mean, apparently he's been searching for his family for 200 years. well, he knows that his wife screwed him over and everyone else. She's one of the architects of the nuclear war. And then the kids, yeah, it's hard to feel much of a connection there because we just haven't seen them on screen.

So his whole quest, it's like, okay, you kind of feel for him, but not in a very visceral way. So I felt that too. And I guess just like the tonal swings, I don't know if this was just more me or more of the show, but I was always trying to pin down. down, kind of calibrate, like, how funny is this trying to be? You know, like, is this full-on satire?

I mean, it's a little bit like the games where there's elements of all things. But it felt like at times it was trying to be more of a comedy than it actually was. You know, like it's not. It's got that plucky first taste. It's got that plucky taste of the 50s and 60s like we were saying with the aftertaste of the sinister element. of the society that they live in, right? So it's sometimes hard to pin down. Yeah, it's not like laugh out loud funny regularly.

Sometimes it is. And yeah, like Kyle McLaughlin is a great sort of good guy face character who then, you know, has a heel turn and like turns out to be sort of sinister. I also, I guess I just had some questions about like the lore, which might be explained in future seasons and don't really matter that much. and maybe it's so accessible because of the lack of explanation for some of these things. Like my wife really liked the show and she knew nothing about the Fallout games. But like Moldaver, what's her deal? Like, how is she still around? I mean, I guess we're supposed to assume she got cryo-frozen at some point.

But like then she got Dodd. She like started Shady Springs. She was friends with Rose, Lucy's mother. And she's still like leading the- Honestly, even her being thought wouldn't explain it, though. I mean, it would explain, because it's been years since Shady Springs has been destroyed. Right. But not that long because I guess he was a kid, so I'd say probably at least 20 or 30 years.

So I guess she's, they de-aged her a little bit when they went to the flashback. Yeah, a little. Then the question would be, how did she survive in the fucking 100 years or whatever it's been, 180 years between when the bomb went off and the time they were in now? Because essentially now, I mean, I don't know what time, if it was really the 1950s and stuff. Essentially now, it's like, what is it? It's 221. Yeah, it's like 2296, I think.

2296 or something like that. Yeah, it's later than the games in the timeline. Right. So it's weird. I thought she was a ghoul at some point. Right. If she is, she's hiding it really well. Just got a great makeup job or something.

Yeah, I thought she was a ghoul at some point. I thought, okay, well, that explains how long. she's been around and stuff like that, but I guess she, she would have had to have been in the Bud's buddies program, but no, she wouldn't have been in the Bud's Budd's buddies program. No, she was, yeah, she was opposing their whole deal. I mean, she started the company with the cold fusion that got bought by Vault Tech, but I don't know why she would have gotten the space in the vault or whether she

would have wanted to. I guess we're just supposed to assume that she got frozen somehow, but it's, yeah, to leave that unexplained and, you know, she dies. So I don't know if we're going to get an answer to that or not. Maybe. Maybe we'll get flashbacks. But yeah, like that and, you know, the enclave where we see Michael Emerson's scientists come from. I mean, there's very little detail there. Even the Brotherhood, the history of the Brotherhood.

If you've played the games, you know more about that. And if you haven't, maybe you don't need to know. But some of that is just kind of yada yada. It's like here are the factions. And we don't really have to explain how they got here. But it's not the type of show where you need. to interrogate all those things necessarily, but I was left with some questions

about some aspects of that. So the big reveal here, I guess we've already done enough spoilers that you're fully spoiled if you're still with us. But the famous fallout line is war never changes. But we know now, based on the show, that the origins of the war in the canon have changed significantly

because this is not like US versus China. China drops the bombs. This is kind of confirmation of a fan theory that was not canon before, which is that Voltaic dropped the bombs. They engineered the war, which is a pretty big deal for the canon. And, you know, I found myself kind of questioning, what's their motivation here? Like, you see this sort of nefarious Dr. Strangelove meeting. How did they go make money?

It would make more sense to me to fucking keep the tension of the war. Right. Yeah. Going in perpetuity So that everybody would need a vault. Yeah. If you kill 90% of the people. I get that the one bud's buddy got the bud,

He was kind of insane talking about time and all of that stuff. But if that's the case, it seems like it would make more sense if capitalism is what undergirds all of their plans. It seems like it would make more sense to just keep every. thing going. Yes.

