No need to stand by any longer: the new trailer for Prime Video’s Fallout TV show was just broadcast, and you can check it out above. The series will begin on April 11… and end on April 11, too, if you’re into binging TV shows: the trailer ends with the announcement that all episodes will be available immediately, rather than shown week by week.
The Fallout trailer gives us a closer look at the three main characters—Walton Goggins as The Ghoul, Ella Purnell as Vault-dweller Lucy, and Aaron Moten as Brotherhood of Steel disciple Maximus—and hints a bit more at their motivations. As some fans guessed, based on the last teaser, pre-war Goggins/Ghoul was a Vault-Tec spokesperson who unfortunately didn’t make it inside one of the Vaults when the bombs dropped.
Meanwhile, Lucy decides to leave her Vault—the Vault’s purpose is to eventually restart civilization after a nuclear calamity, and it’s been 200 years so they might want to get started—and ventures into the remains of Los Angeles. There she’s mocked by surface dwellers (“I thought all you dipshits were dead,” cackles a survivor played by Dale Dickey), threatened by The Ghoul, and nearly vivisected for spare parts by a Mr. Handy robot. Maximus, meanwhile, sounds like he’s out for revenge: when asked why he joined the BOS, he says “To hurt the people who hurt me.”
Like the first Fallout teaser we saw back in November, the show is still looking pretty darn good to me, a bright and colorful post-apocalypse with over the top violence and gore (some poor sucker gets a large hole blown in them), some grim and serious moments, but also plenty of humor. “Well now, that is a very small drop in a very, very large bucket of drugs,” The Ghoul says to Lucy after she ineffectively shoots him with a tranq dart. The Ghoul is no beginner when it comes to chems, it seems, and later in the trailer he chugs a few more. No judgments. I’m the same way when I play a Fallout game.
Speaking of The Ghoul, Walton Goggins revealed a bit more about the character during a press conference held for the trailer’s release, including his pre-war name: Cooper Howard.
“The Ghoul is, in some ways, the poet Virgil in Dante’s Inferno,” Goggins said. “He’s the guide, if you will, through this irradiated hellscape that we find ourselves in, in this post-apocalyptic world.” He also described The Ghoul as pragmatic and ruthless, “with his own set of moral codes. And he has a wicked sense of humor, like me,” Goggins said, laughing.
A final note on the trailer: I spotted an NCR flag in one shot, so Fallout lore specialists can unclench a little: the New California Republic is on the scene after all.
