Especially when it still appears.
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I was planning on making Amazon’s Fallout TV show last at least a week, but by Sunday evening I’d devoured all eight episodes. My love of Fallout has been dwindling since Fallout 4’s launch back in 2015, but the misadventures of Lucy, Maximus and the Ghoul have reignited my Fallout fervour. It’s more than a great videogame adaptation; it’s simply a great TV show.
But something’s missing, and I don’t just mean the supermutants—seriously, though, where are they at? I can’t walk a yard in Fallout without bumping into them. Anyway! For all the dangers the trio face as they wander across the Wasteland—from stoned organ harvesters to hungry gulpers—their journey is absent a larger-than-life, scenery-chewing villain like Fallout’s Master or Caesar from New Vegas.
In the first episode, Moldaver is set up as Fallout’s Big Bad. Her attack on Vault 33 and subsequent kidnapping of Hank is the impetus for Lucy’s journey, but after that her presence is barely felt. She’s mentioned a couple of times, and we learn a tiny bit about her background through the Ghoul’s flashbacks, but she doesn’t show up again until the final episode, where she gets to reveal the true nature of Vault-Tec before being killed off unceremoniously.
Granted, Moldaver’s role is important when it comes to Lucy’s transformation from sheltered Vault-dweller to determined Wastelander. Technically she’s also now responsible for empowering everyone living on the surface, at least in what used to be LA, thanks to cold fusion—though I’d argue Lucy and Wilzig (RIP) deserve as much credit.
Regardless of importance, though, Moldaver isn’t really the first season’s antagonist. In RPG parlance, reaching her is simply Lucy’s quest objective. For Maximus, meanwhile, she’s the Brotherhood’s competition. And for the Ghoul, she’s a ghost from the past. She doesn’t throw any obstacles in their way, or interfere at all, and then we discover that she’s actually one of the good guys—as much as anyone in Fallout can be, anyway.
That leaves us with Vault-Tec. Obviously it’s monumentally awful, and thanks to flashbacks we get to see just how shitty it was back before the bombs fell. This is probably one of the best parts of this adaptation: digging into Vault-Tec in a way none of the games have done before. We also finally have a pretty clear answer to a question Fallout fans have been asking for decades: who dropped the bombs? How things actually played out is still a bit of a mystery, but we know, thanks to Barb, that the apocalypse was planned by Vault-Tec.