And then, yeah, but that's not what they want to do on. So the supervillain plans, they don't always make sense when they do their sinister monologue. And you're like, but why didn't you just do this other way simpler thing? But yeah, I wasn't totally following that. I get like, okay, you can experiment on people in the vaults and then you can emerge and rule the world in the future. But in the short term, I don't see how you're, you know, fiduciary duty to your shareholders. If a lot of them are going to die, you're going to be losing.

money in the short term. So that whole scheme, I don't know, that that really landed for me. But for the most part, yeah, we don't have to take it too seriously. I don't want to take too seriously. It is kind of like when I went to see Superman returns. And Lex's scheme was to essentially build more continents to, like, have land. Yeah. I was like, this thing Alex is an idiot.

Like, Lex was like, this is like, you know, I was like, when I went to see Superman returns, I was like, bro, Lex's scheme is so. stupid. Like, what are we doing? You know, Lex wanted to build more continents or use kryptonites or whatever the fuck was going on? I'm like, this is kind of taking me out of the movie because it's so ridiculous. It's supposed to be a super genius.

Yeah. I'm like, this is just really stupid. But once we got to the end of it and they're all sitting around, I'm like, they said we have like 100 volts or something like that or 100 different cities with faults. I can't remember what they said, something like that. There was more than 100 volts or 100 vault networks. Yeah, 100 plus, yeah.

And everybody was doing to think, I was like, well, shouldn't we just like play the war out? Yeah. Until. Yeah. You want the threat of nuclear war, not the actual war. Not the actual war. So everybody got to have a vault. You build like, you fucking build poor people's vaults to where it can only feel like three motherfuckers in there.

You get as much money out of people who are afraid of nuclear war as possible. But they didn't want to do that. They wanted to get to a point and blow everybody to fuck up. Yeah. The other two reactions I had had nothing to do with the show. It's not a knock on the show. But I do just find that, like, the older I get, the more I watch and read and play, just everything feels like a mashup of everything else, which is, I mean, that's how we tell

stories as a species, right? Like, there's nothing new under the sun. We're all just building on something. But sometimes you see a bunch of shows, let's say, in quick succession that have some similar elements. So, you know, I'm watching this show and I'm thinking of like Westworld and Silo, right? which was just a year ago and sort of underground vaults. Everything is not as it seems and twisted metal and the horizon games and, you know,

Walking Dead. I mean, last of us, like, I don't know if you have that feeling, but sometimes I just feel like, man, I've seen so many things that are kind of like this, that, you know, this puts a unique spin on it for sure. But there are so many things in this genre, it's just increasingly crowded, like the dystopian post-apocalyptic setting, you know? This is, it's not like everything else, but there are enough common elements that part of me is just like, gosh, I've seen some aspects of this before. Do you have that feeling too?

Of course. Everybody, you know, watching these as a kid, everybody tries to do it differently, you know, and it's all about the elements of society that you keep intact. But at the end of the day, it's still going to be about people battling against their instincts and cooperation. versus usury, right? And so that's what essentially what this show is going to be about and setting in a post-apocalyptic situation. You're going to get creatures. You know, it depends on, like, if you want to go high sci-fi, mid-scibi,

if you want to go completely dystopia where people are fucking fighting with broken glass and whatever. There's this movie I was telling Mallory about. It's called Z for Zachariah. You ever see this? No. With Chil, Chris Pine, and Margot Robbie.

And the film is after a nuclear war. and Chihuetel is like a love story. And Chiuwetel plays a nuclear engineer, scientist slash guy who's on the road. He used to work for the government. He's on the road and he ends up finding a place where there's no radiation. And Margarabi lives there. It's like her whole town, the fucking mountain or whatever, shield at the valley from the radiation. She lives there, whatever, whatever.

And the winters are very hard on her because things get skil, cares. And she almost didn't make it one winter. Well, he's an engineer. So he figures out how to rig electricity and have a whole deal. And everything is going good between her and him. And then fucking Chris Pine shows up. Oh, yeah.

