With just over three weeks to go before the Fallout TV series hits the airwaves, Amazon has dropped a two-minute clip from the show in which Vault dweller Lucy finds herself caught up in a sticky situation between a gun-slinging ghoul and the Brotherhood of Steel.
The scene opens with the Ghoul—capitalization courtesy of Amazon—playing rough with a couple elderly citizens of a local shantytown. Vault dweller Lucy, played by Ella Purnell and presumably imbued with the spirit of “do good in the world,” intervenes, only to discover that she’s woefully unprepared for the moment. Hey, the Wasteland is a rough place. Luckily for her, a member of the Brotherhood of Steel swoops in to save the day, although whether he’ll make things better or worse is left untold.
While not much actually happens, the scene touches on aspects of Fallout that will be familiar to fans: The babe-in-the-woods naivete of a newly-emerged Vault dweller, the rough-living durability of ghouls, and—although it goes unsaid—the very strong likelihood that the senior citizens on the wrong side of Walton Goggins’ bad mood probably deserve whatever was going to happen to them. It may not click with non-gamers, but if you know the games you’ll recognize those notes.
The appearance of the Brotherhood of Steel trooper is a little more ambiguous. Is he a good guy? A bad guy? A fascist tech-hoarder or upright defender of little people? Or perhaps he’s an uncertain cog in an uncaring machine who discovers the world is filled with wonder, and that the hopes and dreams of the individual are as important to a worthwhile future for humanity as peace and order? (That’s where I might be inclined to put my money.)
Lucy is clearly enthralled by the trooper’s arrival but I rather suspect that, much like everything else she’s going to encounter during her adventures into the post-nuclear world, there will be some hard lessons ahead about how things are really done out there.
This is a bit of a nit-pick but the BoS trooper’s brief flight onto the scene didn’t really work for me. Can’t quite put my finger on why, but it’s got kind of a “guy being lifted by ropes” vibe to it. Not that Brotherhood power armor is going to conform to real-world aerodynamics anyway, but it just looks weird.
All of that stands in contrast to recent remarks from Fallout series director Jonathan Nolan, who said that trying to please fans of the games with the show would be a “fool’s errand.” He’s not wrong, but as the famous saying goes, war never changes, and when you get right down to it neither does Fallout.
