The wasteland is going get even bigger.
I’m only two episodes in, and I like it even more than The Last of Us.
If they keep the quality up, this is one series that could keep going for years just on existing lore.
i finished it and i agree. i liked TLOU (show and lesser extent game), but Fallout had enough of the game’s…surreal?…humour that it bumped it from an “oh god this is a slog through human misery” (not in a bad way, per se!) to “miserable, but with bits of unexpected hilarity” for me.
both great shows - hope we get more like them!
Big take away for me is both stay true to the source material… minor changes but nothing over the top. The attention to detail in fallout is incredible, even down to the controls that open the doors in the vault.
So many shows just go so far away from the source they’re terrible.
coughWitchercough
I thought the inclusion of the even the hacking mini game in the terminal was another nice touch. I don’t know why that one made me smile. Like you said, there’s a ton of little details.
I’d be down with a Horizon show, God of War show, or Mass Effect show fully fleshed out like these.
Watched it. Its good, but no Last of us.
I like it more than Last of Us personally.
I think it is incredibly mediocre. It’s fine, but it doesn’t really do anything for me. I still have some episodes left though.
Characters seem randomly chosen and development is with glacial speed until calving.
Gonna watch it through though.
I’m a bit split about this series. On one hand it has great world buliding, solid cinematography and style, interesting places and encounters, and so on. But on the other the main story is very bland, mostly about teasing you with the unknown, the tone flips wildly between goofy and serious, and I can’t really sympathize with any of the characters. Kinda lika a typical Bethesda game I suppose, but it’s not really working for me as a TV series.
the tone flips wildly between goofy and serious, and I can’t really sympathize with any of the characters
So its staying true to the source material, then.
also I am not shocked at all Bethesda wanted to destroy new vegas, I’m sure thats a metaphorical middle finger to obsidian for daring to release a more popular game than they were able to, lol.
Lol seriously. The tone was what I thought they absolutely nailed. There’s tons of examples but the easiest is how genuinely badass that power armor intro is, and then also “fuck fuck fuck fuck”. Fallout was always like that lol.
you say this as if todd doesnt love obsidian and new vegas. why even go there at all if he hates it so much? this idea is so pathetic among the new vegas fanboys just seems like bad actors pushing a narrative against bethesda any means neccesary
Tod Howard literally confirmed that NV is still cannon, and that >!shady sands was nuked shortly after NV!<.
You are responding as if I said NV wasnt cannon?
a woman searching for her kidnapped father who hopes to trade a (spoilers) for his release who is herself kidnapped by a semi-immortal and befriends a man who has only lived his whole life in a bootcamp against the background of a 200-year-old unethical social experiment precipitated by a global nuclear catastrophe… is not what I would call a bland plot.
Even if executed badly, written poorly, acted ineptly, shot awfully, edited confusingly and delivered sub par, I don’t think the plot is bland.
Compared to, say, a lawyer starts at a new office and falls in love with his secretary, or a teenage daughter falls in love with a guy from the wrong side of the tracks.
I’d say most of that is the setting, not the plot. The plot was mostly about slowly uncovering that setting, bringing a MacGuffin from A to B, and having random stuff happen along the way. Many of the character interactions felt surface level (heh) as well to me, probably because or why (as I said) I couldn’t really get into the characters.
Idk, I don’t blame you if you see it differently, but the overall narrative and character building left a bit to be desired for me.
I’m very deep into this stuff having worked in entertainment my whole life, plot as fabula vs plot as syuzhet - the world of the drama vs the events of the drama - which are inseparable and at times interchangeable.
While you could say Fallout S1E1 is just set up for a standard Aristotlean call to adventure, you could also take each beat granularly: Howard (who becomes The Ghoul) faces a tough social confrontation at a kids birthday party, obviously hurting from being down on his luck as an actor, when seven or eight nuclear bombs detonate, but there are also sub beats regarding the size of his thumb (detailing his history of military action, and setting a call back for the Fallout Boy thumbs-up logo which we learn about in coming episodes…)
While I agree it’s probably not going to be anyone’s favorite show of all time, I do think the dramaturgy is well-considered.