And that if you are him and you're fucking Chewetel and you got some of the finest milk around, you're ready to live in the valley forever and like figure it out. They got a little farm. They can grow stuff. He didn't turn the

fucking electricity on, and then the last motherfucker you want to see is Chris Pine coming, and what do you think happens? Oh. Like Chris Pine comes and now it's all fucked up, right? That is a movie where you look at the post-apocalyptic then you go, okay, that's a little different. It's

a love story or something that has to do with it, and it's not a perfect movie. It's actually, I'm not even sure if it's a good movie. It's an intriguing movie. But crossing a wasteland, because you think you're going to get to something is pretty pay by numbers. Yeah. Post-apocalyptic.

You know what I'm saying? The book of Eli, all that stuff. Right. It's pretty post-apocalyptic, pretty standard post-apocalyptic fare, you know? Mm-hmm. The other thing, and I feel like a broken record with this question, this is on Amazon, not on the makers of the show, but why the binstrap, right? We just had this conversation about three-body problem.

I almost understand it if you're Netflix, your brand is associated. with the binge trap. You're the market leader. People are going to watch one way or another. Maybe you don't need the word of mouth and the weekly coverage. Maybe you think a show that's kind of complex like that is easier to follow without breaks between episodes. But for anyone and anything else, I just don't know. What mystifies me is that it seems like Amazon learned this lesson. Like the boys season one, Invincible Season 1, those were binge drops. But then those shows became popular. Later seasons had more of a staggered release, maybe two, too staggered in Invincibles case. We don't need that long a break. But like rings of power,

wheel of time, had two or three episodes drop at once, but then the rest was weekly. So here you have Fallout, which comes out at the perfect time to dominate the nerd culture conversation. Because X-Men 97 and Bad Batch are on, but live action-wise, the floor is kind of cleared. Like there's a lull between three-body and then Hot D and the boys in the Acklead in June. And Fallout could own this stretch. Instead, it owns one weekend. I just, I don't get it. To me, it tells me they were a little bit gunshot.

You think? Yeah. Yeah. They didn't know what they had here. Yeah, just a little bit good shy, right? Not sure about it. You drop in the binge, you let everybody get crazy about it, or you let the talk kind of swell about it.

You don't know right now if you have the audience to maintain a week to week. Listen, man, I agree with you. It should have been a week to week, right? Yeah. But I think it just demonstrates that they are a little gun shy over there. Because if we're being honest, like you said before, a lot of the shows that they've put out that they've thought people were going to go crazy over just because they had the IP, it's not like they've bricked with them, but they haven't been the successes and the sensations that they thought that they would be. So I think with this one, they wanted to give people the full meal and then really, really what they're doing is they're counting on the fact that people will be so into where the story left, which it leaves in a great place for a second season. Yes.

But they can maybe do more with the second season. That's what I would assume. Yeah, right. The only advantage you drop it all at once, you're going to get a big boost in week one on the charts that go by hours watched. So you can brag about how big a hit it was that week, how high you. were on Nielsen, but if and when, let's say, because I'm almost certain this is going to come back for season two. When it does, I'm guessing maybe we get two or three episodes at once, but then the rest, they'll parcel it out because I think they'll be more aware of what they have on their hands here.

So speaking of season two, which, as you said, there's already some hints that it's probably in the works. Just at the tail end of the finale here, we see a Death Claw skull, just an iconic fallout wastelands, batty. We get a glimpse in the past of Mr. House, the boss of New Vegas, as you recall. And at the end, Hank walks toward New Vegas, which appears to be derelict and run down. I guess that could be deceptive. But that leaves you with the question of what happened to New Vegas in the 15, I think, years between that game when it's sort of a bustling metropolis and this TV show, right?

a lot of people have been like, wait, is New Vegas not canon now? And the writers have said, no, it is. So they'll have to have some explanation for what happened to New Vegas and the intervening time. So I guess that's one of the big questions for season two. What else, if anything, are you interested in? Well, the New Vegas thing jumped out of me because this is my favorite game. Yeah. I'm also interested in what Lucy does now.

I think that's the biggest thing. I mean, there's not much game stuff that I'm interested in. I only play really the one game. But when I saw New Vegas, I assumed that maybe New Vegas was another place that got sort of wiped out like shady springs or shady sands. Shady sands. Sandy Springs. Yeah. Like whatever, Silver Springs, Maryland.

