There's a hole at the centre of the Fallout show, and the more you start to notice it, the more disturbing it becomes.
It starts with who gets to be a POV character: vault-dwellers, a pre-war ghoul, cryogenically frozen pre-war people, and a boy who was born in Shady Sands before being indoctrinated into the Brotherhood. None of these characters, you might have noticed, are actually wastelanders - born and living in the wasteland of the post-apocalypse - and for a setting that's supposedly all about a post-apocalyptic wasteland, that's a little odd, right?
Then there's the wastelanders the show does include: grimy, ugly, half-crazed and overwhelmingly selfish; most of these caricatures aren't even granted the decency of a name. Time and time again, they are the punchline of a scene or a cruel lesson for our protagonists. They willingly submit to having their memories erased and gleefully refuse to lift a finger to defend their own homes. And when the central plotline of a season is about forcibly stripping the personalities from people and turning them into mindless drones, you would think not characterizing these people in any meaningful way would be somewhat short-sighted, no?
But that's where the hole becomes apparent: the Fallout show simply does not consider wastelanders to be people.
You see this message repeated over and over again throughout the show. Cooper Howard, after surviving 200 years of wasteland, has become a callous mercenary with little in the way of moral code. Lucy and Norm step outside their vault and are rapidly hardened with overwhelming death and suffering. Living in the wasteland makes you less than human, the show tells you. And it reinforces this with every raving lunatic NPC you come across along the way.
Even if this weren't a Fallout show, this would be a storytelling problem. You can't portray a world full of miserable, selfish people devoid of humanity and then expect viewers to care about the deathclaws in the Strip, or the mind-control devices, or the impending Legion attack. Lucy has absolutely no ammunition in her counter-argument against her dad's plan, because she's never given a reason to care about the wastelanders, either.
But unfortunately for all of us, this is a show with the Fallout label, that flaunts its Fallout fanservice wantonly at every given opportunity. And yet it completely misses the point of what Fallout is supposed to be about. Because Fallout is about people. Specifically, people making their way through the post-apocalypse, navigating the remnants of the failed systems of the past, and building something else from the rubble. Failed systems, because when the bombs dropped, nobody won. That's what the end of the world is supposed to mean. Everything failed. People are what's left.
And yet the Fallout show would have you believe that those failed systems - the Enclave, Vault-Tec, even Robert House - are still alive and well in some way, and more importantly, are not only still relevant, but still winning. Shady Sands gets nuked, the NCR and the Legion get flashed about for fanservice points, and the Brotherhood descends into civil war offscreen, but all the pre-war boogeymen get their moment in the sun. What does the show really want us to care about, here?
Without wastelanders, without any kind perspective or pathos for the actual people living in this world, the stakes feel hollow - empty, like the Howard family's cryo pods, like the lack of any resolutions or answers to the show's grander mysteries. "The Wasteland is the experiment now" Hank McLean says, ominously. But why should we care? To us, the wasteland is already nothing but a collection of mindless NPCs.
There's a hole at the centre of the Fallout show, and I fear it will consume the whole thing eventually.
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