Fallout season 2: Wastelanders don't have souls & more compelling ideas from Amazon Prime - spoiler review
Fallout season 2 spoilers below.
I finished season 2 of Fallout. 6.5/10. My brief review is that it's dull misanthropic garbage that believes in prewar Americans and their derivative cultures as a master race who implicitly deserve to rule over p-zombie wastelanders who lack souls, characterization, or humanity. Carried somewhat by actors and a support team (set design, etc.) that's clearly trying their best.
It's been some time since I saw season 1, and I'm only a casual Fallout fan. The reason I disliked this season wasn't because it changed lore or whatever. The main reason I dislike it is because the only people allowed to have any humanity beyond 'stock cynical townsperson lemming', 'comic relief', or 'stock post-apocalyptic psychopath' are vault dwellers, pre-war Americans, or folks from the NCR - who are obviously mimicking / trying to resurrect the old soul of America.
Wastelanders, however, get no generosity. No sympathy from the narrative. They are depicted as cruel, myopic, grunting savages incapable of forming a successful civilization on their own. Only the guiding hand of a vault dweller or NCR outpost or what have you allows them to achieve sapience.
There's one very telling scene where Hank has a couple dozen wastelanders enslaved in a vault, and he's using the brain modification device from Squadron Supreme to do it. He's been kidnapping people from the wasteland to do it, and basically the only people he's kidnapping are evil - murderers, raiders, Legion - or comic relief - the salesman, the senile NCR vet. In basically any Fallout game, you'd see or hear about Hank kidnapping normal people just trying to survive in a deathworld, but those kinds of people don't exist in the Fallout TV show.
In any Fallout game, you will meet characters like Trashcan Carla or Doc Mitchell or even fucking Moira inside of fifteen minutes of booting up the game and getting past the tutorial. Those are regular people trying to live their lives in a deathworld. They have personalities and character traits beyond stock cardboard cutouts for comic relief, goals, ambitions, so on, so forth. There's no one like them in Amazon Fallout. In 380 minutes of content, fucking *nothing*? No humanity in the wasteland except that imposed by outside forces? The actual video game NPCs have more personality, characterization, and autonomy than the wastelanders in the TV show putatively for grownups.
Instead, every single wastelander is either 'grunting 1930s pulp savage', 'bad comic relief', or 'cynical asshole townsperson too stupid to see five seconds into the future.'
On that note - there's a cool scene in e7/8 where Max (best character on the show) is fighting deathclaws in power armor, using predominantly melee attacks. It's very cool - like a less impactful version of Real Steel and Pacific Rim blended together, but still very cool. He's doing so to defend the people of Freeside.
They're a bunch of idiot lemmings who immediately start gambling on how fast he'll die, someone points out 'if he loses, we're next' and they're all like 'whatever'. Apparently they never tried to organize and clear out the deathclaws themselves, there's no indication they tried to build any form of society themselves, no, they're wastelanders, they're too stupid for that.
So Max is on the backfoot. The tired old cynical shopkeep sees he's 'just a kid', picks up his shotgun, beseeches the townsfolk to aid their hero. You think this is going to lead into a triumphant moment where the Freesiders reclaim their autonomy and band together against the monsters that have threatened their community for who knows how long, inspired by the kid who put his life on the line for them.
But Amazon Fallout is too mean-spirited for that and the wastelanders don't have souls in this universe, so they have a comic relief myopic lemming wastelander character go 'uh, no!?' and then the NCR just shows up and saves the day.
We get a moment where the deathclaw charges Max, a shot rings out, and I thought 'oh the shopkeep walked out by himself to save the day and finally inspire his fellows'. nope. NCR just shows up. Deeply frustrating scene. You had the chance to let Max be an inspiration, be the good in the world, be the change in the world, but no, the wasteland can only be changed by external forces bending it to their will.
The only characters who get to experience emotions like love or compassion or such things are vault dwellers, prewar folk, or NCR characters like Max and his parents. Barb Howard, who gets a really stupid retcon where she was threatened by the Enclave/Vault-Tec all along, does everything she does for love of her family. Hank MacLean is in the same boat, but the universe isn't generous enough to give him a tragic motivation to justify it.
The bits from the games where prewar society was barely functioning are mostly cut out and we largely only see mild discontent and mostly glitz & glamor. It's also reve
Dane and Max apparently don't know any good people in the entire wasteland, so they immediately decide that they should give the show's macguffin to Lucy, the only good person in the world.
It's astonishing. The wastelanders are literally just animals in the eyes of the narrative. The show clearly wants us to believe Hank and the other Vault-Tec guys are evil for thinking they should rule over and brainwash wastelanders, but the show implicitly -hell, all but explicitly - agrees with Hank that the wastelanders are savages who need that subjugation in order to function.
Ultimately - that was my biggest contention with the show. If the wastelanders are not people who deserve better, then the franchise does not work. And in the show's eyes, they're not people at all.
(I still think the show trying to lead us to thinking Vault-Tec launched the nukes is so fucking stupid. 'There's a lot of earnings potential in the end of the world!' no there's fucking not. who wrote this? What rich person would say or believe that? They're the established powers, shorttermists who love the status quo, they wouldn't want to blow it up!)
There are more problems I had, there are things I liked, but they all kind of pale in comparison to the fact that the show has absolute contempt for the wastelanders and it bleeds through every scene with them. In the hands of good but not great writers, this show could have been a masterpiece. Unfortunately, it got bad ones.
