October 30, 1961 Tsar Bomba, the most powerful nuclear bomb ever created and testedexploded over the Russian Cape Stukhoy Nos.
The device, called “Product 602” by its creators, was supposed to be twice as powerful, with an explosive yield of 100 megatons and a blast radius of more than 90 km; a force capable of destroying the entire Greater Toronto Area almost instantly. But to reduce emissions, uranium was replaced with lead, and the full power of the Tsar Bomba was never realized.
Nearly 50 years later, in late October, struck by the radioactive banality of Bruno Mars' “Just The Way You Are,” Fallout: New Vegasarguably the best Western RPG ever released has released worldwide.
Season 2 Prime Video's Fall out returns to a devastated retrofuturist Vegas that has become a digital paragon, populated by warring factions of Roman soccer wannabes, fledgling federal republics, self-proclaimed Elvis-like kings, and a tech oligarch at its center. They, along with the series' main characters, inhabit an area roughly the same size as the path of destruction of the Tsar Bomba if it were released at full power. If the first season Fall out was a proven bomb, season two is its unlimited counterpart: twice the size of its predecessor and disgustingly amazing.
After last season's revelations and Hank (Kyle MacLachlan), making his subsequent escape from Los Angeles, Ghoul (Walton Goggins) and Lucy (Ella Purnell) heads to New Vegas for answers, and Maximus (Aaron Moten) became entrenched in the Brotherhood of Steel, a militaristic group seeking to preserve and control the use of technology that existed before nuclear war.
As they circle New Vegas, the Ghoul's past resurfaces as the circumstances that led to the end of the world some 200 years before the series' major storylines become increasingly clear. As always, Goggins brings his performance to life and continues to establish himself as one of the finest actors currently working, aided by a soundtrack of new and familiar mid-century fireworks.
But despite its nuclear aesthetics and 1950s values, as well as jokes about America and its minions, the pre-war world of Fallout is even more reminiscent of today in public sentiment and the growing power of American oligarchs. Mr House (scarily Justin Theroux) is America's most powerful technology tycoon, an amoral and classically charismatic man whose ideas of progress are about income and influence. Mr. House seeks to automate workers and create a technocratic United States; A TIME magazine The “Man of the Year” sits on a throne in his penthouse overlooking Las Vegas and predicts the end of the world.
Both Theroux's performance and the story told in Fallout: New Vegas House's richness as a character is taken into account, and the calculated approach taken by showrunners Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner pays off, enriching the series in unexpected ways – both play and television. They bridge gaps that players have been theorizing about for 15 years, answering questions that will either catch nerds off guard or come flooding back.
Returning to a region that fans worship like a drop of water comes with risks. Instead of pampering fans with links to Fallout: New Vegas and the satisfaction of nostalgia that leads to arrested development, season 2 Fall out represents the franchise's nearly lost morbid humor and critique of all aspects of American existence. Office workers function like ladder-climbing lemmings, shelter-dwellers serve as nuclear-grade suburbanites with fluorescent smiles, and the enchitification of military technology cements Marines as victims of the state.
While some references become clunky to the point of stopping any momentum, the exploration of America in Las Vegas, before and after the war, in the season's first six episodes (critics weren't given access to the season's final two episodes) does fans the ultimate service of wiping off their rose-colored glasses and giving them a new lens through which to look.
The most celebrated video game adaptations for television have found plenty of room to fill in the gaps of their predecessors, and despite some overly gratuitous expansions for their fans, Fall out elevates the source material and turns it into something truly special.
