Jonathan Nolan of Westworld and The Dark Knight fame is back to recapture the magic of the video game adaptation of The Last of Us in the new Prime Video series, Fallout. And judging from the pilot, oddly titled “The End,” video game adaptations are back in full force. This trippy, action packed series introduces viewers to a post apocalyptic world, a spunky new heroine played by Ella Purnell of Yellowjackets fame, and a new villain known as the Ghoul. Here we go into the Wasteland!
The Day It Ended | It begins at a young boy’s birthday party at an idyllic mansion overlooking a futuristic city, as the parents at the party comment on the rodeo cowboy entertaining the kids (Walton Goggins), calling him Cooper Howard and saying that they’re surprised he’s doing a kids party. Regardless, Cooper entertains the kids with his daughter in tow as the news on TV talks about the threat of nuclear war. As Cooper goes inside to get his daughter a slice of birthday cake, a nuke goes off in the city and Cooper grabs his daughter and races out on his horse as three more nukes go off.
Meet Lucy | 219 years later, we meet Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell), who describes to the Vault 33 council her daily routine in the Vault she lives in as she applies for a marriage with someone from another Vault, which gets approved. Lucy gets all dressed up with her pregnant friend Steph (Annabel O’Hagen) and her father Hank (Kyle MacLachlan) escorts her to the Vault door, but Lucy’s cousin Chet (Dave Register) holds up the ceremony to proclaim his love for her- Gross! Lucy rejects him immediately as the door opens and Vault 32’s Overseer, Lee Moldaver (Sarita Choudhury) agrees to exchange a guy named Monty (Cameron Cowperthwaite) as Lucy’s new husband for seeds to plant.
Lucy and Monty tie the knot as Hank announces that the surface is close to being habitable again. Monty asks Lucy to take him to their new home and immediately takes off all of his clothes, which Lucy is totally fine with as they have sex on the dining room table. At the same time, Lucy’s brother Norm (Moises Arias) ventures to Vault 32 to find a dead body, just as Lucy hears screams from outside and grabs a wrist device that detects radiation on Monty- meaning that he’s from the surface. Monty stabs Lucy, but she stabs him with a broken glass and then grabs a tranquilizer gun and goes outside to see the the Raiders posing as Vault Dwellers slaughtering everyone else.
Steph’s husband is killed and she takes a fork to the eye fighting back, as Hank kills the barely alive Monty. Hank and Lucy run to the Vault exit, but Lee is there holding the survivors, including Steph and Chet hostage with a bomb at the entrance. Hank locks Lucy in a storage room, but she sees through the window Lee tranquilizing Hank and taking him away. Lee tells Lucy that she looks like her mother before triggering the bomb and leaving. The survivors hightail it right before it goes off.
Meet Maximus | Above the surface, a man named Maximus (Aaron Moten) is training with the Brotherhood of Steel- some kind of military unit- as a large hovercraft arrives at their base, dropping off men in suits of armor by the plane load. A nonbinary recruit named Dane (Xelia Mendes-Jones) shows Maximus one suit of armor chained up in the warehouse before they are summoned by their superiors. The next day, Dane arrives and says that they are anointed and shipping out to the wilds, which makes Maximus jealous and angry. Unfortunately, Dane puts their boot on and finds a razor blade inside and Maximus gets the blame.
Back at Vault 33, Lucy asks the council to send someone to the surface to find her dad. Betty (Leslie Uggams) and Woody (Zach Cherry) immediately shoot the idea down, but Lucy goes anyway with help from Chet and Norm. They take her to the outer door of the Vault far above, but when Chet insists on going with her, she tranquilizes him. Norm refuses to go with her, but bids her goodbye as she goes to bring Hank home. The door opens and Lucy goes outside as the door slams shut behind her. Outside, she sees dead bodies everywhere as well as an ocean and a ruined boardwalk right next door to the Vault. Her response? “Okey Dokey!”
Maximus is interrogated and asked why he joined the Brotherhood, to which he says, “To hurt the people who hurt me.” A guy in an armor suit arrives behind him and demands to know if he put the blade in Dane’s boot. Maximus denies wrongdoing, but admits that he wanted it to happen. The Officer (Brendan Burke) asks if he is weak, but Maximus thanks him for giving his life meaning, which not only saves his skin, but earns him the promotion in Dane’s place. He tells Dane, who responds by admitting that they defended him when asked. Maximus is branded with a letter T before being ordered to hunt down a member of the Enclave who has some dangerous object. Maximus is given a crude picture of the target before shipping out on a plane to the wilds.
Meet the Ghoul | Elsewhere, three sketchy looking dudes arrive at a cemetery to dig up a coffin, saying that they’re looking for some kind of mutant. The coffin opens, revealing the Ghoul (Walton Goggins), who looks like Cooper with his face scarred and his nose missing. The men tell him that there’s a big bounty on the Enclave man that Maximus is looking for and that he’s heading to California. The Ghoul immediately kills two of them and buries the last in the coffin he just emerged from.
Fallout is now streaming on Prime Video.