Pacing is a dramaturgical issue sure, (as well as performance, cinematographic and editing-room issue) but you can pace a plot of “girl loses balloon, girl looks for balloon, girl finds balloon” like sesame street, an action movie, a chekov play, an advertisement or a 12 hour German expressionist epic - it doesn’t change the plot itself.
Or compared to whatever the fuck the Halo series was
I thought the point of all halo stuff was humans shooting aliens and aliens shooting humans. 🐈🦅
The entire point was the introduction of Master Cheeks.
That’s not plot, those are premises. Premises are fine at the beginning of a series but they need to do something interesting with those premises.
For example, lawyers starts a new office and falls in love with secretary is just a premise, a starting point. But it turns out that said lawyer has a strong imposter syndrome that makes him doubts everything he does despite his externally cocky attitude, while the secretary is actually a down on her luck law student who got emotionally abused by her previous boyfriend who is now the new hire on a high tier firm that is the main competitor of the protagonist’s firm. Main guy shows interest on the secretary but they have a fallout due to her wariness and his insecurity. Then the opposing firm starts a hostile takeover by stealing clients and lawyers. Main guy is on the brink of bankruptcy which throws him into a spiral. So he concocts a crazy plan that involves a dangerous representation of the local mafia, to which one of their big players are the estranged family of the secretary who she tried to abandon to run away from the insecurity and violent life. So now they find out this facts about each other when the mafia accidentally kills one of the lawyers of the opposing firm under weird circumstances and both the lawyer and the secretary end up hashing their deep emotional baggage on a road trip to another district and find their respective strengths, her to confront her criminal father and him to stand up for his employees, then…
You get the idea, that is plot. Things that happen to the characters or that the characters do, that fundamentally changes them and the context. A cool premise can only get you so far. In Fallout things barely happen and the characters end up more or less at the same place they started in, emotionally speaking.
see my reply here for further explanation about what I meant: https://sh.itjust.works/comment/11015082
In dramaturgical terms I’d define what you say here as
For example, lawyers starts a new office and falls in love with secretary is just a premise, a starting point.
it’s a plot summary or precis.
And then to take a few of your points:
But it turns out that said lawyer has a strong imposter syndrome that makes him doubts everything he does despite his externally cocky attitude,
these are character attributes and are not necessarily writer-controlled and could vary wildly between the writers’ intent, the directorial notes and the actor portrayal.
while the secretary is actually a down on her luck law student who got emotionally abused by her previous boyfriend who is now the new hire on a high tier firm that is the main competitor of the protagonist’s firm.
debatable about whether this is plot. If we see (or hear about) this happening relative to a turn of a beat or a block of the objective to a character in a beat - then, that’s plot otherwise its exposition
Main guy shows interest on the secretary but they have a fallout due to her wariness and his insecurity.
If we see the main guy making a move, this is plot, the reason for her rejection is an attribute or expository, but is not specifically dramaturgical
Then the opposing firm starts a hostile takeover by stealing clients and lawyers.
Technically this wouldn’t actually be plot without us seeing the opposing firm (presumably by synecdoche of seeing a character from the firm). So if we meet people from the competition firm it’s plot, but if we don’t then the plot would be more accurately described as “characters X, Y and Z leave the firm” and less accurately that “the competitor steals the characters”
the reason for being this specific is a) artistic - that drama (including comedic drama) relies on character relationships and dialogue and b) the process of turning writing to performance to product is a large and refined one that requires adherence to these principles to function
While I can surely appreciate a technical breakdown, that was still a lot of hot air. That doesn’t change the fact that, whatever your want to technically call what happened in Fallout, it was not interesting. It was flashy, it was pretty, but it was not interesting. Thus bland, like rice without seasoning. It’s there, it fills a stomach, it has nutrients. But ultimately it is boring and inconsequential.
