When the Fallout TV series came out in 2024, I published my thoughts on it on this blog, including why I think that it was a fantastic adaptation of a game property. The sets, the acting, the story, all of it added up to one of my favorite shows currently on TV.

I rewatched it in the lead up to the release of Season 2, and it really held up. Sure, there were some weird things, like fusion cores being super rare and powering whole vaults, that were a bit weird, but overall it was better than I could have realistically hoped for.

I’ve now watched Season 2 in its entirety. Did I like it? You bet I did! Are there still some puzzling aspects of it (which I’ll get to in a bit)? Also yes. Regardless, I definitely tuned in to it eagerly every week, along with my family, to see what drama was brewing in the wasteland that week. Did I mention that we are a Fallout family? Yeah, this was a major event in our household.

Before I go on, here is your obligatory SPOILER warning. If you haven’t watched the second season, I highly recommend that you go and do so before reading this blog. We good? Okay, let’s talk about the strengths of this season first.

The Sets: I made mention before of just how incredible the sets looked in Season 1, particularly the interior of the vaults. This time, much of the events take place in New Vegas, and again, the sets were breathtaking. Walking into Mr. House’s audience room at the top of the Lucky 38 was spot on. The nearness of the Ultra-Luxe and Gomorrah, all felt right. We even got to see the Strip before the bombs dropped, which was really cool.

The Acting: I can’t say enough things about the acting talent in this show, particularly Walton Goggins and Ella Purnell, who both shine like diamonds here. Kyle MacLachlan gets a lot more screen time this season, and he turns in a chilling performance, being both a loving father figure and ruthless villain at the same time. We even got some really great moments with Aaron Moten as Maximus, particularly when he suits up in the NCR power armor while we hear the Fallout main theme play. There are so many great moments that I can’t quite recount them all here.

Super Mutants:  When I first heard his voice, I knew it was Ron Perlman, the famous narrator of the earlier Fallout games. The super mutants that have retained their intelligence, like Fawkes and Erickson, have always been of interest to me. They’ve been exposed to the forced evolutionary virus, but they haven’t just turned into raging barbarians who collect gore bags and decorate in twisted metal. It sounds like they will be a major force against the Enclave next season, and I’m all for it.

NCR Power Armor: This gets its own listing. I have a love of power armor, in general, and Iron Man is one of my favorite superheroes. So, seeing the iconic NCR Ranger helmet adapted to power armor was pretty spectacular, particularly seeing all of its built-in weapons and abilities. It’s too bad it got trashed to the point where Maximus might simply abandon it. I would love it if he were to join the NCR and for this armor to become his signature power armor.

On the other side of the coin, there were some things that didn’t quite resonate with me. Again, I liked it overall, but these were the things that often didn’t work for me.

Trouble on the Homefront: The story arc that takes place in the vaults was one of the weakest threads this season. I do applaud the writers for bringing back the broken water chip. One of my critiques of Season 1 was that this was mentioned then never followed up on again. We get some more movement on that, but it’s just kind of bleh. I am glad we got to spend more time with Stephanie Harper, as there’s definitely more going on with her than is apparent. Overall, though, there just wasn’t enough screen time or compelling beats for this to land. And what was going on with her marrying Chet and not even telling him? Steph has just kind of co-opted him, but we’re not entirely sure why.

Norm and Bud’s Buds: A close second for last, Norm’s arc to spring himself from Vault 31 didn’t seem to go anywhere, and that’s a true shame. Last season, Norm investigating what was going on in the vaults was something I found compelling. Norm himself being physically weak but extremely smart and perceptive was something I enjoyed, and his dynamic with Chet was fantastic. This season, he’s separated from Chet, and that’s not great. The Bud’s Buds group was ultimately a nothing burger as they all get wiped out by radroaches, except for Norm’s friend and potential love interest. Convenient, that. Norm is too good of a character, and Moisés Arias too good of a talent, for arcs with no real substance. Let’s hope Norm gets his due next season.

Caesar’s Legion: This may have been more of a set design issue, but did it not look like someone could have snuck up that berm in the dead of the night to retrieve Caesar’s body? If it had been more separated, in full view of the other side so snipers are a constant risk, and more dead legionnaires who had tried and failed, I think I would have bought the scenario a bit more. But more than that, if no one knew what heir the original Caesar (Edward Sallow) had chosen, how did the two competing Caesar’s justify their taking up the mantle in the first place? And who put Sallow’s body out there and put barbed wire around it? That whole setup had me scratching my head. Having said that, seeing Macaulay Culkin as the new Caesar was pretty cool, and the fact that they want a “Caesar’s Palace” on the Vegas strip was a nice touch.

The Brotherhood of Steel: While it was interesting to see the different chapters of the Brotherhood assemble, and witness firsthand the differences between them, that part of the story ended early enough that I was surprised when we got the stinger at the end. I thought that was about all we were going to get of the Brotherhood for a while. Also, it’s a bit weird that Quintus had chosen Maximus as his champion, then openly insulted him in public, which clearly eroded Maximus’ loyalty. It’s also really weird that if the cold fusion diode were really the key to making unlimited fusion cores (which they established were rare) that it would be left entirely unguarded. It seems like multiple fire teams, each led by a trusted Star Paladin, all in power armor, would have been there to make sure one of the other chapters didn’t go in and seize it for themselves.

