Pipboy Papers

Meursault has been ticking like a manic Geiger counter all week. With the second season of Fallout freshly plopped down on Amazon, he’s feeling jittery about watching it. I’ll explain the reasons at the end, but first some introductory exposition: Like many other nerds¹ of his age, Meursault spent his childhood reading pulp sci-fi and staring at a computer screen. His first encounter with computer games—Elite and Wasteland, both on floppies—were on a hand-me-down 80286 PC. Since then, he’s played every Fallout title (except the one for mobile phones), and his love for the first season of Amazon’s adaptation was strong enough to justify renewing his subscription. To prepare for this article, he even sat down with me to rewatch Season One, offering expert commentary on the lore. Meursault has been ticking like a manic Geiger counter all week. With the second season of Fallout freshly plopped down on Amazon, he’s feeling jittery about watching it. I’ll explain the reasons at the end, but first some introductory exposition: Like many other nerds¹ of his age, Meursault spent his childhood reading pulp sci-fi and staring at a computer screen. His first encounter with computer games—Elite and Wasteland, both on floppies—were on a hand-me-down 80286 PC. Since then, he’s played every Fallout title (except the one for mobile phones), and his love for the first season of Amazon’s adaptation was strong enough to justify renewing his subscription. To prepare for this article, he even sat down with me to rewatch Season One, offering expert commentary on the lore.

“Amazon has—for once—understood the Fallout cocktail’s recipe while remixing it to suit television, complete with the moral hangover that follows. People will steal from you, kill you for your teeth, sell you ‘miracle-cures’, or simply walk past without a word. The Wasteland is indifferent to your existence and will force you to your knees if you’re not careful; if you’re particularly cocky, you will die. I used to play hardcore, you know,” said Meursault, as he mixed a large Grey Area for himself. “What’s that?” I asked. “I would only allow myself one save game at the end of the session,” he replied, hiding the pride beneath a sheepish grin. Nerds…

The vault door groans open, and what spills out isn’t a slick Hollywood apocalypse but the same irradiated grit Meursault’s enjoyed since he first walked out of Vault 13 two decades ago. Nostalgia mingles with familiarity and revelation throughout the series—searching for medicine at the Super Duper Mart, hearing Agatha’s violin on the radio, Dogmeat’s origin story, Megaton, and a few examples. The easter eggs (e.g., Hank’s password—101097—is the release date of Fallout) aren’t used as crutches to prop up a limping narrative. Instead, they’re added as seasoning, a little whiff and crunch to remind us that we’ve scavenged here before.

Meursault was positively glowing to see Amazon’s Fallout hold faith with the original, and for once I agreed. I found myself nodding along like a bobblehead when he said this:

“I loved the moment when Lucy, still naïve enough to believe that generosity has value, offers her bottle of clean water—a rare commodity in the irradiated wasteland—to a random Wastelander,” said Meursault. The Wastelander drains the bottle without hesitation, grinning: ‘When someone gives you clean water, you drink it. Even if you’re not thirsty—you drink it.’ And as Lucy walks away, bewildered, he calls after her: ‘Thanks for not killing me.’ “In Fallout’s world, compassion is a currency that no merchant accepts, and kindness evaporates faster than RadAway under the Mojave sun.”

Another aspect of Fallout worth noting is Lucy Maclean’s blessed refusal to be drafted into the “bad-ass, girl-boss” trope that Hollywood writers now churn out. She doesn’t stride from Vault 33 with a choreographed swagger, wearing a smirk. She’s scared and overcomes her fears; she stumbles, bleeds, learns, and repeats. The scene in which she emerges triumphantly from the Super Duper Mart, breathless, bloodied, wearing a leather chest piece, and wielding a 10mm pistol is pure Fallout, according to Meursault.

“You spend half the game wearing mismatched gear until you encounter someone else wearing something you like. (And whom you have to kill with gritted teeth and one eye on your health meter.) This is exactly how I’d imagine myself at Level 1 or 2 in Fallout: bloody nosed, brandishing a pop-gun, and wearing tattered leather armour.”

Lucy is depicted as a new player character transposed to television, fumbling through the irradiated wasteland and experience a world she could not have imagined during her life in Vault 33. Her growth is earned rather than scripted. Ella Purnell plays her so well that Meursault wonders if she’s a fellow nerd; I didn’t tell him that she’s confessed she’s not.

Cooper Howard and Maximus are also played well, respectively, by Walter Goggins and Aaron Moten. Maximus is a soldier who wants to believe in the Brotherhood of Steel’s ideals (such as they are), but he’s torn between loyalty and self-preservation. His arc—a wide-eyed recruit trying to climb the hierarchy—dramatizes the tension between ideology and survival. He’s a reminder that the Wasteland doesn’t always reward clean heroics—every act of bravery is tinged with desperation. He feels like the Brotherhood companion you’d pick up in-game: useful, morally compromised, and occasionally exasperating. That makes him a perfect foil to Lucy’s naïve generosity.

Cooper Howard’s origin story—revealing him as the living symbol of Fallout’s satirical take on American optimism—is one of the show’s boldest moves.