I think you and I watched different shows. It was very interesting to find out what’s going on with these vaults. With this ghoul. With this squire low level grunt in the brotherhood. They all had interssting stories and character traits that played out nicely together into the larger picture/story.
We definitely watched different shows. Matter of taste I suppose. But none of those things were actually interesting. They were set up as mysterious, but were actually telegraphed and predictable. The characters really displayed no depth at all, nothing that happened to them or that they did changed them in any significant way. And the whole thing has massive plot holes and ends in a event that only video game fans would care about but overall, instead of a resolution, leads to a cliffhanger.
Bro what are you even talking about. Lucy and Maximus had their entire world-views turned upside down, completely changing allegiances by the end of the season. Cooper/the ghoul probably had the least development but he did go from bounty hunting for the love of it to trying to find his family again.
I’d swear you never even watched the show, you’re just throwing out mindless criticisms with no bearing on the actual plot.
To me the interesting part is blaming this on plotting, why I’m digging into it is that - as writers/creators/dramaturgs we often coalesce around how it’s never what is happening, but how the people dealing with it interact with each other.
What plot events do you feel were missing? We had nukes, monsters, gun fights, h2h combat, robots, all the main characters interact. What plot point, if added, would’ve saved it for you?
First of all, I don’t think it needs saving at all. It is what it is. Most people like it and I think that it barely qualifies for background noise. That is not a bad thing, nor do I think it’s a bad show. But everything that has happened in Fallout I have seen it better executed and in more interesting ways elsewhere. It’s cliche events, predictable story, characters have no agency and their arcs are flat, and it has a weird almost Disney like censorship over the whole plot. We almost never get to see the truly (few) eventful and important beats. But also even minor things that would be interesting or impactful to watch, they always cut or pan away the camera.
Nothing needs saving, no entertainment needs to be good, but arguably, we want entertainment to be good, therefore it should be good. That is the line of conversation. Of course Maslow’s hierarchy of needs exists, but let’s take that as read.
I want to dig into the “cliche” and “agency” part: Fallout (the games) are themselves pastiches of south-west Americana - westerns and cowboy dramas with a retro scifi flare (like how most cyberpunk dramas are pastiches of film noir). With that premise in mind, of course you need A Man With No Name as anti-hero.
It’s also an homage to a video game - a genre defined by everything being a go-fetch quests as a simplified version of Aristotles Poetics.
So I don’t think you can adapt fallout and ignore these influences - that’s part of the fun. If you don’t like westerns and quests you’re not only going to hate fallout tv show, but the fallout games too. But also red dead redemption, elder scrolls, mass effect…
We disagee that it was Disney-esque (there were heads exploding in every episode, a guy gets shot in the gooch, children are frequently murdered, there is on-screen sex, rape via deception, slavery, impalement, desecration of corpses, mutilation, maiming and vivisection, cannibalism, frequent visible kill shots to the head, nudity and tier-1 swearing).
What are the important beats we don’t see? >!the explosion of the city caused by the important guy, causing a main character to hate him!< - we certainly see the aftermath and consequences frequently and a significant part of the final episode discusses it. I can’t think of anything else.
That’s not plot, those are premises. Premises are fine at the beginning of a series but they need to do something interesting with those premises.
I had thought the premise was a daughter trying to find the father, a bounty hunter on a bounty while also trying to find his family, a squire caught in political machinations trying to save himself, and a suspicious vault citizen investigating the mystery of another vault.
And then over the episodes those premises were fleshed out, coming to interesting conclusions in episode 8.
I had the same thoughts as watching it. Mind you I’m not into the games at all, just have a passing familiarity with random Internet articles. It just didn’t seem to move and didn’t focus on one arc long enough to give a crap about anyone until the end where it ties together. I almost stopped watching it because when it would get good, they would invariably cut to another character arc and lose me.
This exactly. Barely anything of consequence happens in any one episode, apart from the first and the last. Everything in between could have been condensed into maybe 2-3 episodes, leaving more time for actual plot after the big battle at the observatory.