Also, the showrunners and Bethesda have had something of an allergy to establishing canon endings for Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout 4. The arrival of Xander Harkness from the Commonwealth chapter, however, would seem to imply that either the Minutemen or Brotherhood ending of Fallout 4 is canon, as the Institute and the Railroad endings see the Prydwen destroyed, and the Brotherhood almost entirely dismantled. Xander showing up was not as important for lore as, say, if Arthur Maxson had shown up on screen, but it does mean that the Brotherhood is still operating in sufficient force in the Commonwealth to still be a power.

Walking Back the Big Reveal: Last season gave us the jaw-dropping reveal that Vault-Tec might have been the ones responsible for launching the nukes that started the apocalyptic nuclear war. This was something completely new to the lore, which had previously left it ambiguous on whether the USA or China had launched first. This season, they moved away from that. Mr. House even says that it was ultimately “unclear.” We also see a seen where Siggi Wilzig from the Enclave instructs Barb that she should say that line in the meeting. All of the tension they established in that scene in Season 1 was largely undone in Season 2 with the rather vague reveal being “the surface was the experiment.” So, we’ll see where that goes, if they don’t walk that reveal back by next season.

The Tease of the Ghoul’s Family: I’m including this one for the fact that it was telegraphed in advance. For all the other cryopods we see, such as with Bud’s Buds, we can clearly see the figures inside them. Both Barb and Janey’s pods were opaque when we saw them, which told me that they were empty. So, no resolution there, but we do get a clue to lead the Ghoul/Coop on the next leg of his quest. Let’s hope there’s some resolution to this next season.

My Biggest Concerns: Really, I’m a little afraid Season 3 is going to be stretched too thin, especially if we’re only getting eight episodes per season. One of the main issues this season seemed to be that there wasn’t enough screentime to cover it all. More story arcs were opened than were resolved. If we take a look at what might be brewing for Season 3, we have:

• The Brotherhood civil war/Liberty Prime
• Caesar’s Legion vs. the NCR over control of the strip (along with Mr. House)
• The Ghoul going solo to Colorado to find his family
• The Enclave vs. the Super Mutants
• The Pre-War arc of Cooper Howard and his family
• The Vault-Tec/Enclave hidden control chips
• Vault 32’s uprising against Stephanie Harper
• Vault 33’s instability and water/food scarcity
• Norman and whatever he winds up doing

That’s a lot of ground to cover to say nothing of any new arcs they establish that we haven’t heard of yet. If we had 12-episode seasons, that would be one thing, but eight episodes feels like they will be hard pressed to move the plot forward in a satisfying way. I hope Season 3 will start giving us some resolution, so they can really focus down on the major characters and what’s important.

I’m also a bit concerned that the Ghoul is going off on his own. I think some of the best moments in the show are when Lucy and the Ghoul are on screen together. It doesn’t look like we will get much of that for a while since there’s about to be a lot of distance between them.

Final Thoughts

Even with my concerns, I am still onboard with this show. Fallout is one of my favorite game universes ever, and even with some of the flaws and missed opportunities, this team and these actors, are (in my opinion) able to do it justice.

I’m curious to see where they go from here.

Thanks for reading!

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An overwhelmingly intense portrait of motherhood, passion, and mental illness, “Die My Love” brings together Lynne Ramsay, the Scottish auteur behind such anguished psychodramas as “We Need to Talk About Kevin” and “You Were Never Really Here,” with Jennifer Lawrence, the Oscar-winning actress whose tour-de-force performance marks a viscerally affecting high point in her remarkable career.

Ramsay’s latest (now in theaters, via MUBI) opens as a young couple, Grace (Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson), move to a remote house in the Montana wilderness; it belonged to his late uncle, we learn, and appears worse for wear, but both are initially hungry for the start of this next chapter in their lives—and for each other, as they prowl through the tall grass and paw at each other on the kitchen floor. But soon enough, Grace is pregnant, and after the baby is born, the fervent heat of their relationship cools into something distant and unhappy. A writer by trade, Grace is creatively blocked, and the intolerable, enraging sense of abandonment that attends her experience of motherhood begins to emerge in increasingly destructive, unsettling ways. 

Based on the novel by Argentinian author Ariana Harwicz, “Die My Love” first came to Lawrence via Martin Scorsese, who’d read it in his book club and could immediately envision her playing the central character (who remains unnamed on the page). He sent it to Excellent Cadaver, the production company Lawrence co-runs with producing partner Justine Ciarrochi. Taken with this challenging material, the actress had only one filmmaker in mind: Ramsay, who’s been making harrowing films about broken familial dynamics and the all-consuming loneliness they can breed since 1999’s “Ratcatcher,” a Glasgow-set social-realist drama that stands among the greatest debut features.  

Paired up to discuss “Die My Love,” Ramsay and Lawrence spoke for a whirlwind 13 minutes about coming together to tell this story, running on instinct, picking the film’s musical selections, finding its sensorially overpowering visual language with cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, and more.

This interview has been edited and condensed. It was conducted in two parts, also including a secondary, five-minute follow-up with Ramsay.

To ask you first about each other: Jennifer, you’d wanted to work with Lynne since first seeing “Ratcatcher.” What was it about that film, and about Lynne’s filmmaking?

Jennifer Lawrence: Well, when I saw “Ratcatcher,” I knew I needed to see this person’s entire filmography, and so I did—and it’s because her filmmaking was so singular. It was so unflinching. I had never seen anybody make a movie like that. It was just so raw, and it was almost like she didn’t even care if an audience [saw it.] You could tell she wasn’t making it for an audience. 

