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Bethesda showed off a bit of the Amazon Fallout TV show in a Vanity Fair exclusive, and while it tells a new story in the post-apocalyptic world, it’s got some big Fallout 3 vibes going on. The plot rundown from Vanity Fair even loosely mirrors Bethesda’s first steps into the wasteland.
The Fallout TV show starts with the end of the world, as you’d expect from the series. Nuclear bombs rain down across the globe in 2077 before switching to protagonist Lucy, 200 years after the atomic catastrophe. Lucy is a lot like you at the start of Fallout 3. She’s lived her life underground in a Vault-Tec vault and has no idea what life is like on the surface or how things got the way they are.
Lucy eventually heads up on a rescue mission and faces the blighted wasteland and its manifold horrors – monsters, giant bugs, and worst of all, people. Vanity Fair says that Lucy is kind and naive, which is a pretty dangerous combination in the wasteland, but something that gives the writers plenty to to work with.
Lucy’s journey eventually puts her in a situation where she has to question the values her Vault Overseer father instilled in her, as she clashes with the wasteland’s myriad people groups.
“The games are about the culture of division and haves and have-nots that, unfortunately, have only gotten more and more acute in this country and around the world over the last decades,” writer Jonathan Nolan, who also created Westworld, told Vanity Fair. “We get to talk about that [social satire] in a wonderful, speculative-fiction way. I think we’re all looking at the world and going, ‘God, things seem to be heading in a very, very frightening direction.’”
One of those other groups is the Brotherhood of Steel, a robot-loving militant group that’s home to one of the show’s other leads, a soldier named Maximus.
The third star is a ghoul called, well, The Ghoul. He’s a canny bounty hunter whose intelligence and keen wit helped him survive centuries of hardship. Nolan says The Ghoul is similar to Virgil in The Inferno, someone who’s been around the block before and is here to lend a hand to these youngsters he takes a liking to.
What kind of broader plot all this leads to is still a bit of a mystery, but Bethesda will likely share more in the near future. The Fallout TV show airs on Amazon starting April 12, 2024.
Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF