The sixth episode of Amazon’s Fallout has a scene so hilariously on the nose with its political message that it made me do a double-take. Walton Goggin’s Cooper is meeting with ꦦan army buddy and fellow actor named Charlie Whiteknife (Dallas Goldtooth), who has fallen in with a group of anti-Vault-Tec radicals labeled communists by the media. Cooper tells Charlie that he should be more grateful for the life he has and toꦉ give up the communist ways that they fought against together, but Charlie is unswayed. His goal is to convince Cooper to come to one of his meetings.
He starts by teaching Cooper the concept of fiduciary responsibility, explaining that Vault-Tec is a corporation driven solely by the profit motive, and has a responsibility to its shareholders to increase its value by selling vaults, but it can only do that if people need v๊aults, i.e., when the world is teetering on the edge of nuclear catastrophe. Without a hint of irony, Cooper delivers the most perfect retort imaginable: “That’s called capitalism, Charlie!” If there hadn’t been a cut right after this line, I bet you would have seen Walton Goggins wink at the camera.
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Fallout excels at capturiᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚng the spirit, ton𓂃e, and themes of the games to tell gripping a story for fans and newcomers alike.
This moment isn’t created in a vacuum. Most of what Cooper goes through in the show’s pre-apocalypse timeline serves to deprogram him from his rigid attachment to the systems of injustice and inequality that govꦏern the world around him. That process started before he met up with Cooper. Earlier in the same episode while hosting an afterparty for a Vault-Tec commercial shoot, Cooper chats with another fellow actor, Sebastian (Matt Berry) who has a much more receptive attitude to the apocalyptic economic system they’re suffering under. “The future is products,” he says. “You’re a product, I’m a product, the end of the world is a product.🌌 For those of us who can successfully embrace that, I say the future is golden.”
Slowly, Cooper starts to question things more and more. When his wife Barb (Frances Turner), a Vault-Tec executive, mentions that dogs won’t be allowed in the vault, Cooper lashes out in an act of defiance that shocks her. She tells Cooper that the freedom they’re losing is the cost of keeping their family safe. What she neglects to tell him, which we learn in the season's final episode, is that Charlie was right: Vault-Tec is intentionally bringing on the end of the world for the sake of market dominance. Or, as Barb describes it to the board of executives, a true monopoly.
The scene in which this scheme is revealed is cartoonishly evil. Among a cabal of defense contractors and co-conspirators, Vault-Tech’s Bud Askins (Michael Esper) refers to their economic competitors as “every other𒐪 living human that isn’t us”, and describes a scenario where they simply wait in their vaults for everyone in the world to starve and die from nuclear fallou🌟t.
Barb invites each of them to imagine Darwinian experiments that could play out in the vaults they control for the sake of market re🉐search and entertainment as they wait for the scorched earth to cool.hey revel in the thought of people killing each other for resources in overcrowded vaults, or separating children from their parents so that only the smartest kids survive. “It’s a fun idea,” the CEO of Bob-Co admits, “there’s a lot of earning potential with the end of the world.”
Like the games it’s based on, Amazon’s Fallout is an overt satire on the inevitable consequences of end-stage capitalism. I say inevitable, because a version of this is playing out in real life today. While the reality is far more banal, and there probably aren’t billionaires doing the Mr. Burns evil finger tent while salivꦦating over the idea of children killing each other, we do have an entire fossil-fuel industry as well as an army of sycophantic clima༒te change deniers in the government working together to accelerate the end of the world for their own personal gain. Fallout’s politics are about as thinly veiled as it gets.
There is no mistaking what Fallout has to say about the world we live in today, and yet, I have a strong suspicion that certain people will, in fact, mistake it. It seems like the anti-woke crowd has been on a tear of poor media literacy as of late, so much so that something as overt as Helldivers 2 - 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:an astute🐽 skewer꧂ing of militarist fascism - is being hailed as an anti-political game. If they can miss a ༺satire as on the nose as “managed democracy”, Fallout’s message might fly over their heads too.
Of course, when folks talk about politics in games, they’re only ever talking about identity politics, which is a faulty, outdated way to approach the much more useful c🌸oncept of intersectionality. By politics, they mean games with women, queer people, and people of color. If Fallout is to be criticized for its politics, it ironically won’t be for its anti-capitalist themes, it will be for centering a woman and a Black man.
It will be for the way it presents its villain, Kyle MacLachlan’s Overseer Hank, as a bitter old man whose wife left him for another woman. I imagine they’re going to be a lot more upset about the way Charlie Whiteknife talks about the shallow roles he gets as a Native American actor in Hollywood than the things he has to say about the fiduciary respons♐ibility of c﷽orporations. Thank God none of the bloodthirsty billionaires plotting the end of the world are trans, otherwise this show might be political.