She was making it because of something so pure—she’s just a real artist. She’s been my favorite filmmaker forever, but I just hadn’t really come across something that I felt would be worthy of her. When I read this book, though, it was clear that it would not be a linear movie. It was poetic, so only one person could do that.

Lynne, what distinguished Jennifer as a creative collaborator, both as an actress and a producer on this project?

Lynne Ramsay: When I received an email about the novel, asking, “Would you read this? We really like your stuff,” I was really flattered.

JL: [laughing] “We really like your stuff.” I’m sure it was more effusive than that.

LR: [laughing] The way we started working together, and talking together, it was all about having a trust within our relationship that was unphasable. For me, what was then amazing was to expect the unexpected. I love when you’re working with actors where you feel—especially with a character like this—that you don’t even know what they’re going to do next. I think I gave enough space—I hope I gave enough space—for that to happen.

But, definitely, it was about a relationship that we developed over time: during the script [phase,] actually with sharing some images, by singing songs, and just talking—you shoot the breeze a bit about it, like, “Who is she?” Really uncovering this character, that was done over a month, so it was all a process of really getting to know each other and getting inside each other’s brains a little bit, you know? It just felt there was a match, and that’s—for me—always what I look for, so it was perfect.

How much did you work to plan out in advance in terms of performance, and how much did you want to leave open and reactive to the pressures of being on set? I was curious about the place of spontaneity in a character so driven by impulse and instinct, and what that felt like to embody.

JL: It was really, really fun—and complicated. I mean, it’s really fun to play somebody that has no veneer, that has no impulse control. You’re just kind of living this internal world. You’re living intrusive thoughts—which is satisfying and fun. 

But I’ve always relied on my instincts. And this was the first time I was playing a mom since becoming one, so I do have my own instincts, but they were very counterproductive to our journey, so it was a little complicated to try to dissect what I would do, as opposed to what Grace would do.

Ariana Harwicz writes in such a lyrical, unsettling style, and there’s similarly such passion and poetry to your film. Lynne, I know this is your fourth adaptation, but what can you say about finding a visual and auditory grammar to tell this story, adapting that text into sound and image? 

LR: Well, it’s a real process. I work a lot on instinct. I think that’s what just clicked with us two; I can feel when something works or doesn’t. Maybe you think it’s going to be great or perfect, and you end up thinking, “Do you know what? Something else is much better.”

You find it in the day. I try to be very present on a set, to look at things that are outside what’s happening, or at moments in between. It just felt like, on this one particularly—and it’s not in every film—one thing I knew was that I really wanted the camera just to follow, to give the actors enough space to let them play in this house, with props or whatever was there. 

She was bored at home; there were moments when I just let it run, and beautiful things happened. There’s a laundry basket in one scene that she tips over. It’s a moment of rage. Then she licks a window. Jennifer just went for it, went for these moments. I never asked her, “Every single beat, you need to do this, you need to do that,” but it felt like the character was trapped. 

And it was funny. That was important for me. I think Jennifer’s got great, great comic timing, and she really brought that to it, and that was important to me. The film was fun in that respect; it was set up to be this thing, but within that, there was a lot of freedom.

I’m curious to ask about the role of music in heightening our experience of Grace’s inner journey. Of course, the needle-drops—Toni Basil, Cocteau Twins, John Prine, and Iris DeMent—keep you on your toes as a viewer, and Lynne, you perform a magnificent cover of “Love Will Tear You Apart” that plays over the credits. At what stage were you envisioning particular soundtrack choices, and was the music in place during filming?

LR: It was very early on that I’d sent John Prine to Jennifer, and she was like, “I love this track.” It seems like a lovely country track, but underneath it is what’s really inside the relationship, you know? And it’s beautiful. Jennifer really responded to it. I hadn’t heard it before; my music supervisor sent it to me. When I did “Morvern Callar,” as well, I’d made all of that soundtrack well before I started. 

We did have music on set—“Mickey” was playing, for real. I thought of the couple having a good vinyl collection, that when they’d lived in New York, he’d tried to be in a band that was unsuccessful, that she threatened to cut off things, and this house was a new hope—even though it was a bit rundown. And it starts from there, then things go… the way they go. [laughs] That meant every piece of music was a little satellite indicator for me, I felt, of these points in the relationship. 

I think about music a lot when I’m writing scripts, and playing music when you’re writing is great as well. It was all open, but it was a process of working quite early on, which I try to do as much as possible.

JL: Lynne is the only director I’ve ever worked with who uses music on set. And so, when it was the wedding scene, you know, when you read a scene like that—where she goes nuts and starts throwing things—it’s a little hard. You’re like, “Okay, well, what? Where’s this coming from? What’s the beginning of this?” 

And so she played the song, “Infinity Guitars,” by Sleigh Bells, and it just immediately got me there. It was such an “arrggghhh” sound of rage — such a cool beat. And so I had that playing in my ear during that [scene].

One of the first lines of dialogue we hear from Grace, as she inspects the house she’s moving into with Jackson, is, “We need a cat.” I wanted to ask about animalism in the context of this film—rats scurrying upstairs, cats prowling in grass, flies buzzing, horses running, dogs yapping. What drew you to this animal symbolism? 

