Never has the post-apocalyptic world looked like a traveling circus, both merry and sordid, as we see in “Fallout,” the new series inspired by the hugely successful video game of the same name. In this twisted universe located after a nuclear winter that flattened the planet, we have dramas, we have blood, but also a very healthy black humor as a binder that manages to hold the whole action together and make it, paradoxically, even “truthful”, despite the XXL cockroaches, misshapen sea urchins or radioactive undead roaming the landscape. However, the most terrible creatures seem to be the post-corporatists who control the vast network of underground bunkers in which the lucky ones from before the plague took refuge: people who like to dress in tracksuits, who keep their multinational reflexes intact and they seem extremely comfortable in their underground bubble-turned-corporatist post-apocalyptic Heaven.
“Fallout” is, in fact, a “Star Trek” in an extremely pessimistic version. Both are set somewhere in the 21st-23ish centuries and thus share roughly the same “historical” period.
Only in “Star Trek” we have the progressive world in which Good has completely triumphed: here, people have matured over the Great War that ravaged the planet, solved the global food problem with a snap of the fingers (food replicators and drink) and also escaped the solar system with the discovery of the superlight engine.
Well, in “Fallout” it’s upside down.
Those left are still literally crawling across a ravaged planet.
Here, broadly speaking, aside from the eternal cockroaches, we have three main categories of human survivors of the nuclear apocalypse: the radioactive thugs, the iron-obsessed fanatical paramilitaries, the censers or techies, and the corporatists. Among them we have the vast crowd of NPCs (“non player character” – unimportant character from video games) who are also trying to earn a crust of bread without strontium and cesium.
The series (with Jonathan Nolan as executive producer and who also directs 3 episodes) can be watched in Romania on the Prime Video streaming network. The action is located in a post-apocalyptic and simultaneously retrofuturistic Los Angeles: the nuclear war takes place in an alternate universe that resembles America in the 60s, while the actual action takes place “200 years later”, through 2296.
Humanity has stagnated throughout this period at a type of technology similar to that of the mid-20th century (the one in our “timeline”, of those watching the series). Some irony, we may ask, of the authors to the “deep” America, which has remained “paralyzed” in time from the 1950s to the present? And who knows how long from now?
We have a lot of Mad Max on the surface and a kind of “City of Ember” with multinational meetings underground. Sometimes Mad Max pirates raid progressive bunkers and wreak havoc. The survivors gather at the table and have another session. When one of those present loudly demands “revenge”, the response is prompt and sounds like a robot on the phone line: Thank you for your feedback, it’s very good that you externalize your anger, but we don’t do it that way.
One of the biggest threats, however, comes from the radioactive undead, a post-apocalyptic subspecies of radiation-soaked survivors who have superior endurance and “lifespan” to ordinary humans.
The Alfa undead is actually “The Ghoul” (“The Ghoul”) played by Walter Goggins.
“Fallout” presents itself as a carefully prepared recipe that combines several genres of the “post-apocalyptic genre”: some horror, some zombies (although the “undead” are not really zombies per se), a little Westworld (let’s not forget that Jonathan Nolan was also a producer and screenwriter here) with lone and ruthless gunslingers in leather trenches shooting people in the dusty streets.
Throughout this Tower of Babel, the remnants of humanity struggle to survive as best they can with the world’s extremely limited resources. star trek? Hold my beer. The only thing in common with the world of Captains Kirk and Picard are the body-hugging suits, like the nylon pajama uniforms worn by the corporatists of the future in the atomic bunkers.
The moral – sad and happy at the same time – is that Corporate Heaven will apparently not be fulfilled until after Atomic Hell. And even then we won’t be 100% sure that the citizens in blue suits will win in the end so we can all dream of Star Trek heaven.
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