Amazon Prime's memorable new hit series Fallout, based on the popular video games by Bethesda SoftWorks and Interplay, is marred by a number of left-wing biases.
The series follows Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell), a resident of a "Vault-Tec" bunker in the year 2296. Vault-Tec bunkers are a high-tech underground network of vaults designed to survive a nuclear blast. Generations have lived in them since nuclear fallout from the fictitious "Great War" centuries earlier. Lucy's father, Hank (Kyle MacLachlan), is the overseer of the vault where she lives.
After Hank is kidnapped by invaders from above ground, Lucy leaves the secured vault to go up to the surface for the first time in her life to find him. She journeys across a wasteland filled with ghouls, warriors and various unsavory characters.
The series bounces back and forth in time between a pre-fallout 1950s-style world and future years.
Up on the surface, the audience is introduced to the "Brotherhood of Steel," a post-apocalypse paramilitary order. The brotherhood includes "Dane," played by "non-binary" actor Xelia Mendes-Jones, a biological woman. Dane is supposed to be one of the boys but is really a butch-looking woman with a light mustache. Dane's leader uses the pronoun "they" when speaking to her, albeit very briefly. The "transness" of the character is never spoken of or emphasized in any way, yet Dane's presence in the brotherhood still requires suspension of disbelief.
Outside of Dane's character, much of the series eschews any direct wokeness. The main female lead, Lucy, is not a "Mary Sue." Stronger men sometimes have to intervene to save her, and she does not try to girlboss her way across the wasteland. She just wants to find her father.
In the end, she discovers her father is actually a villain who works for a corporation that has repeatedly nuked the world in order to destroy competition from it.
The truth is revealed by Lee Moldaver (Sarita Choudhury), a woman who is described as a communist in pre-fallout flashbacks. Numerous characters are capable of living for hundreds of years via different means and Moldaver appears through different epochs. In flashbacks, she heads what is described as a communist Hollywood circle. She butts heads with actor Cooper Howard (Walter Goggins), a John Wayne type of character who stars in Vault-Tec ads before learning their evil plans. He turns into a ghoul after nuclear fallout.
After their confrontation, Moldaver tells Howard (Walter Goggins), "I'm not a communist, Mr. Howard. That's just a dirty word they use to describe people who aren't insane."
Moldaver's Hollywood movement began after her research on cold fusion was stolen by Vault-Tec. She warns Howard and others that Vault-Tec is an evil corporation intent on destruction. In the video game version of Fallout, numerous companies profit off the war, but this series adds a twist: Vault-Tec and other connected companies ensure that the bombs get dropped in the first place.
Moldaver builds a new republic in the years after the first nuclear fallout. With the support of Hank McLean, Vault-Tec creates a second nuclear bombing so that there is no future alternative to their vaults.
Upon finding her father, Lucy learns that the man she thought of as a loving dad is actually a cold-blooded murderer who works for a diabolical corporation. Up until that moment, Hank was one of the few white male characters in the show who had not become weak, cowardly or cruel. A preponderance of bad guys is par for the course in a post-apocalyptic word, but the fact that a white male leader always turns out to be a horrible person in contemporary television is frustrating.
Fallout is a strong series in many ways, with real character development and a coherent plot. It will likely be able to keep its fan base into future seasons. Unfortunately, an underlying leftist worldview ultimately seeps through it despite all its strengths.