LR: I can talk about that in terms of this character. I don’t know so much in terms of everything, overall, in my work—it’s hard to say. But I used the book as a bit of a jumping-off point; this isn’t a literal translation at all, but there was something so feral, unapologetic, and animalistic about Grace being stuck in this house, like she’s this beast, like there’s something dangerous about her. It kind of came from that. It’s funny that you’ve noticed that it’s the first line of the film. She’s like, “We need a cat.” Of course, he brings a dog home.

Lynne, sound carries emotion so powerfully in all your films. How did you approach the sound design for “Die My Love” with Paul Davies? He’s one of your longest-standing collaborators.

LR: I have worked with Paul in all my films—apart from one short, and I think that was because he was doing something else at the time. We talk about sound being almost like a camera; we focus on this sound, this detail, and we get inside this character, and it’s bringing something up that you don’t expect. 

In the case of “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” it was a sprinkler sound, which actually means a lot in the film, but it’s the most innocuous, familiar sound, and then it becomes a sound of horror, later on. 

I wrote all that [sound] into the script, and I think we have that kind of relationship, certainly on this film as well. We talked about when the sound goes off, when she’s Alice through the looking glass, and when the changes happen. When do we hear? When do we have silence, and when do we let loose something that we’ve really honed in on? 

That process has been going on for years. I always think that sound works so much on your subconscious, in a way that’s often deeper than an image. That is something I’ve always been really interested in. In another life, I’d like to have been a mixer. [laughs]

Jennifer, I wanted to ask as well about the deeply moving scenes between Grace and Pam that you share with Sissy Spacek. 

JL: [grins] I mean, I am a huge Sissy Spacek fan. 

I love your shirt, by the way. [A/N: Lawrence is wearing a shirt commemorating Spacek’s seminal performance in “Carrie.”]

JL: Thank you. She’s an icon! I mean, I’ve known her since I was a teenager. We’ve just always been in each other’s lives, weirdly. I always remember her being so kind and maternal to me. And then I worked with her husband, [production designer] Jack Fisk, on a movie, [“Causeway,” the first film produced by Excellent Cadaver]. And so, when we started playing together… Sissy herself is so aware and sees everything. When she looks at you, it’s like she’s looking right through you. And she’s so maternal. 

It really leapt off the page. I think what was really in the book is more of a normal, average relationship between a mother and a daughter-in-law. But Sissy was so loving and so aware that she ended up being the only one who really saw what was going on with Grace. 

LR: I mean, she glows in conversation, Sissy does. She wanted to understand what was going on, to dig deeper. It was great. She’s a total icon. I didn’t know she was going to take [the role] at first, but she really developed that part. It became much more empathetic. It became much more—like Jennifer was just saying—like she sees what’s happening, or she understands what’s happening much more clearly than Jackson does. And so the film becomes about the two women, which I thought really added to it. It added another dimension to the original material.

I love that glorious, bitter, final sentiment there, in Grace’s toast: “May we live long and die out.” 

LR: Yeah! That scene was really interesting to shoot, as well, because of the way the two women are acting. There is that toast, where Grace says, “Pam,” and then Sissy says, “Grace.” The two of them are really seeing each other, you know? And I remember sitting gripped. I loved that. I was getting goosebumps at that moment, because there was a real understanding implicit between these two characters.

Lynne, tell me about your collaboration with your longtime cinematographer, Seamus McGarvey, who shot much of this film on Ektachrome, shooting night scenes during the day and then manually darkening them. I’m curious about that process and how it interacted with your artistic inspirations on the film. You had an early interest in photography, and you’re also a trained painter—there are compositions in this film that, to me, palpably evoked the work of Andrew Wyeth.

LR: That’s really smart, actually—Andrew Wyeth, I mentioned in the script, so that’s fitting. I have known Seamus for years. He shot “Kevin,” and we shot that in CinemaScope, which was totally right for that film. There, we talked about the epic in the everyday—you don’t normally shoot a film in scope when it’s all in a house; it’s normally landscape, but that choice suited this Mexican standoff of sorts between Kevin and Eva, the main characters.

With this one, it felt more like a portrait, like the actual location of the house dictated the Academy frame. I hadn’t used that before and wasn’t going to use it. We were going to shoot CinemaScope, but when I walked in, I thought we needed to be shooting Academy so we could always see the full length of the doors, to see them coming in and out. I always wanted to see that patio door, and I wanted later to see these layers of the house. It’s a real prison of a house in a way—not that it’s not beautiful, but it feels like that for her. She’s stuck there, so that dictated that. 

I was talking with Seamus also about “Morvern Callar,” which I shot some scenes of, [including a club scene,] on reversal film stock, but you can’t get that same film stock anymore. Seamus was like, “Why don’t we still shoot reversal? Why don’t we try it?” It’s about having it all feel heightened for her. Our minds were rattling; we were looking at these colors in a different way. 

We did all these tests. Seamus is such a buddy, and I think he likes working with me because he can experiment, and we can try things out. We could have come off something a bit more conventional before, and it was like, suddenly, we can be trying all this stuff out again. I’ve known him for 19 years, since I was at film school.

But [Kodachrome reversal film stock] had this otherworldly, dreamlike quality, so we were finding the character through how we were shooting it as well. Seamus is so kind; it’s always such a real collaboration with us, and I think that makes it exciting. He’s really thinking about the story and about the characters. Some DPs come in really technical, but he is thinking about what’s going on as much as I am. It was a real pleasure. We were getting excited like little kids when we were doing camera tests or coming up with ideas while we were shooting.

