As the Fallout games are so fond of reminding us, war never changes. No matter the setting – Washington D.C., Boston, Las Vegas – there will always be opportunities for players to wage wastelander-on-wastelander warfare for the future of mankind. And yes, the Fallout show seems to be no stranger to war, quietly suggesting conflict between the Brotherhood of Steel and other factions from the larger Fallout universe.
But what about those of us who want our Fallout to lean into the absurdity of the wasteland? Can Fallout still be prestige television if it’s utilizing the weirder elements of the franchise?
While publishers Bethesda Softworks have confirmed that they are treating Prime Video’s series as canon… well, there’s canon, and then there’s “canon.” In each of the games, your choices as a player reshape the wasteland in your own image, and what is canon to someone on a no-kill playthrough may not exactly be canon to someone who prefers to dish out wasteland justice one exploding head at a time. And that should free the showrunners up to really take some big swings with the world they’ve built.
So setting aside the obvious proper nouns – people, places, and locations from the Fallout universe – here are a few things any Fallout show should include to really get the vibe right.
Fallout FM
Want to know why people love the combat in the Fallout games? The secret is musical counterpoint. Few things are as fun as shooting your way through the wasteland while listening to the post-World War II optimism of performers like Bob Crosby. Truly, the Ink Spots just hit different when their harmonies are serving as the backing tracks to the bloodiest slow-motion gun fights this side of Max Payne.
So adding period-specific jazz to your Fallout series is good, but putting a character on the other end of those songs is better. In Fallout 3, players meet Three Dog – host of Galaxy News Radio – who offers both main storyline quests and in-world flavor. You’ll also meet Travis Miles in Fallout 4 – host of Diamond City Radio – whose fumbling news updates and nervous ad reads provide players with a few laughs as they scour the Commonwealth for supplies. And don’t forget The Silver Shroud, the pre-war radio drama that can be heard in the city of Goodneighbor in the same game.
While the Fallout series might understandably be focused on television – after all, The Ghoul is an irradiated incarnation of a classical Hollywood star – the wasteland runs on radio. Making radio stations both an aesthetic and a narrative tenet of the series would be a great way to recreate period details while also making your world seem just a little bit smaller than it is.
Isolated Little Towns
Picture the strangest small town you’ve ever driven through on a road trip or a hike in the countryside. Now irradiate the hell out of that town and let them fester for 200 years. Do you think that community only got more normal with time? That’s the potential of townships in the Fallout universe.
Consider Fallout 3, one of the main inspirations for Prime Video’s Fallout adaptation. In that game, players come across plenty of strange little communities that have flourished in isolation and built entire infrastructures around half-remembered niceties. There’s the Republic of Dave, a democracy (“democracy”) enforced by the community’s cheerful figurehead. There’s also Little Lamplight, the underground community of children – think a post-apocalyptic Lord of the Flies – that promises riches untold when its inhabitants turn sixteen and are forcibly evicted.
These communities are the Fallout equivalent of a Monster-of-the-Week episode. Players stumble into a town – dangerously low on stimpacks and pushing the limits of their carrying capacity – and find themselves needing to awkwardly play along with whatever mass delusion the community suffers from long enough to unload their junk. But what makes these experiences such an integral part of the game also makes them tricky for an eight-episode season. If Fallout wants to go all-out on its road-trip-from-hell vibes, then the showrunners will need to build a bit more breathing room into the narrative.
Robots, Robots, Robots
No matter which version of Fallout you jump into, it won’t take you long to encounter your first robot – most likely a Mister Handy, the popular servant model that is near-ubiquitous in the wastelands. Robots are everywhere in the Fallout universe, and like ghouls, their level of sentience varies depending on the make and model of the unit. But despite their posh speech patterns, the robots of Fallout are so much more than just the help.
Robots are one of the major focuses of Fallout 4, which asks players to choose between The Institute – Fallout’s alt-history perversion of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – and The Railroad, a coalition of activists who try to free sentient robots (or synthetics) from The Institute’s grasp. Synthetics are also one of Fallout 4’s best allegories for Cold War-era paranoia, with most towns keeping their residents in a near-constant state of fear about friends and neighbors being replaced by robotic lookalikes.
Geographically, synthetics may not make a lot of sense for Prime Video’s Fallout series, which takes place halfway around the world – and in a post-apocalyptic hellscape where that kind of distance actually means something. But given show co-creator Jonathan Nolan’s background with Westworld – another series that explored the boundaries between artificial and organic life – the series certainly has the kind of creative foundation you’d need for a deep dive into Asimov’s laws.
The Darker Side of Vault-Tec
Have you noticed how all the truly evil companies in science fiction have hyphens in their name? We’ve got our eye on you, Baskin-Robbins.
Between Fallout and this year’s release of Alien: Romulus, 2024 is shaping up to be a banner year for military contractors whose too-cozy relationship with the United States government spells bad times for the future of humanity. And while Fallout’s marketing has suggested there are secrets buried under Vault 33 – I think we can all assume quite literally – Vault-Tec gives Weyland-Yutani a run for its money as one of the most impassionate architects of mass death in humanity’s future. Things are probably not going to turn out great for Lucy MacLean’s friends and family.
Once you learn that only a handful of vaults in the Fallout universe were actually designed to protect humans from danger, the door opens wide to whatever perverse experiments your writers can imagine. Vaults in Fallout have been home to cannibals, killer robots, virtual reality, super mutants, and all kinds of freakish experiments that would make the engineers of Cabin in the Woods blush. There’s a whole big world out there beyond the Vault 33 triptych, and given California’s historical predilection for wealthy cults and secret societies, there’s no better playground for a writer to dig in and have fun.
Wasteland Monsters
If you’re one of the people who stopped playing Fallout 76 after its release, you might be surprised to learn that it’s held its popularity quite well since 2018. And part of the appeal is its willingness to lean into the unbridled spookiness of the Appalachian wilderness. Look no further than the Mothman, Fallout 76’s signature cryptid that remains something of an online sensation.
But Mothman is just one example. Everyone who has ever faced off against a Deathclaw knows that the Fallout universe hardly lacks imagination when it comes to the monsters of the future. If Fallout continues to ramp up the creature design – a dash of radiation here, a dollop of local cryptozoology there – then the sky's the limit when it comes to populating post-apocalyptic California with monsters. Hell, the showrunners have already used Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a goalpost.
Of course, there’s also DLC in a handful of the games that allows you to get beamed up to an alien spacecraft and shoot aliens in the head with rusty pipe revolvers, but unless Fallout becomes the longest-running Prime Video series of all time, our monsters will probably remain decidedly terrestrial in nature. I mean, the prospect of lizard people alone should tickle the fancy of any comedy writer worth their salt.
Conclusion
No matter what direction the showrunners take the series, fans can take heart in knowing that the world of Fallout falls inside a very big tent. The series can tell stories of humanity and perseverance, and it can build set pieces around creepy little locations, all without losing its signature balance between comedy and action.
So bring on the Brotherhood of Steel and the secrets of Vault 33, but let’s also make sure that characters like Chris Parnell’s cyclops – who we can’t wait to meet, by the way – are the rule and not the exception. The world is already full of extremely grim fantasies about end times and mankind’s penchant for self-destruction. Who says the end of the world always has to be a bummer?
