Fallout S01E07: The Radio Review
Medium: Television
Release date: 4/10/2024
Review date: 6/24/2024
Score: 6/10
There are too few episodes left to wrap this season's story up completely which only helps fuel the feeling that this entire project's concept was about two or three episodes worth of content that was then stretched out for eight episodes, which sucks; makes me question why I watched any of this to begin with.
Reflecting back on the episode, my main takeaway is that I get why the “Fallout” games don't ever really let you flashback to pre-apocalypse America at any point during their stories (the intro to “Fallout 4” notwithstanding). Pre-war America works as an undefinable, amorphous ideology and culture in the games to provide a contrast to the games' current settings, but all of that is ultimately second fiddle to whatever the core story of that specific “Fallout” game is. Pre-war America provides context and background for why the things in the “Fallout” universe are the way they are, but the “Fallout games” are narratively about moving the story of “Fallout” forward, not getting caught up looking in the past. In fact, a lot of the enemy and evil factions in the “Fallout” games are the people in the Wasteland who are incapable of moving past pre-bomb America and are holding back progress in the Wasteland by not letting go. Pre-War America is a canvas backdrop for the “Fallout” games to draw new stories from, not just to lionize those days of old.
Anyways, the “Fallout” show has plenty of pre-Bomb flashback scenes, as they're the main scenes that Walton Goggins gets to do his actual acting in with his real face and not prosthetics, and after watching this last episode I think they make the show's narrative worse. It already feels like as the audience I'm not spending enough time with Lucy, Maximus, or the Ghoul each episode to feel very invested in their individual stories, and popping back to the past every once in a while seems to add to that lack of connection rather than deepening it. The flashback stuff seems mostly just to help the audience see how "far" the Ghoul has fallen living in the modern Wasteland, to sort of set dress a bit so the audience know when and where America was culturally when the bombs dropped even though the technology is so advanced that there are plasma rifles and power armor; but having already played the “Fallout” games, this was kind of unnecessary for me and felt like it was just slowing down the plot. Maybe viewers unfamiliar with the “Fallout” universe feel differently, but I am not them.
Maximus and Lucy splitting up felt pretty sudden, and maybe that was the point, but their now professed feelings for each other also felt pretty sudden, so that basically ended up changing too quickly to feel all that impactful - I didn’t really care about their relationship, if I have to be honest. The Ghoul Wasteland stuff was fine, though I did cringe a bit in the scene where its implied that the Ghoul might be eating the scavenger's daughter, only for her to be revealed to be actually alive, because the moment was well handled initially, but then the scene went on to explicitly repeat all that in the dialogue, which really dampened the effect of the reveal for me as it feels like the show doesn’t even trust the intelligence of its viewers. And Norm finally making a move and sneaking into Vault 31 under the disguise of being Betty fleeing her post as Overseer after being "compromised" would be more interesting if more of the season was left, but the effect is a bit diminished when I feel like the payoff to everything will mostly just be cliffhangers for next season, since I already know there’s only one episode left of this season. Not to sound like a broken record, but I’ve been rather disappointed by how this whole production has been going.