Finally, I was hoping you could share a bit about Nick Nolte appearing in “Die My Love.” It’s always so wonderful to see him, but this is a very special, moving performance. How did he get involved?

LR: Well, I’d thought of him, and so I asked him one day if he would like to play this. He wanted to meet in person, so I went to Los Angeles, and I met him in Malibu with my daughter, actually. There was just something about him, you know? I mean, his face is mesmeric. And, going back to Seamus as well, in thinking about shooting Nick Nolte, the camera can’t take its eyes off him. It is this screen presence he has that’s really magical and wild.   

It felt like, whenever we turned the camera on him, he didn’t need to do that much, and it was just mesmerizing. And it was beautiful to work with him. We were all quite taken aback by some of his scenes—the whole crew was—when Grace was with him in the woods and when she sees him later in the hospital… There’s nobody like Nick Nolte.

“Die My Love” is in theaters nationwide on Nov. 7.

I mentally began the process of writing this blog in my living room when it was lit by just a fire in the fireplace and the lights of our Christmas tree. The combination of those two things turns what is an ordinary space that I see every day into a magical place, full of warmth and love and memory.

You see, there’s a poem in The Lord of the Rings that really resonates with me at this time of the year, especially as I get older. It’s the song that Bilbo sings to Frodo on the eve of the Fellowship leaving Rivendell: I Sit Beside the Fire and Think. Clamavi de Profundis (who I can’t say enough good things about) sang a version of this song as a farewell to Christopher Tolkien when he passed away a few years back. It’s well worth a listen, especially if you’d like to take the musical pulse of where I am I’m currently.

I’ve always thought of the holiday season as a time for self-reflection in addition to making merry. The world is dark and cold (or cold-er when it comes to Texas), the regular rules of work and life are temporarily suspended as we celebrate in defiance of winter. The New Year has not yet come. We don’t know what it has in store for us yet. We hope, we plan, and some make resolutions, but we don’t know how it will turn out. We sometimes wonder what our world will look like this time next year, though life is far too unpredictable for us to know for sure.

So, for my last blog post of 2024, I wanted to express some thoughts that have been rattling around in my head for a while now. I must warn you, however, if you were looking for a feel-good holiday post, this isn’t it. But, if you would like a glimpse into where I am right now emotionally and my state of mind, this is absolutely the post for you.

Still with me? Excellent — let’s get started.

The Year of Mourning

See, I warned you. This first one is a corker. While there were many bright spots to this year, including reconnecting in person with some old friends, making new connections, and getting to higher ground in numerous senses of the word, 2024 will be known to me as a year of loss. In 2024, I leave behind two pets, a cousin, my mentor, many of my illusions, and much of my faith in humanity.

Grief and pain have shadowed my steps for much of the year. I felt as though I had scarcely begun to deal with one crushing emotional blow when another would land. As I’ve said before, I obviously don’t have a monopoly on grief or pain. I know that this has been an incredibly difficult year for many people I know, and when you look at the wider world, it’s been one tragedy after another. So, I’m not trying to claim some special status for what I’m going through; I’m only trying to tell my little slice of the story.

At times like this, I had always looked forward to the New Year in the hope that it would be better. Unfortunately, that is not the case this time. While 2024 has been the Year of Mourning, 2025 is already the Year of Uncertainty.

But again, we make merry in defiance of the cold and dark. This year, I’m making merry in defiance of that uncertainty. It might turn out to be more in the style of an Irish wake, but if that’s the case, so be it.

Fellow-Passengers to the Grave

I recently had a discussion with some co-workers on our favorite Christmas movies. I may be in the minority, but I generally don’t have a single favorite anything. I have favorites, plural, but my tastes might change from day to day on my favorite song, TV show, movie, etc. Still, if I had to pick a lone favorite, it would almost certainly be A Muppet Christmas Carol.

While Dickens’ timeless tale has been retold countless times in various ways, we have an actor of the caliber of Michael Caine playing Ebeneezer Scrooge, and he plays the role absolutely straight. He speaks and reacts to all the Muppets around him as though they were fellow actors in the Royal Shakespearean Company, and it absolutely works. Watching it this year, as I do with pretty much all the classics, I was particularly moved by it.

Part of it is that A Christmas Carol did more in creating the holiday we know as Christmas than any other. Dickens practically redefined the holiday into what it is today through his prose. It’s one of the reasons why the Victorian era looms large when it comes to Christmas traditions, from Christmas trees (first introduced to England by Prince Albert) to carolers and even versions of what would become Santa Claus.

The other part of it is Gonzo’s delivery, in the guise of Dickens himself, of the famous line about “seeing other people as fellow-passengers to the grave.” Grief has a way of making you think of your own mortality. Sickness does as well, and how did yours truly start off his holiday break? By coming down with a particularly nasty case of strep throat, of course, which is only finally starting to subside. Strep can be fatal if left untreated, but thankfully it rarely is now with modern medicine. Plus, I got on it pretty early when it became clear that it wasn’t just seasonal allergies messing with me. I’ve been pretty lucky in that I don’t get seriously ill all that often.

