See how the pilot of Fallout, the acclaimed Amazon Prime Video series, hits the Save the Cat! story beats.

Created by: Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet, based on the video game franchise by Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky

S1 E1: “The End”

The World: Post-apocalyptic alternate-history Earth (specifically, Los Angeles) in the year 2296

Franchise Type: Mad, Mad World

Pilot Episode Genre: Dudes and Dudettes with a Problem

Platform: Amazon Prime Video

TV Genre: Hour-long Drama

Story DNA:
Hero(es): Lucy MacLean, a young and naïve Vault Dweller; Maximus, a fledgling squire of the Brotherhood of Steel; and B-list Hollywood actor Cooper Howard, later known as “The Ghoul.” They will each, in turn, take us through the three acts of our pilot episode.
Goal: To survive and make sense of what happened in the Great War of 2077
Obstacle: The evil empire Vault-Tec and a whole cast of characters whose compasses have been broken by war and its aftermath
Stakes: Their lives and the Earth’s continued survival

Opening Image/Sequence: In a color-saturated, retrofuturistic setting (1950s meets the 2070s), fading Hollywood star Cooper Howard (Walton Goggins) entertains a group of wealthy white children with lasso tricks at a birthday party while their concerned moms hide in the house listening to a TV report about a possible nuclear attack. Moments later, Howard and his young daughter Janey (Teagen Meredith) watch in horror as a mushroom cloud rises up over downtown L.A. and literal hell breaks loose.

Theme Stated: Howard tells Janey he learned in the marines that if a bomb is dropped and the resulting cloud is smaller than your thumb, run for the hills. “And if it’s bigger than your thumb?” she asks. Howard, a truth teller, admits, “They told us not to bother running.”

The characters navigating this particular fallout of nuclear war have a choice: keep moving and striving as though there’s still hope on the horizon, or accept their lot and live a half-life in one of the Vaults (fallout shelters) buried deep in the ground, watching filmed projections of sunny days and never once seeing the real sky.

Set-Up: We cut to 219 years later and Act One of Fallout follows the story of Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell), Vault 33 Dweller. Lucy is a striver, perkily optimistic about the future of America, and in this insular and inbred community, so done with having sex only with her cousins that she’s submitting an oral application to be matched with a husband from another Vault in a transaction known as Triennial Trade.

Vault 33 Overseer and Lucy’s dad, Hank (Kyle MacLachlan), makes the formal swap with Vault 32’s Overseer, Lee Moldaver (Sarita Choudhury)—seed and machine parts for Lucy’s breeding abilities—and Lucy meets/marries Monty (Cameron Cowperthwaite). Sure, the folks from Vault 32 are a weird, uncultured bunch, but Monty is sexy, so you take the good with the bad in this strange thesis world.

During the wedding ceremony, Hank drops a bomb of an ostensibly positive sort: radiation levels on the surface are receding so rapidly, the next generation will be able to colonize, bringing “light and civilization to the dark world” above ground. Hmmm, somehow those words sound familiar, almost as if America has done this sort of thing before….Anyway! While Lucy and Monty are enjoying some connubial bliss, Lucy’s brother Norm (Moisés Arias) wanders through the tunnel to Vault 32 and comes across a frightening scene of devastation and recent violence. What has happened here?!

Catalyst: Lucy tests Monty’s radiation levels and realizes he is not from Vault 32, but a dangerous Raider from the surface.

Debate: Lucy tries to get out to warn the others, but Monty fights her tooth and nail; ultimately, she has to hit him upside the head with a bottle to escape to the common area, where depraved Raiders are slashing and stabbing the Dwellers of Vault 33. When the very bloody Monty reappears, Lucy watches in confusion and horror as her sweet, peaceable dad drowns him in a vat of pickles.

Moldaver, who apparently is not a beneficent Overseer but some kind of warlord with the Raiders under her command, has Hank seized and taken away, telling Lucy that she’s bringing him to “the real world.”

Break into Two: Moldaver sets off a bomb, destroying a portion of Vault 33 and forcing the remaining inhabitants to consider escaping up into…

Fun and Games: … the antithesis world of the surface, the upside-down world above ground, a raw and vicious place where we meet our Act Two hero, Maximus (Aaron Moten). A very unlikely hero, as he’s currently getting his ass kicked by the bigger, tougher aspirants of the Brotherhood of Steel, a militaristic cult tasked with securing the Wasteland and searching for pre-war technology.

Maximus, a consistent underachiever who dreams of becoming a Knight, is jealous when his friend Dane (Xelia Mendes-Jones) is promoted to Squire for Knight Titus, but when Dane is mysteriously sabotaged, Maximus displays enough of a backbone to Elder Cleric Quintus to be substituted in Dane’s place.

Meanwhile, the few remaining inhabitants of Vault 33 have doubled down on safety and blissful ignorance, trying to revive their community and refusing to even entertain the thought of going to the surface.

B Story: Although they don’t meet in the pilot episode, the hesitantly trusting relationship between Lucy and Maximus (and The Ghoul makes three!) will be the driving force in Fallout’s theme of fighting the isolation and dehumanization that comes from survivalism.

Midpoint: Lucy, with the help of her brother, escapes to the Wasteland to try to find her father, ensuring that A and B Stories will eventually cross.

Bad Guys Close In: Lucy is immediately overwhelmed at what she finds in the real world; the sun is too bright, the air too harsh, and there are fossilized bodies everywhere. But once she sees the beauty of the ocean, she is energized and with a true Vault Dweller “Okey dokey!”, sets off on her quest.

Maximus is branded in a painful ceremony and sent with Knight Titus to the Wilds to find a missing member of the Enclave, someone who has the potential to do great harm to the Brotherhood.

In the Wilds, three mangy bounty hunters enter a graveyard and dig up the casket of The Ghoul, who is our old friend Cooper Howard in mutant form but still sporting his cowboy hat from his last day as a human. Honcho (Mykelti Williamson) tells the Ghoul that there’s a bounty on the Enclave escapee who’s been rumored to be heading to California to meet up with “that witch” Moldaver, and that they’ll cut him in on the prize if he’s nice to them.

All Is Lost: The Ghoul responds by pulling out his trusty bullwhip, lassoing the bounty hunters, and shooting two of them without blinking an eye.

Dark Night of the Soul: Yeah, it’s partly that he doesn’t actually have eyelids, but The Ghoul is also as cold as the ground he came from. It’s our dark night of the soul, thinking of what havoc this frightening and seemingly heartless zombie will wreak on the surface world, particularly on our two vulnerable friends, Lucy and Maximus. Luckily, The Ghoul as played by Goggins is an absolute scream, both of the horror and hilarious varieties, so we’re ready for the ride.

Break into Three/Break into Series: In a sly nod to the underground/above ground themes in Fallout, The Ghoul kicks us off into the series by shooting Honcho and kicking his body into the deep grave The Ghoul just abandoned. Then he jauntily saunters off into the Wilds, in search of a synthesis world we can only imagine in our worst nightmares.