Ideologically, this episode of a video game adaptation raises some provocative points. That is probably It’s not a phrase you would have read until very recently, given the history of video game adaptations.
But that’s a historical fluke, not a reflection of the limitations of the source material. When I first discovered the artistic potential of video games in the 1990s mysteryso Earthquakeso Super Mario 64so The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time — I’ve never seen any reason why a movie or TV show based on one couldn’t also be thoughtful, beautiful, and powerful in its own right. Even if we are not there yet, it is only a matter of time.
Anyway, Fall Episode 3 (“The Head”) is, indeed, an interesting political text. It starts early, in a flashback to the Ghoul’s days as equestrian opera movie star Cooper Howard. One day on set, Cooper balks at executing an injured villain in cold blood after a cold monologue. The director tells him that the original writer has been fired for being a communist, that the new script reflects “the power of the inpidual when things are bad, the new America” and that “out here, it’s just you, your weapon and his personal code, bringing order to the Wild West.”
That is fascism. You understand that that is fascism, right? Persecuted communists, patriots. übermenschen, the wide world tamed by the master race and the beauty of its weapons: plain old American fascism, ladies and germs! That’s the America that vanished when the bombs fell: a fascist state in Donna Reed dresses and Ward Cleaver cardigans. Which is also the United States one of our two main political parties is frantically fighting to recreate… I’ll leave it to you to decide if the filmmakers had that in mind.
The next established ideological marker is one that, frankly, I never expected to hear on an American television show of any kind: the fact that torture doesn’t work. You understand that’s not the case, right? If you fuck with someone enough, they’ll sing any tune you ask them to. As the Ghoul says while repeatedly dunking captive Lucy in a poisonous river to attract a huge mutant axolotl with giant human fingers for teeth (eww), someone you’re actively hurting has no incentive to in fact help the person who does the harm. It’s common sense, right? They will say whatever is necessary to make the pain stop.
Brother, I’ve seen 40,000 TV shows where people are tortured (by gangsters, by nobles, by police, by undercover Russian spies, by government agents racing against a time bomb) and I don’t think I’ve ever seen heard this clear fact expressed clearly. Good for the Ghoul and good for Fall.
The third point is one that I’m not sure if the show is making deliberately or not, since I’m admittedly not familiar with the video game series with source text. But isn’t it interesting how a future United States and its underground remnant, modeled so closely on the politics and aesthetics of the Korean War and Eisenhower era… isn’t also extremely racist?
Cooper Howard’s wife and wife, Barb (Frances Turner), is black. The committee that runs things at Vault 32 and rejects the proposal of Lucy’s loser brother, Norm (Moises Arias), to execute his surface-dwelling prisoners, is made up of people of color. Is this a deliberate argument that even America’s racial pide can be subsumed under capitalism’s all-out war on Marxism, or is it simply a contemporary, race-blind interpretation that is doing something by accident in the construction of the world?
In any case, some standard plot stuff happens as well. A large monster called Gulper, which looks like an amphibian made of human flesh, swallows Wilzig’s head to slowly digest it. Ghoul and Lucy fail in their collective attempt to retrieve it, breaking the Ghoul’s supply of life-preserving vials in the process; After her, he leads her away from the water, presumably in search of another fix.
Maximus is luckier, without any work of his own. He barely preserves his power armor from the scavengers (he scares them off by using the armor’s hand to crush the ringleader’s skull as they are about to beat him up). He is almost discovered when, since he is posing as the knight Titus, the clerics send him a new squire to replace the apparently murdered one: Thaddeus (Johnny Pemberton), his main enforcer at the base.
For a while, Maximus amuses himself by ordering Thaddeus around and scaring him. But he soon discovers that not only is Thaddeus quite ingenious (he realizes that they can track the head by tracking the Ghoul’s radiation signature, an idea for which Maximus quickly takes credit), but that he is also a good guy. Thaddeus tells “Titus” that he only picked on Maximus because he himself had been bullied mercilessly and that he only wanted to pert attention to a new target. He now feels bad about the whole thing and wishes Maximus had lived long enough to pass the harassment on to someone else. This story cures Maximus of his revenge, which I suppose is an ideological point in itself.
In the end, teamwork makes the dream work. Each saves the other in the process of defeating the monster and, as a result, quite unexpectedly, regains his head.
And back in the vault, the pregnant and one-eyed widow, Steph, encourages Norm on his vengeful path, while Chet (Dave Register), Lucy’s cousin and friend, is reassigned from guardian duty and therefore , you lose your purpose in life. These are difficult times everywhere.
Ian Fleming once wrote that once is chance, twice is coincidence and three times is enemy action; that is, it is a pattern. The pattern for Fall After three episodes, any 50-minute installment will include sickening violence, tasteless jokes, and the monster of the week, based on the premise that America isn’t shit because its ruling class prefers to live in holes in the ground than improve. the world we live in. Sure, I’ll eat it.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about television forRolling Stone,Vulture,The New York TimesandAnywhere that has it, In fact. He and his family live on Long Island.