Shout to Kevin Durant. But I'm assuming that that same thing happened. But I really want to see two things. Number one, whether or not Maximus's new perch in the Brotherhood is going to change his set of priorities, number one. And number two, like what Lucy can find out about what her true purpose is supposed to be. She is a pretty important, but also she's a vault dweller through and through. But her world has just been shattered and changed. So now what is basically my curiosity, does she become more ghoul or does the ghoul become more human? Right. Yeah. Does she try

to carry out her original mission to sort of repopulate, re-civilize the surface, or does she sort of learn to live on the surface civilization's terms now that she knows the backstory of the vaults? It's not a utopia down there and so much has been hidden from her

that maybe she adapts. We saw her adapt, obviously, and become much more self-reliance like there's a killer in Lucy that kind of comes out at various times this season. And I wonder about that. I also wonder, I mean, there's still some Koop backstory that we haven't seen here. Like, how did he go from TV, movie star pitchman for Vault Tech to down on his luck guy doing kids' birthday parties?

Right? We don't know how that happens. They allude to it, but they don't really say why. Yeah. Presumably, like, you know, his wife discovers that he was spying on her. And maybe he was called a pingo, which is a term for, you know, the red scare. So they allude to the fact that at some point he went over to the Moldaver side of, yes, sounding the alarm about Lotech, right? So we still have to see that.

And I hope that we see more of the relationship between Kup and his daughter. Like if that's going to be a driving force here for season two, like him reuniting with his family, I mean, I'd like to feel a little more attached to the family. Because unless he's out for revenge on Barb, which I guess is kind of compelling. but you'd like to see some, you know, not redemption necessarily. Again, like I like the antihero who doesn't need redemption, fine with that. But if he wants to find his kid, then it'd be great if we could see more than like a scene or two with that kid. So that we could care about those two. And I guess I'd like to know a little bit about Moldaver just to answer those questions.

Did you think that Moldaver kept Rose Lucy's mother alive because, like, they were an item together. Like she couldn't bear to put her out of her misery as the ghoul. It was kind of like, I don't have any fucking clue while she was there. Why was she still there? Like, I guess it was convenient.

She got injected with the ghoul stuff. Yeah, I guess I don't have any fucking clue. I didn't see it. I don't know why she was still around. Yeah. I don't have any fucking clue while she was still there. Okay.

And Moldova is dead now. So, yeah. There's really no way to know how crazy she's going. Right. Or even if what she's saying is the right way to go about shit. You know what I'm saying? Because every time we put faith in somebody, we figure out they were up to some fuck shit.

So it seems as if she had the more palatable way of looking at society. She fucking rebuilt the Shady Springs. That fucking trolley and all kinds of great shit. They had fucking corn growing. This fucking shit was figured out. It seems like they were on their way. And once again, the Voltaic people just came around and killed for nothing. Whatever.

But I still kind of don't know why her mom was still being goulded up. Yeah. So I guess that's a question for season two. Just like, who are the good guys? Maybe there aren't any good guys. It's all shades of gray. But is it like New California Republic? Is it the Brotherhood? Is it the enclave? Is it whatever's going on in New Vegas? Is Lucy? Maybe Maximus, are they going to start their own thing? Just like the lack of moral clarity here, which is kind of a hallmark of the games. Like you decide what's good, what's bad, what you want to do. And they're bringing that to the show too. So it's a lot to look forward to. and a lot to enjoy about this season. So I'm glad that it's good, that we can add it to the list of good game adaptations, gives us even more confidence going forward. I don't know about the Borderlands movie that's coming later this year.

Again, now, even tougher acts to follow. Another, like, wasteland post-apocalyptic. That thing's been in development hell, but also incredible cast, kind of. So we'll see. We'll talk about that. We'll talk about Knuckles. We'll talk about it at all.

But as Bud Askin says, the ultimate weapon is time. And we've come to the end of our time today. Van, you're the man. Thanks for hopping on. No problem, brother. Thanks to Devin Ronaldo for producing. Thanks also to Arjuna Ramgapal who just got married. Arjuna got hitched.

Congrats Arjuna. Happy honeymoon. Sorry, ladies. He's taken. Stay tuned for Midnight Boys and House of Our later this week. But MASH will be back next week. Email us at Ringiverse Gaming. at gmail.com. Love y'all. Talk to you soon. War never changes. You look out at this wasteland.

Looks like chaos. But there's always somebody behind the wheel. And that's who I want to talk to. You coming?