If anything, this bout of illness has forced me to slow down and focus on my health more than I usually do. Thankfully, I have a decent break from work ahead of me to complete my recovery, but I missed a number of things in the meantime that I regret. Even still, I just crossed paths with a bacterial strain that might have ended my journey had I been born in another time, or even if the right medications were not readily available. That has a way of putting a lot of things into perspective.

What’s my takeaway from it? I’m grateful. Grateful for the fact that help and aid were available when I needed them, that I have the time and space to convalesce, but most importantly, I’m grateful for the people I have in my life. My family, my friends, my co-workers, my extended network — all of them. And if you’re reading this blog, dear reader, that now includes you. I’m grateful to be a passenger with you on this journey, even if we know that it will inevitably end.

The Pale Blue Dot     

This month marks 28 years since America lost one of its greatest minds: Carl Sagan. I’m firmly convinced that if more of us could see the world in the way that he did, we would all be better off. Yet, a mind and a perspective like his are sadly rare. Though the man himself is gone, he left behind an incredible body of work, including his famous “Pale Blue Dot” speech.

If you’ve never heard it, I’ll link it here. It is, in my opinion, one of the most poignant speeches ever given. It puts things in perspective in a way that I’ve never encountered before or since. One of the lines that really speaks to me is this one: “Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.”

As I said earlier, I’ve lost much of my faith in humanity this year, and I’m not sure when, or even if, I will get that back. I hope I do, as I feel that I am a humanist at my core. The pronouncement that we, as a species, are in charge of saving ourselves, however, doesn’t sound all that comforting to me at the moment.

Deep in my geeky heart of hearts, I want humanity to achieve the kind of high-minded ideals that the Federation stands for in Star Trek. But I also realize that even in that continuity, humanity had to go through some pretty dark days before it finally got its act together and made the world a better place. Maybe that’s where we are now.

Maybe.

As he closes the speech, Sagan says, “To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

Strangely, this sentiment also echoes the long-held and oft-quoted Christmas sentiment of “peace on Earth and good will towards men.” Lately, it seems we’ve had a lack of both of those things. To my fellow Earthlings, let’s do something about that, okay?

Gandalf’s Wisdom

This year, I introduced my young son to the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings films. While he struggled with sitting through 3+ hour movies, he did enjoy them. He felt the emotional highs and lows just as I did. While the entire cast is famously, almost absurdly, talented, I really have to hand it to Sir Ian McKellan in his role as Gandalf the Grey/White. He really delivers on one of my favorite fictional characters of all time.

Gandalf is one of the great mentor characters, up there with the best of the best, the likes of Merlin, Alpha Trion, Morpheus, and Obi-Wan Kenobi. As an immortal maiar, an angelic being, Gandalf has been around since before Middle-Earth existed. So, Gandalf is extremely old and wise. He’s also quick to give the protagonists under his care an inspiring quote just when they need it most.

Trust me when I say, that we all could use such a quote right about now to lift our spirits or show us the folly of our ways. But as Gandalf stubbornly stays in the realm of fiction, and most definitely not in the real world, we have to content ourselves with the various portrayals of him in the books and in adaptations of those books. I’m drawn to three quotes in particular. For LOTR fans, these may seem like low-hanging fruit, but they are three that live rent-free in my brain right now:

• Frodo: I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened. Gandalf: So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.

This one is pretty self-explanatory, and one of the most famous. The moment in the movie when Frodo stands on the banks of the Anduin, contemplating his plight, and he hears this quote again gets me every time.

• Gandalf: Pity? It was pity that stayed Bilbo’s hand. Many that live deserve death, and some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Do not be too eager to deal out death and judgment. Even the very wise cannot see all ends.

I think what calls to me about this quote stems from some of the deep-lore surrounding Gandalf himself. He was once a servant of Nienna, the Valar (one of the gods of Middle-Earth for those not familiar with the term) who understood sadness and grief in the most profound way. She mourned the destruction and sorrow that existed in the world, often before it had even happened. Because of this connection to grief, she was also a being who appreciated compassion and pity beyond all others. Gandalf is often cited as the wisest of the maiar. I suppose that is why I have always associated wisdom with compassion and empathy.

• Gandalf: Saruman believes that only great power can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. I’ve found it is the small things — the everyday deeds of ordinary folk — that keeps the darkness at bay, simple acts of kindness and love. Why Bilbo Baggins? Perhaps it’s because I’m afraid, and he gives me courage.

To some degree, I feel this speaks to my relationship with my son. He’s a deep thinker, and feels all the doubts and apprehensions that this implies. But, ultimately, he is an optimist, and sometimes surprises me with his insight that seems far beyond his short years. Even though I can at times feel hopeless, he gives me the courage to keep going.

Final Thoughts

It’s been a rough year for me all right, personally, professionally, and creatively. I am not looking forward to writing the State of the Sector Address for this year, simply because I had so many misses and so little to show for the past twelve months.

Despite the somber tone of this blog post, I don’t want to end it on a down note, truly. So, how do I strike a delicate balance between a meaningful Christmas message and the not-so-holly-jolly state of mind that I’m in now? Simple, I’ll refer you to Loreena McKennitt’s A Midwinter Night’s Dream album. Her versions of some well-known Christmas classics are introspective, even a little melancholic, without being depressing or nihilistic. And that’s pretty much me right now.

In particular, I would recommend The Holly and the Ivy, God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, Emmanuel, and Snow, though there is not a bad track on the whole album. Even if Christmas is not your thing, or even part of your belief system, they are beautiful expressions of music that I highly recommend.