I’ve never understood tone flipping wildly as a criticism. I prefer the tone to have a wide swing in my media. Matt Smith was an amazing doctor because 1 second he could be a total goof, and a deadly “old” man the next.
Changing the tone here and there is good, but in Fallout it felt a little jarring to me at times.
Matt Smith’s Doctor is the only I actually believed when he would say “Guns are bad, kids!” and then do a genocide anyways.
Normally I just roll my eyes when he kills them with SCIENCE! instead, but that one was just crazy enough that I believed he believed it.
The biggest Amazon show since The Expanse? Of course it’s was going to get renewed. Not surprised.
This is
House of the DragonEarthworm Jim erasure. Also, The Expanse was a SyFy original.Edu: changed to an ACTUAL Amazon show. The best one ever, no less.
Do you mean rings of power?
Wasn’t that a gigantic flop?
It’s a decent show that is moderately popular, just it’s also an easy target for edgelords to dunk on in the audience reviews. It has some pretty significant pacing issues early on, represents non-binary & brown people from early on, and dropped during the height of Tate-mania. Like a perfect storm for backlash from angry white boys. And even normal people wanna dunk on Bezos’ expensive new toy. The later episodes are worth sticking it out for tho imo.
It cost about 10x per episode to make compared to The Expanse, which was a Syfy show offloaded to Amazon on the cheap. Amazon recycled the assets, rushed a final half season and killed the production before they’d have to spend any real money on it (due to setting/cast changes in the book that follows final season arc). So the comment above is kinda a weird one to make. Even Wheel of Time is bigger, let alone Citadel, The Boys etc
Didn’t Amazon make like 50% of the expanse seasons?
Yes, and I’m glad they did, didn’t mean to imply otherwise. But they resumed an existing production Syfy fronted the costs for. I think that whichever way you slice it, Amazon squandered the IP to an extent. In retrospect of such excessive spending on their more recent productions… They just didn’t spend enough on it. The final season benefits greatly from a higher budget, but that doesn’t magically save it from feeling rushed when it’s half the normal length. It’s a handwave apology for re- prematurely canceling the show
Yes. Syfy cancelled the show after season 3 and Amazon did seasons 4-6.
Such a god damn shame were probably never getting the best books adapted to TV :(
Ah OK, fair enough. I might check it out as I patrol the high seas, then 😉
The weirdest thing about the people talking about it not being “lore accurate” is that they’d usually complain about things that are actually fine for the lore but ignore the things that aren’t.
GAlaDrIEl wAsnT a WArRiOr, suck my fucking hairy hobbit foot.
There are some weird dialogue and graphics choices though. Prepare to roll your eyes a couple times, even if you end up liking it anyways.
I’m still waiting for someone to explain for me how she survived a face full of pyroclast.
It’s never been about lore accuracy. It’s about accuracy to their individual subjective historic reading or thinking about a text. When a book gets adapted to a film, it’s natural to want it to be like you imagined. What they don’t understand is that if it isn’t, that’s not necessarily because it’s inaccurate to the text. The reader might not have had the requisite general understanding to put the text in context.
In practice even this is a very charitable view of the people complaining. Usually it’s literally just that they imagined it with more cis white people and traditional gender roles. That’s if they even truthfully engaged with the source material they pretend to champion, and aren’t just people with an agenda trying to dupe fans
Aren’t they doing a second season?
My monthly reminder that for the same cost of Rings Of Power and the MGM acquisition, Amazon could have likely kept every single laid-off employee hired (assuming average $100k salary) for the average tenure of an Amazon employee.
HotD isn’t an Amazon original is what they’re saying
Syfy also cancelled the expanse and it was bought by Amazon for the second half
Oh, it isn’t? checks oops, my bad 😂
Gonna change it to the best ever Amazon original then 😁
Yeah the shows came out around the same time so I can see why you got them confused. Didn’t mean the show was good.
New Vegas Baby!
