Fallout’s sci-fi escape hatch

I really enjoyed the first season of Fallout, Prime Video’s adaptation of the popular video game series. In fact, I like it so much, I will go out on a limb and say that Walton Goggins should have gotten an Emmy nomination for Fallout, not The White Lotus. His performance in Fallout is a lot more layered and richer, never mind that he has to do it through heavy makeup and prosthetics and remain emotionally convincing, which he does.

The second season of Fallout is coming in December, and a teaser dropped yesterday, showing off the return of Goggins as “the Ghoul”/movie star Cooper Howard, and Ella Purnell as post-apocalyptic survivor, Lucy. The teaser also shows off “New Vegas”, the post-apocalyptic version of Las Vegas. Fallout: New Vegas is arguably the most popular of the Fallout video games, so nerds are stoked to see this location and these characters—including Justin Theroux as “Mr. House”—come to life, but for the non-nerds, the super cool production design can be enjoyed in and of itself. Within the post-apocalyptic “current” timeline of the show, and the retro-futuristic “past” timeline, both look equally cool, albeit in different ways. This is what season one did so well—there are plenty of nods to the games for nerds, but if you’re not familiar with Fallout, you can still easily follow the show and just enjoy the stunning design for itself. 

The teaser also includes a Deathclaw, one of the scariest monsters in the Fallout universe. Season two is promising a lot of fan-favorite stuff, which would have me worried that they’re cramming it all into the sophomore season because there won’t be any more than this, but Prime Video has already picked up the series for a third season. Whew! Netflix cliffhanger this is not. 

Fallout’s first season was a fun genre adventure series, but the second season is coming in a time when we are paying a LOT more attention to how corporations are making everything worse for everyone, which is a central theme of the series. I don’t know how hard people will latch onto that in season two, because the show’s “sci-fi escape hatch” is pretty big. A sci-fi escape hatch is what I call it when speculative fiction offers enough made-up hokum to cover real-world implications, inspirations, and politics. Think Avatar and its mealy metaphor for manifest destiny, or Star Wars and its space Nazis, or Tolkien’s thinly veiled anti-war message in Lord of the Rings. These worlds are built out of direct, real-world analogs, but they are so hugely imaginative it’s actually EASIER to ignore the sub/textual implications. The speculative nature of the fiction becomes an escape hatch from the reality underpinning it.

But in Fallout it is not even subtext that corporations destroyed the world to secure their profits, forcing everyone into a mutant nightmare hellscape. Given that season two is going big with Mr. House, a character directly related to that plotline, will Fallout season two be accused of going woke? Or will it continue to get a pass because the setting is so fantastic that it’s easy to ignore the show’s themes?