Fallout: Season 1

[pokoko]

Ryuu96 said:

Watch more of their good shows

Invincible, The Boys, Good Omens, The Expanse, Gen V, Upload, The Legend of Vox Machina.

All great Amazon Prime Originals, it all depends on the showrunners, directors and writers in the end.

It's funny Amazon cancelled Jonathan Nolan's other show though, Lol.

I watched The Boys up until I felt it was getting kind of slow and preachy in season 2.  Also, Amazon's X-ray commentary started talking about Homelander's "white male privilege" which was absolutely ridiculous and took me right out of the show.  I tried Gen V but quit halfway through the first episode because all the characters talked about was social media.  I might try Good Omens but I've been putting it off because I loved the book and it seems quite a bit different.

HoloDust said:

Yeah, I watched his video after I watched the episode. Tim Cain is a wise old man - I tend to meet some people of his level, albeit from movie/TV industry in my line of work, and you'll rarely hear them saying bad things, at least publicly.
I don't doubt he liked a lot of the aspects of the show (since there are good ones) and focused on those, though he said himself he has to watch it again, since he missed some story beats by not paying attention to what was going on in dialogue and watching production design of scenes.

That said, there will always be a divide between original Fallout and Bethesda's Fallout fans - Obsidian showed Bethesda how it can be done and honor the originals (to a degree) with NV, but they just didn't care.

I'm hoping to see what Leonard Boyarsky has to say about the show, as an architect of visual style of original Fallout universe, since, at least according to Tim Cain, he was not that kind after the trailer.

He seemed pretty honest with his impressions, I thought.  My guess is that he knows it's just a video game IP, not some kind of immutable sacred cow that people should be harassing others over decades later.  But, that aside, if people would rather be eternally bitter instead of playing some really fun games, more power to them.

Machina said:

Just managed to watch the first episode and I enjoyed it. Solid 7, maybe 8/10.

One thing I really like is that there are three main characters, instead of there just being a singular focus on the (former) vault dweller. I also like all three of those characters so far, and the decision to put one of them in a supporting role to a Power Armor knight who we haven't seen outside of the suit yet (I hope both things remain true, but there seems to be a sense of inevitability that we'll see who's in the armor and that Maximus will eventually get in the suit himself). It also looks great - much better than the still images had led me to expect - and I've enjoyed most of the references to the lore.

I've seen some reviews for that first episode criticise the sheer amount of lore, and especially the Brotherhood v Enclave stuff, but I enjoyed most of that. Though I did find some of the cuts to be very abrupt and weirdly sequenced; the Brotherhood stuff should have come after Lucy first leaves the vault, for example, so that that was our first view of the outside.

The mix of brutal violence and quirky comedy works for me. I'm guessing the excessive use of slow-mo was to make the combat easier to shoot while also being a kind of homage to the VATS system, but I'm not sure I'll want that to become the norm for the series though.

In terms of negatives, I dislike almost all of the supporting characters so far - some very weird secondary casting decisions imo. The Brother who conducts the interrogation of Maximus and the Power Armor knight who barely speaks are the only two I like in episode 1.

My other main negative is the whole Raiders-invading-the-vault angle and the sheer amount of stupid decisions made by everyone throughout the battle and plot holes it created. A better way to have done that would've been for the vault dwellers to have caught on earlier and barricaded themselves in part of the vault, after having suffered the same number of casualties they did in the original script. Instead they went with this open battle sequence where somehow the vault dwellers aren't completely wiped out, despite being taken by surprise and being completely out-equipped and losing control of the armory. Then the Raider leader takes the Overseer hostage, but lets everyone they've captured go free and live (despite telling the Overseer to choose who dies, and despite indiscriminately slaughtering everyone they could find just minutes prior), after setting off a bomb intended to do... whatever. I dunno, all of that just struck me as shit and lazy writing all round.

EPISODE 1 SPOILERS (kind of, I guess) ---

The stand-off with the Overseer and the Raiders made zero sense and is probably the worst written sequence I've encountered after watching four episodes.  I eventually realized that the Raiders were just there to capture the Overseer, which is why I assume they didn't try to slaughter everyone and take over the vault, but the part with the hostages had me completely puzzled.  An actual raider would have killed them as soon as he surrendered--actually, why was that even necessary to begin with?  He was an old man, they could have simply taken him without a problem.  

The bomb, though, was to block the tunnel so they couldn't be followed, which I didn't even get until much later and they did a poor job of explaining at the time.

I don't like Maximus.  He seems very slow-witted and he makes a lot of dumb decisions.  On the other hand, Lucy's brother ends up being an interesting character.  There is definitely more going on in the Vaults, which of course would make sense given Vault-Tech's track record.