Amazon’s Fallout show has become a hit with fans of the video game series, thanks to its dark humor, action, and writing that stays true to the games. From costumes and locations to characters and dialogue, it evokes the feeling of the franchise and captures all the elements that make it great. Of course, no show built on an established property can avoid controversy or criticism entirely. The decision to have the New California Republic destroyed prior to the narratives start, in particular, has sparked debate among viewers and angered some fans. It’s a different plotline, however, that truly departs from the primary themes and message of Fallout to the detriment of the show. The revelation that corporate America was seeking to engineer a nuclear war, while a shocking twist, is actually the one big problem with Season 1.

The meeting between the leaders of Vault-Tec and America’s other major corporations is a tense moment and certainly effective in and of itself. Aided by cuts to Walton Goggin’s Cooper Howard, who reacts with horror at what he’s hearing, it was a truly dramatic way to conclude the season. Unfortunately, the scene also breaks thematically with Fallout in a fundamental way.

In Fallout, People Are Their Own Worst Enemy

• Factions fighting each other is a common element in Fallout games.
• Most titles give the player a chance to choose which factions to support and which to destroy.
• Robert House, who appears in the Fallout show, represents one of the major factions in Fallout: New Vegas.

From the very beginning of the Fallout franchise, its chief themes have been moral ambiguity, the absence of good options, and the idea that humans are their own worst enemies. The RPGs eschew traditional tropes and don’t feature heroic protagonists setting out on epic quests to defeat evil villains. The player characters in most titles are regular people trapped in extraordinary circumstances, simply trying to survive or help their community. While they encounter many dark and sinister people, it’s rarely clear who is truly good or bad and most factions reflect numerous shades of gray. Conflict often arises not from some unambiguous evil trying to conquer the world, but from different groups who all believe they’re right, fighting to impose their vision on a crumbling society.

Early in Amazon’s Fallout series, a line from Maximus indicates that the writers of the show understand this element of the franchise. Explaining why the New California Republic was destroyed by a nuclear blast, he states “everybody wants to save the world, they just disagree on how.” This simple idea captures the nature of Fallout. Conflict often arises and people die not because of mustache-twirling villains, but because different groups genuinely believe they are doing the right thing, and can’t find a way to coexist or cooperate with one another. The revelation that America’s corporations started the war that ended the world flies in the face of this ideology.

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The Fallout show seems to establish, for the first time in the franchise, that, on the eve of nuclear war, there was a chance to avoid disaster. Back in 2077, the woman who would come to be known as Moldaver tells Cooper that she has developed cold fusion technology that would allow for unlimited energy and eliminate the source of conflict between the United States and China. She also reveals that Vault-Tec buried her research to ensure the tension would continue. Later, in the meeting of corporate CEOs, it is made explicitly clear that Vault-Tec and its allies plan to start a nuclear war by dropping the first bombs if China and the United States don’t. In short, it’s revealed that peace was apparently possible, and the war only happened because of the actions of overtly greedy and evil individuals.

This revelation essentially lets the rest of humanity off the hook and absolves both parties to the war of guilt for it breaking out. The cause of war is changed from human nature to a secret conspiracy of villains. It’s shown that people could potentially learn to coexist and resolve disputes peacefully, if not for a small group of business people. While this is a fine premise for a show and works on its own, it’s fundamentally at odds with Fallout.

War Never Changes Is the Definig Tenant of the Fallout Universe

• “War. War never changes” has been Fallout’s tagline since the first game.
• The phrase is spoken by the narrator at the beginning of every mainline Fallout game.
• Barb Howard says the line in Fallout’s Season 1 finale.

The original Fallout games and subsequent titles intentionally left the immediate cause of the nuclear war a mystery. While it’s established that the United States and China were the primary actors in the conflict and both launched bombs at the other, just who fired the first shot is never revealed. One of the original project leads for the first two titles, Leonard Boyarsky, has explicitly stated that he doesn’t think it matters who actually launched the first missile. The creator of Fallout, Tim Cain, has said that he personally thinks China fired the first nuke but that it did so in response to threatening actions by the United States.

The official, canon truth has never been revealed, and it’s clear that the larger message is that it doesn’t matter who shot first. The point is that both sides created conditions where a war was almost inevitable. The famous line from the series that “war never changes” beautifully captures this idea. Fallout emphasizes that, while the sides, weapons, technology, and official reasons may evolve, war itself is always the same. It reflects a flaw in human nature and an inability of the species to resolve differences peacefully and share resources without violence.

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For Amazon’s Fallout to suggest that peace was ever possible and that China and the United States may have overcome their differences is to reject the entire premise of the setting. Even if cold fusion was developed and energy became abundant, even in the absence of intervention by Vault-Tec, nuclear war could have been prevented in Fallout. The problem isn’t any single resource or evil conspiracies. The problem is humanity itself. Because people never change, war never changes.

To be fair, it has not officially been established that Vault-Tec and the other corporations did start the war. The first season ends before depicting the actual cause of the war, so it’s possible that, in Season 2, fans will learn that Vault-Tec’s plan was never implemented. Still, even the possibility that they started the war contradicts the established themes of the games. Further, it elevates those corporations to a level of scheming that doesn’t exactly fit with Fallout’s lore.

Fallout’s Corporations Are Evil, But They Shouldn’t Be Masterminds

There’s no doubt that Vault-Tec, RobCo, and the rest of the corporations of Fallout are evil and villainous. The vaults themselves, and the experiments conducted in them, speak to Vault-Tecs immorality. Further, nearly every game gives players a chance to explore the ruined facilities of the world’s various companies and, through computer terminals, notes, and long-dead bodies, discover the existence of some sinister scheme that killed countless people. Indeed, these corporations often rise to the level of James Bond villains in their dark machinations. What they are not, however, is clever.

More often than not, players in Fallout games learn how the various plans and experiments of Vault-Tec and the like backfired spectacularly, failing to produce results and killing nearly everyone involved. Most vaults are found to have collapsed into chaos and death. West Tek and Big MT weapons end up destroying their own people rather than the enemy. The corporations of Fallout are certainly evil, but often cartoonishly inept as well.

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Given their track record, it’s hard to imagine the corporations of Fallout successfully teaming up to plot the secret destruction of the world. It’s certainly something they might consider, but not something they could hope to pull off. Apart from the thematic issues with this explanation for the war, the logic of it conflicts with everything fans know about Vault-Tec and its peers.

The problem with the Fallout Season 1 revelation is not that corporations like Vault-Tec and Big MT are portrayed as villains. Fallout has taken swipes at capitalism, consumerism, and corporatism since the first game and these big businesses have always been villainous, with Vault-Tec’s evil experiments always being an element of the series. Just because these companies are run by bad people, however, doesn’t mean they should be established as the cause of the world’s misery. Indeed, the central theme of Fallout is that we humans are our own worst enemies and war, never changing, can’t be avoided.

Fallout

Created by

Tim Cain, Leonard Boyarsky

First Episode Air Date

April 10, 2024

Cast

Ella Purnell, Aaron Moten, Kyle MacLachlan, Moises Arias, Xelia Mendes-Jones, Walton Goggins

Video Game(s)

Fallout 2, Fallout 3, Fallout 4, Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel, Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel, Fallout: New Vegas, Fallout Shelter

Genre

RPG, Action RPG, Tactical RPG, Management, Simulation, Survival

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