Image: Amazon Prime Video
First-look images from Amazon’s Fallout series show off Vaults, Power Armour, Ghouls and more familiar imagery from the game franchise.
Amazon Prime Video has shared a first look at its upcoming live-action TV adaptation of Fallout, along with more details on its trio of protagonists. Via a First Look piece on Vanity Fair, we now know that the series will follow a Vault Dweller named Lucy (Arcane’s Ella Purnell), a squire from the Brotherhood of Steel named Maximus (Aaron Moten) and an ancient ghoul (Walton Goggins).
More details on Amazon’s Fallout series
Amazon’s Fallout series has the same showrunners as HBO’s Westworld: Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy. Speaking to Vanity Fair, the duo confirmed that the series takes place 219 years after a nuclear war breaks out across the Earth in 2077 - the now-definitive date of Fallout’s infamous nuclear apocalypse. The retro-futuristic aesthetic of 2077’s clothes, entertainment and robots remains only in pieces by the time the series begins. Bethesda’s Todd Howard also confirmed that the series is canon to the games, which is an interesting tidbit we didn’t know before.
Fallout will follow Lucy, a naive young Vault Dweller who has spent her life locked inside an underground vault, as generations come and go waiting for the right day to resurface on Earth. When a crisis forces Lucy to venture out of the vault and into Los Angeles, she discovers that the world above her is a post-apocalyptic wasteland filled with mutated creatures, violent bandits and untrustworthy human factions abound.
Unlike Lucy, most of the human population didn’t have the option to escape into vaults during the nuclear war - and so transformed into monsters or simply adopted a very different perspective on life thanks to a lack of resources. The showrunners tease that she’ll have to confront the ‘rougher’ world outside, where people who weren’t as lucky as her don’t possess her morals or idealism.
Fallout's three main characters
Lucy will encounter the show’s other two leads along her journey. One of them is a member of the Brotherhood of Steel named Maximus. The Brotherhood of Steel is a faction whose power relies on super-soldier knights wearing Fallout’s iconic power armour, dispensing order as it sees fit. Maximus is a squire to one of these soldiers, only important to the Brotherhood so long as he proves useful.
The series’ third lead is a bounty hunter named The Ghoul, who also happens to be an actual ghoul - monstrous mutated zombies players have likely killed in the hundreds across the Fallout franchise. The Ghoul is different from his peers, as he’s been alive for hundreds of years and somehow returned his mental faculties despite the mutation. He was a father and husband named Cooper Howard before the nuclear apocalypse, and now he’s a ruthless bounty hunter in the wasteland. He’ll act as an antagonist in the series, though it’s unclear if he’ll have a bone to pick with Lucy specifically.
Despite all the seriousness of these characters’ backstories, the showrunners also promise social satire and dark humour very much in the vein of Bethesda’s Fallout games, so players won’t be alienated by its tone. Fallout debuts on Amazon Prime Video on April 12, 2024.