“The ghoul is Vault Boy!” exclaimed Meursault during the Vault-Tec photo-shoot scene, when Howard flashes the iconic thumbs-up. He paused, savouring the irony. “That cheerful gesture is a survival tip. If the mushroom cloud looks smaller than your extended thumb, you might live. If it is larger, don’t bother running. Either you die quickly, or you become a ghoul.”

“Why should someone wait to measure the cloud? Why not just run?” I asked. “Because this is Fallout, not bloody Oppenheimer.”

Walter Goggins’ performance balances Cooper Howard’s movie-star charisma and ghoulish menace, making him simultaneously entertaining and eerie. In the games, Vault Boy embodies every possible player choice—cannibal, gunslinger, scientist, saint, and so forth. Cooper Howard could have been anyone—or no one—but he chooses to be a cold-blooded killer. Meursault liked Cooper’s portrayal but complained that he was overpowered. The last episode of the first season stages a climactic shootout: Cooper Howard versus a platoon of Brotherhood Knights in full T-60 armour, wielding heavy guns. Cooper takes them all out in a 10-second montage of shotgun blasts, explosions, and dying screams in the dark.

“T-60 Armour is no match for Plot Armour,” said Meursault.

As for those who insist that Fallout is woke writing, I tend to disagree. To be fair, Fallout does contain a few elements on the woke checklist: the cast is racially diverse, there’s a non-binary character, called Dane, in the Brotherhood of Steel, the Wasteland’s cowards, predictably, are all “white guys”. However, Meursault argues that these elements were baked into the Fallout DNA long before Hollywood woke up to the bugle of overt political messaging. These are not relevant to the plot and—most importantly—they are not shoved in the viewer’s face the way Acolyte and Discovery did. I agree with Meursault simply because he is intensely allergic to woke scripts. He abandoned Amazon’s Lord of the Rings, all the Star Wars slop (all of it, except Andor), Star Trek: Discovery, and The Witcher because of the abominable political messaging; conversely, he loves Fallout.

“The Fallout games had gay, transgender, and prominent non-white characters since the beginning i.e., since 1997, long before Bethesda bought the franchise. The writers has always taken a satirical stance on political ideologies, and the American Dream. The Brotherhood and the Enclave, both militaristic societies, have non-white, female, and gay members. Tribal pagan communities were always present in the Wasteland. Super Mutants are all transgender or non-gender or whatever else you want to call them. You can play as a gay character if you wish. Also, if this was a woke story, Dane would be punching Deathclaws to death instead of being a cowardly duty-dodger.

But, The Witcher went downhill after a great first season, and both Amazon and Bethesda can still choose to be monumentally dumb³⸴⁵, so let’s wait and see.”

As I said earlier: Meursault remains nervous about the second season. We usually wait for the entire season to become available before binging through them all over a weekend. This time, he couldn’t bear to wait, and so we sat down on Sunday with a pitcher of Grey Areas and a bowl of peanuts to watch the first episode.

We both loved it. I suspect I would have enjoyed it even without Meursault at my side, annotating every scrap of lore. The world-building is impressively detailed with texture and nuance: rich enough to reward seasoned Vault Dwellers and Wastelanders, yet welcoming to wanderers stumbling into the wasteland for the first time. I hope to return with a review of the second season next year after the last episode is aired.

So yes, Meursault surveys the Amazonian Wasteland because he only has one save slot, and is terrified that Season Two might overwrite the file. Fallout may be faithful now, but faith is a fragile thing in the Wasteland. Lucy’s journey, Cooper’s irony, Maximus’s compromises—all remind us that Amazon has successfully distilled the spirit of the Wasteland. Whether the next season mutates or matures, we’re sipping the cocktail now—moral hangover be damned—with a toast to Amazon: War… War never changes. But reviews can.

Editor’s Notes

• Albert’s characterization of Meursault seems to follow this video by Don MacMillan on the difference between a nerd, a geek, and a dork. Meursault is a nerd; Pi is an insane geek.

• I am a dork, and I love this interactive map of all canonical locations in the Fallout series, created by Redditor MarcelusWalrus:

• As a fan of the Elder Scrolls, I can attest to Bethesda’s continuing project to dumb down its games. Morrowind was far more complex and nuanced than Oblivion, which in turn was more complex than Skyrim.

• Readers should also know that Albert is a sentient cauliflower created by Prof. O.V. Saries of the Central Sheep Research Institute. We leave it to readers to assess the heft of Albert’s opinions given that he’s a sentient cauliflower who regularly scores 1400+ on SAT-like tests. Indeed, after Albert’s recent annual check-up at CSRI, we’re absolutely certain that a sentient cauliflower can influence the world far more than it should. That story, however, belongs in Meursault’s most recent dispatch about the goings on at CSRI that will be published as soon as Meursault turns it into printable copy. Meanwhile, Albert is watching re-runs of Top Gear…

• Stop Press! The second episode’s out too. I hear Meursault’s become fidgety about something that happened.