Boxing Clever: Fallout Season 2
Every week, Michael Telfer – aka Mike TV – recommends a box set to crack open. This week’s choice is a post-apocalyptic series that is so much fun you might just stop worrying and love the bomb…
Last month the Doomsday Clock, a symbolic measure of how close we supposedly are to blowing ourselves up, frying ourselves, or generally making Earth uninhabitable, moved closer to kaboom o’clock than at any point since the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists dreamt it up in 1947.
The Amazon Prime team responsible for marketing the newly released Season 2 of its post-apocalyptic action-comedy-drama Fallout probably couldn’t believe their luck.
The retail and streaming giant’s latest big-budget TV show is the adaptation of a long-running and much-loved series of video games that are set in a version of the United States that has been pretty much eviscerated by nuclear war.
Season 1 starts before the bombs drop, in a version of 1950s Americana where nuclear power fuels everything and the richest families have paid significant sums to reserve spaces in underground vaults where they can hopefully survive Armageddon.
It’s not long before everything goes up in smoke in a cascade of mushroom clouds and slow motion carnage, and we fast forward two centuries to find society split between underground vault-dwelling mini civilisations and lawless wastelands on the scarred surface.
No knowledge of the games is required to follow the story and enjoy the show, but I would suggest a strong stomach for violence and bloodshed is a definite prerequisite.
A series of events conspire to shatter the tranquillity of everyday life in Vault 33 during the first episode, and no violent details or eye-watering injuries are left to the imagination. Life in Fallout is a bloody mess, and this is consistent across every episode. You have been warned.
The show revolves around three main characters. Lucy (Ella Purnell) is a young woman who has lived a sheltered life in Vault 33 but now finds herself topside in a terrifying world where everything and everyone is trying to kill her.
Aaron Moten plays Maximus, a squire in the Brotherhood of Steel, a mysterious sect whose attempts to bring law to the wasteland have been spectacularly unsuccessful.
The trio is completed by the blackened heartbeat of the show, the Ghoul (Walton Goggins), the mutated form of pre-war film star Cooper Howard who needs a steady supply of drugs to delay his eventual metamorphosis into a mindless, feral zombie.
The first season threw the characters together, turned their lives upside down and then spat them out. The sort of textbook wasteland life we are all now 85 seconds away from. Don’t worry about packing your toothbrush.
All episodes of the first season were released at the same time, but this time round Amazon have introduced pre-war rationing with viewers being forced to wait for a new episode each Tuesday, with the finale landing earlier this month.
Again it’s been quite the ride, with Lucy and the Ghoul forming an uneasy alliance to try and track down her errant father and his wife and daughter, while Maximus fumbles his way into a Civil War between the various heavily armed clans of the Brotherhood.
The story moves to Vegas, which is relatively unscathed for reasons that gradually become clear as we find out more about the events that led to the World’s superpowers trading warheads and Cooper Howard’s unwitting involvement.
The humour, action and production meet the high bar set during the first season, and if the story takes a couple of episodes to really get going it makes up for it by the end.
The cast are all excellent, and in addition to the leads we are treated to the returning Kyle MacLachlan and new faces Kumail Nanjiani, Clarence James Brown III, Macaulay Culkin and Justin Theroux as Mr House, the enigmatic technocrat pulling strings from the shadows.
The dystopian adventure continues to be a huge hit with subscribers and a third season has already been commissioned, a fact underlined by the bombastic, scene-setting finale. Let’s hope when it lands it’s still light entertainment rather than a documentary.
Seasons 1 & 2 are available to stream on Amazon Prime.