Fallout TV series Season 1, Episode 2 review — You will have to adapt…

Our first brush with Fallout whet our appetites, introducing the world and its characters. We got to know a little bit about Lucy, Maximus, and a mighty cranky Ghoul as they all set out in a world worn down by violence. Then there’s that whole problem of those pesky nukes and all – I mean, we’ve all been there, right?

Just like our other episode reviews, we’ll keep the story beats as spoiler free as possible, providing enough of a general overview to review the installment, but keeping away from anything that could be considered a major spoiler. Here we go!

Episode 2 kicks things off with another character introduction – CCX40. A scientist named Wilzig is working in a lab, performing experiments of some sort. He has decided that maybe this line of work isn’t necessarily for him after making some sort of discovery, and he escapes with CCX40, running away from an all-too-familiar location from the franchise. A man on the run, his hands look mighty soft for the wasteland.

The fun part about Fallout is that everything is awful. The experiments are awful, the weighing of things is awful, the injections are awful, the cauterizations are awful. It’s all just awful across the board, all the way, up and down. And that’s what makes it all the more compelling – the uncomfortable laugh as horrible things happen to people far less fortunate, and our protagonists trying to find their way in it.

Switching to Lucy, “Don’t Fence Me In” from Bing Crosby and The Andrews Sisters serves as a backdrop as she strikes out in…well, without a good direction, really. That’s the nature of things when you step out of your safe and quiet home and into a desert full of rusted hulks and wind-blasted buildings. Camping for the night she finds an unlikely friend and we get to see our first radroach. Turns out, they are even bigger than they were in the game – it’s all skin-crawlingly fun.

Just as in the previous episodes (and likely to be the format going forward), we pop over to Squire Maximus as he serves Lord Titus. This humbling experience is full of all sorts of menial tasks as he learns just how excellent a Knight Lord Titus truly is, and by that, we mean douchebag. They play fetch in a toxic waste zone and play with the local wildlife. It’s a grand time, leaving Titus and Maximus making some hard choices in the wasteland.

Tracking a mission item, Titus and his new squire make their way to an irradiated cave and they get a look at why Goldilocks most likely left the area some time ago. Let’s just say there’s a lot of fur and even more curse words. We also get a very close look at the T-60 armor – a practical effect created for the show that looks absolutely magnificent. I’d like to thank the team at MGM for making me dream of 3D printing one of my own…

Closing out this episode we also get to spend a little more time with our cranky Ghoul friend, who has yet to be referred to by name. Making their way to Majune’s Sundries, we the viewers get a trip down memory lane. I spotted a bobble head and a lunchbox, but there’s plenty more to discover. It’s great to see that even if it’s a fool’s errand to please the fans (according to Nolan), there’s a lot of respect to the source material with tons of references to in-game items and memorabilia.

The first episode of Fallout gave us a hint of the brutality of this world, but if you felt like the show might be shy about the guns and gore that made the first two Fallout games unique for their time, and brought it to life in all its 3D glory from Fallout 3 and beyond, well, Episode 2 will put that to rest. We see some VATS-like slow motion, we see limbs come apart in full 4K HD, spraying nearby residents with gore and viscera. We see machines do things to people that will make your spine want to crawl out of your body. Fallout has never been shy as a game, and the MGM Amazon team has brought it to life in a way that puts war movies to shame. Even the main characters aren’t immune! But, true to the Fallout franchise, it also does it set to a juxtaposed soundtrack, and somehow makes the horrible into something comical. It’s more laughing at awful things as they happen to other people, and I’m here for it.

You can read our review for Episode 3 here.

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