And that’s where I will leave things for 2024. It’s a year that I’m glad to leave behind, but one you can be damned sure I won’t ever forget. It has left its mark on me. But as my father is so fond of saying, “Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you really wanted.”

Despite my reticence to approach the State of the Sector Address this year, I will be moving forward with it, regardless. I know my delivery dates for blog posts have gotten a bit unpredictable of late, but my plan is to post it on the Friday of the first full week of January, so January 10. Watch for it then.

In the meantime, I wish all of you out there, along with your families and friends, a holiday season filled with light, joy, and hope.

Thanks for reading, and take care out there.

To say that the Fallout franchise is popular  in my home is a bit of an understatement. I’ve played the games, of course. There are numerous decorations and signs for Vault-Tec and Nuka-Cola scattered throughout my house, and my closet is full of Fallout-themed T-shirts. A while back, my son (at his behest) went trick-or-treating as Vault Boy. I also once ran a home-brewed Fallout TTRPG campaign that still looms large in my imagination to this day.

There’s just something about Fallout’s unique blend of ’50s retro-futurism and optimism mixed with quirky, often dark humor and the existential hell and horror of the post-apocalypse.

When Amazon announced that they were adapting the Fallout universe into a live-action series, I was…cautiously optimistic. I wanted to immediately believe that it would be a slam dunk, an instant classic that would delight new and existing fans alike, but I was held back in my enthusiasm by two points: Fallout 76 and the Halo series on Paramount+.

The last entry into the Fallout video game series was a live-service game with an emphasis on a multi-player experience heavily laden with microtransactions. While there are many who enjoyed it when it came out, and continue to enjoy it, it was not for me.

I found it repetitive and stripped of all the things I enjoyed in a Fallout game. I know that the game has had many updates and expansions over the years, but my initial experience with it was so lackluster that I never returned to it, and likely never will. The game damaged the Fallout brand rather badly, and made me lose a lot of faith in Bethesda Game Studios. 

The Halo show is not only not canon to the regular game timeline, but bears only a passing similarity to the universe that has been built up over the last 20+ years through games, comics, novels, and two other TV shows. There is no attempt to resolve the differences between the normal Halo universe and the Silver timeline here.

It has a passing similarity to the IP, but none of the things that really tap into what made Halo so popular in the first place. So, it’s a thin veneer of a recognizable and highly marketable brand with none of the substance of that brand underneath. It’s Halo in name only.  

Unfortunately, that’s a common occurrence with video adaptations to the big or little screen. Sometimes you get a Mortal Kombat: Annhilation and sometimes, just sometimes, you get something akin to what HBO did with the Last of Us. I’m happy to say that after watching eight hours of Amazon’s Fallout series, it is firmly in the latter category.

Did I like it? Let me put it this way: I think this is one of the few times were the adaptation actually manages to exceed the source material. The funny thing is that, as I followed the three primary characters on their respective journeys, it had me wishing for a game version of their story. And unlike Halo, the story that this series tells is canon. In fact, if the series goes the way I think it will, I suspect that Fallout 5 might be building off of the show, making this series a catalyst for future games and stories set within the Fallout universe.

I do have a few nitpicks, all very minor, that I would like to get out of the way before I get into what I enjoyed about it. I’m about to get into SPOILER territory, so consider yourself warned:

Recycled Motivations: Look, I understand that if you’ve lived in a vault all your life, it’s going to take something pretty powerful to make you want to leave the relative security for the unknown dangers of the wasteland. Family is definitely one of them. So, Lucy leaving the Vault in search of her father is understandable, but does feel like a retread of Fallout 3.

But, later in the series, one of Vault 31’s engineers announces that their water purification chip has been destroyed, and that they only have a few months of fresh water left. This is precisely the reason that the protagonist from the original Fallout game leaves Vault 13. After that scene, this potentially catastrophic problem is never mentioned again. Perhaps that’s setup for Season 2.

New Ghoul Chem: Through the Ghoul, we learn that there’s a chem that helps ghouls stave off becoming feral. When we briefly encounter Roger, a ghoul repeatedly chanting his own name in the efforts of not turning, we see that he has taken loads of this chem and it hasn’t made a difference. The presence of this new chem is not an issue for me, but we need to know two things about it:

• Is this a pre-war drug that cannot be manufactured anymore, making it an increasingly dwindling resource, or is this chem entirely new, and thus is something that can be made by any decent wasteland chemist?
• What is its name? Fallout is replete with drugs named things like Jet, Psycho, Mentats, Day Tripper, and Buffout. If this chem is that important to ghouls, and becomes something of a minor MacGuffin, what is it called? If it’s a post-war drug, I nominate “Zom-B-Gone” as the official name.

Repressed Brotherhood: The character of Maximus is almost entirely sexually ignorant. While it makes for some funny moments, it is implied that the Brotherhood has intentionally fostered this (though one of his bunkmates certainly didn’t have a problem with it). For a military organization that’s co-ed, I’m surprised at this. For one, if you forbid people from exploring their sexuality at all, they will find ways to do it anyway in secret, and practically every military organization is aware of this.