Ring a ding baby
Maybe a quick stop off to search for aliens
Can’t say no to more Walton Goggins…
deleted by creator
Well, I do now 😁
Huh, figured it would be Kentucky whiskey or shine
Well, it’s currently the most popular show in IMDB with an 8.6/10 rating so renewing for another season is not exactly a though decision to make.
It’s impressive how hype can turn things better than a true masterpiece (won’t list any don’t want a useless debate).
Gosh the show is just a dumpster fire too… 8.6 my ass. Do yourself a favor and watch Shogun on Hulu or Silo on Apple TV
Not everyone has to like every show, but 8.6/10 means your opinion isn’t the prevailing one.
Gosh the show is just a dumpster fire too… 8.6 my ass.
It seems decent enough, worth the watch (I just finished watching it).
I’ve never played any of the games though, so maybe those who have may have a different perspective on the quality?
It’s decent, the plot kinda wanders but comes home. Shame the soundtrack isn’t even close to Arcane
As a game player, it’s pretty fuckin cool to see the pip boy in action, I’m sure there will be naysayers but it’s alright and is packed with easter eggs
I like the two other candidates for overseer that aren’t Betty. Especially the fat guy. He’s funny in everything i’ve seen him in.
Zach Cherry
“Get that jello mold outta here!”
If i didnt have to have prime i’d be all over it
There are other ways 🏴☠️
I can send you an invite to my Plex server if you want - I have the first season on there. Just shoot me a throwaway email address via PM. It works just like Netflix.
You’re doing the Lord’s work. I wish I could get jelly fin working the same way. I haven’t been able to figure out how to access it outside my home network
I looked into exposing jellyfin and holy shit get ready for a new full time hobby in network security if you try.
https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/networking/nginx/
Just use nginx as a reverse proxy. Note- this assumes you have a domain name or can at least use duckdns or similar and open ports at the edge of your network.
I’m here to recommend Caddy instead of Jellyfin. It’s way easier to set up and just as performant. Example Caddyfile below (assuming they’re in the same Docker network and your Jellyfin container is named jellyfin):
mydomain.com { reverse_proxy jellyfin:8096 }That’s it! I highly recommend Caddy! It handles https automatically so you don’t have to worry about SSL certs or 301 redirects from https to https at all!
I’ve never worked with it but have heard great things.
I didn’t know if it handled whatever fancy stuff jellyfin had on the nginx reverse proxy page but if it does, this certainly eases the path to external access.
This is the sharing the internet was made for, thanks for the suggestion. Jellyfish has been giving me trouble so I’m just torrenting each show individually but I want to build up a library
Never used Caddy, but if you’re running a variety of services Traefik also is pretty easy to deploy, especially if you’re using Docker containers. You can set it up to use let’s encrypt fairly easily to handle all the SSL stuff.
Caddy has a docker labels plugin so you can use it similarly to how you use traefik. I have a github repo with an action that automatically runs I think the first of every month that checks for Caddy updates and builds the new caddy docker image with the plugins I want automatically.
U can watch it on movie-web for free (https://movies.fmeee.ovh) No ads no trackers No BS
Thanks a ton. Now if i can just get my carrier to not throttle me… got as far as the vault raid cutscene and got axed. Oh well.
VPN?
Yeah i tried. Anytime my carrier detects a long term data transfer it gets slower snd sloower and slooower til i have to kill it or go crazy. I think it may be set that way at the hardware level because it happens with everything except google play updates and even those depending on time of day
What the fuck was that AI freaking face from Lucy dad when young??? I wonder if the editor and director though that it will pass unnoticed … dafuq
Probably could have made a better face in the games character creator. That would have been kinda cool actually, a better in-universe visual shift than whatever the fuck that demon was
Noice, I enjoyed season 1
Amazing news! I was really worried they wouldn’t get the tone of the fallout universe right in the show but they totally nailed it. From the props and locations to the soundtrack they really knocked it out of the park. I feel like the ending was a little meh, but I guess its just how they set it up for season 2.
