The Saturday Morning Post (No. 44)

I'm taking a brief break from books this week to review an Amazon Prime TV series. Amazon recently gave me, no doubt out of the kindness of their heart, a free month of Amazon Prime, and with it Prime Video which gave me a chance to view this series.

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

Fall Out  Amazon Prime 8 part season one C+

First disclaimer - I am not a gamer and I haven't played any of the various Fallout video games, and thus I may not be its prime target viewer.

Second disclaimer - I am not a big fan of gore and violence.

This series is based on a video game franchise with something like half a dozen releases. It is set in a post nuclear war United States, and like many shooter style games, I gather that it has the usual quota of violence, blood, and gore.

The TV show is faithful to the game that inspired it - in that it has a lot of violence, blood, and gore. There are also many references - Easter eggs - to items and visuals in the game, and how the game is played, many of which I no doubt missed.

So why in the hell did I watch it?

The first reason is that I could, with my free month of Amazon Prime and Prime Video. Now, I could've finished watching Good Omens 2. I had watched a number of episodes of that show before Christmas when we paid for a month of Prime. I had stopped because I found that season pretty lame and boring. I didn't feel like continuing on with it.

The second reason is that Fallout looked visually interesting, at least in the show's trailers. The scenery, the look and feel of the world, looked intriguing enough for me to give it a look.

So, not being the intended audience either for the game or the type of story, and interested in it mostly for the scenery, what did I think of it?

It was not bad. Not great, but not bad either. It told a story rather than just patching often violent scenes together. A rather contrived, and incomplete story, but a story nevertheless.

I while generally I wasn't grossed out by the amount of blood, violence, and gore portrayed in the show though there is a lot of it - I assume it's there as a nod to the game play. The show takes a fairly lighthearted approach to the story - at least at times - making the gore and violence mostly of the comic book variety, i.e. nothing to take seriously, and thus, gratuitous. The only thing of consequence that was killed, was time that would've been better used to tell the story better and more cohesively. But hey, I'm not the target audience, so what do I know?

The story does try to get serious and meaningful, at times. Nevertheless, lot of this effort struck me as being rather ham-fisted - with a lot of close-ups of the faces of characters saying nothing, but clearly thinking something - I guess to save writers from having to actually come up with serious dialog, which was not their long suit.

The story starts rather simply with some sex and violence, and settles into a plot driven by two, count them, two McGuffins.

The basic premise is that some people purchased places in great underground fallout shelters, and now, several hundred years after a nuclear war, their descendants are still in them, waiting for the radiation to die down. There is however, all sorts of dystopian life on the surface, a dog-eat-dog/people-eat-people, society with plenty of mutant monsters and such. 

The first McGuffin has the daughter of one of the leaders of the fallout shelters leave the shelter for the surface to search for her father who was taken/kidnapped/tossed out by some gang of outsiders for mysterious reasons. We only learn why in the last couple of minutes of the last installment. Does the reason make a lot of sense? I'm not really sure, hence I consider it a McGuffin, but I suppose who cares? You're along for the ride, not the destination.

The second McGuffin has that some surface scientist injecting himself with a blue light something, (again we only find out what it is in the last episode - tying the two McGuffins together) and then goes on the run, with a number of people searching for him, including a knight & a squire from a surface military order and a ghoul bounty hunter. The girl from the fallout shelter, the knight's squire, and the ghoul repeatedly cross paths or get together throughout the story, stitching the story together.

There are also flashbacks to the time before the war which tie into characters motivations and builds a backstory for the present state of the world.

The show introduced a number of colorful characters along the way- usually they are the humorous parts - but often, annoying, mostly then kills them off. 

As I said above, it was its look that got me to look in on it. It is simply a good looking show. My only complaint on this score is how erratically the scenery seemed to change from story point to story point, so that the locales never seemed to be connected and time and distances between them vague. And often we seemed to be revisiting the same sets over and over again in supposedly different locales. Plus days go by and no one seems to eat. Minor points for sure, but little things like that catch my eye.

I was ready to DNF this after the first two episodes, but decided to push on, and I'm glad I did watch the whole season. Still, it only earned a C+ from me. Its reliance on violence and its rather lame attempts at seriousness lost it points on my report card. I think it would've been far better if it had just embraced the many quirky aspects of the story, characters, and setting. You know, give it the Jasper Fforde treatment. But that's just my opinion. Give it a try if it sounds interesting. It has been received pretty positively by viewers and critics and has been green lighted for a second season.