Second, wouldn’t the Brotherhood want to encourage breeding to ensure the next generation of Knights? Of course, this chapter of the Brotherhood does seem to be more overtly religious than some of the other portrayals of them, so it could just be a quirk of this chapter. After all, the difference between the Brotherhood under Elder Lyons in Fallout 3 and Elder Maxson in Fallout 4 is pretty substantial.  Still, it struck me as odd, given how the Brotherhood has been portrayed in the past.

The Chalkboard: Okay, this is one that gets some fans in an uproar for its potential as a lore-break. Lucy finds a chalkboard in Vault 4 with a timeline of events that, at a glance, would seem to imply that Shady Sands, the capital of the New California Republic, fell in the year 2277 when Fallout: New Vegas is set in 2281 and the NCR is still a major player at that time.

I think that there are many ways that this could be interpreted as lore-friendly (explained by Many A True Nerd and Juicehead in particular), but it was an oddly unnecessary detail to include and potentially get wrong, especially when everything else has been so lore accurate.

Okay, now that’s all out of the way, let’s get into what I liked about this show. This could easily be a series of blog posts by itself, but I will just give the highlight reel for you here.

The Cast: This show has some serious acting chops going for it. You need actors who can be both dramatic and silly, and the main three: Ella Purnell, Aaron Moten, and Walton Goggins bring this story to life. Each of them gets to portray wonderful moments of strength and vulnerability. Goggins is a particular standout with his dual role as The Ghoul, a bounty hunter in the post-apocalypse, and Cooper Howard, a pre-war A-list celebrity.

Practically every background character is played to perfection. Norman, played by Moises Arias, wound up having one of the most compelling character arcs as he starts to unravel the secret of the interconnected trio of vaults. So, the acting talent on display here is incredible. My proverbial hat is off to everyone who played a part here. Nicely done.

The SETS!: Fallout has never looked so good. The attention to detail here is astounding. The vaults are fully realized live-action interpretations from Fallout 4, right down to the switches on the door handles and the prints on the curtains. I sincerely hope that someplace recreates these sets for people to tour. I would be there in a heartbeat.

Filly looked right at home as a sister town to Megaton or Diamond City. The general store that Lucy enters is a veritable treasure trove of Fallout easter eggs. Every place the characters go fits in seamlessly. I can only imagine the titanic amount of work it took to get the sense of place right, but the production team really knocked it out of the park with this one. 

The Side Quests: What made this feel like a Fallout adventure was simply how priorities shifted as time went on. The Ghoul captures Lucy, but has to abandon the hunt for the scientist’s head (an assignment worth a ton of caps to him) to go get his unnamed ghoul chem from the Super Duper Mart. Maximus and Lucy get sidetracked by accidentally falling into Vault 4, where they have to contend with the weirdness that’s going on there. Maximus reveals his secret to his squire, and then has to track him down.

The side quests and points of interest are what make a Bethesda game, so it feels entirely appropriate that the Ghoul spouts the Golden Rule of the Wasteland.  

The Music: If you’ve played the games, some of the songs that get played are straight from Galaxy News Radio or Diamond City Radio. The showrunners didn’t limit themselves to just what was in the games, however, there are many other instances of them further delving into that 50s/60s musical genre that blends in perfectly. I can’t overstate how well these songs are overlaid onto the visual narrative. The lyrics of these songs often correlate directly to what’s happening on the screen. It’s pretty amazing to watch.

The score is by Ramin Djawadi, who famously composed the score for Game of Thrones and the first Iron Man movie. It’s clear that he takes a lot of cues from the previous game tracks, one notable time being when Lucy sees the NCR flag in the classroom in Vault 4, which echoes back to the Inon Zur themes of Fallouts 3 and 4.

The score is serviceable enough for the most part, though I had hoped to have more of the recognizable modern Fallout themes to go with the spot-on visuals. Not having more of that strikes me as a missed opportunity. The Brotherhood of Steel theme, however, is a stand-out track on this album for sure, along with the western-style trumpet stylings found in “Feo Fuente y Formal.”

The Love: A show that brings this level of detail to the screen and captures the tone of the franchise so well doesn’t happen without love at every level. From the script writers, to the prop-makers, to the special effects crew, and the small army of talented folks it takes to produce a show like this, the love of the source material is crystal clear here.

I was heartened to hear that many of the crew on the sets and behind-the-scenes personnel, as well as many of the actors, were genuine fans of Fallout. It shows. I really hope that Amazon studios is able to keep this same team together for Season 2 (which was just confirmed yesterday as the time of this writing). It’s going to be a long wait to see the continuing journeys of Coop, Lucy, and Maximus, but I’m sure it’s going to be epic once it arrives. I’ll be there Day One.

Final Thoughts: Adaptations are a tricky business, and video game adaptations doubly so. I think what makes this series stand where others like Halo fall is simply an understanding of the source material and why it was so popular in the first place.

Most adaptations of popular franchises these days are definitely not made with the existing fans in mind. (Michael Bay Transformers, anyone?) Too often, it feels like there is a contempt for fans who are already invested in the property. But I think this approach is fundamentally flawed. Sure, filmmakers will want their adaptations to reach, and appeal to, the largest audience possible. Still, if you make something that long-time fans will love, but one with enough on-ramps for new fans to join in, you’re on the right track.

I think that’s what Fallout has done here. There is so much for existing fans to enjoy and sink their teeth into while simultaneously serving as a wonderful introduction to the world of Fallout. That’s pretty much all I could ever ask for.

So, the moral of this story is: In a world full of Halos, be a Fallout.

Thanks for reading!