Out of the Blue: An Orphan Black Retrospective

A young woman, Sarah, returns home to Toronto after almost a year away. Her plan is to pick up her daughter, Kira, from her stepmother Siobhan and use the gains from an ill-gotten coke deal to set up a new life for herself, her daughter and her arty stepbrother, Felix.

This plan is almost instantly derailed: at the station Sarah sees a woman who is her exact double suddenly jump in front of a train, being killed instantly. Sarah is horrified but also sees an opportunity. She takes the woman’s bag, phone and possessions, finds out where she lives and pretends to be her so she can empty her bank account. She learns the woman’s name is Beth Childs and she’s a police officer under investigation for accidentally shooting a civilian. Unfortunately, Sarah gets in over her head: she is forced to pretend to be Beth at work (despite having zero idea how police officers operate) and with Beth’s boyfriend Paul, and, to explain the body on the tracks, has to set up Beth as Sarah, making it look like Sarah herself is dead.

It’s complicated set-up and morass of double lives and identities. And that’s before Sarah finds out she’s really one of at least two dozen clones from an illegal 1980s experiment that went awry.

Orphan Black ran for fifty episodes across five seasons, airing from 2013 to 2017 on BBC America. It was critically well-received but relatively little-watched at the time, with very low viewing figures. Its critical cachet was considerably greater than its modest profile due to the performance of lead actress Tatiana Maslany, who played not just the main character of Sarah Manning but a dozen other roles across the course of the series (including voicing a hallucinatory scorpion). Maslany’s jaw-dropping performance saw her nominated three times for a Best Actress Emmy Award, winning once in 2016. The show also won a Peabody Award and a Hugo Award. Since its original airing, the show has been released internationally on Netflix and picked up many more appreciators.

Despite its acclaim, Orphan Black seems to have fallen out of favour pretty quickly. It rated mentions only on a few “Best Shows of the Decade” lists that appeared last year, and its status as the “little Canadian show that could!” feels like it’s been gazumped by sitcom Schitt’s Creek (not that it’s a competition, and Schitt’s Creek is also an excellent show). Rewatching the show in full for this article, it feels like Orphan Black has been a little undersold and underrated, especially as it’s a series whose original issues have largely been fixed by being able to watch the whole run now in one go.

Orphan Black’s overwhelming strength is its characters. Tatiana Maslany obviously has the heavy lifting to do here, playing the regular roles of not just British punk rebel Sarah Manning but also suburban housewife Alison Hendrix, genius scientist Cosima Niehaus, cool businesswoman Rachel Duncan and Ukrainian serial killer Helena. Later seasons add Swedish hacker Mika and nail technician and would-be social media influencer Krystal Goderitch, whilst cop Beth Childs appears a lot in flashbacks and video footage. Maslany’s ability to make each and every single character a fully fleshed-out individual, completely different from the others, is absolutely amazing. The complexity is increased when she has to appear in scenes with one clone impersonating another. From a technical standpoint, there are also multiple scenes with two, three or four clones interacting with one another (including a dance party in Season 2 and a dinner scene in Season 3), which required the use of cutting-edge effects techniques when the old greenscreen standbys were found to be inadequate. The combination of technology and performance delivers the very nearly flawless illusion of this one actress playing multiple characters.

Orphan Black probably doesn’t get enough love for its other castmembers, though. Jordan Gavaris plays Sarah’s stepbrother Felix, an artist, occasional rent-boy and one-man emotional support for the clones, to the point of putting his own life on hold (which becomes a source of anguish for him in the last two seasons, where he goes looking for his own biological family). I’m genuinely surprised Gavaris hasn’t had a bigger career, since he plays Felix with conviction, humour and steely resolve. Felix also has a nice line in metacommentary, frequently saying the exact thing the audience is thinking in any given moment. Perennial Canadian guest star Kevin Hanchard is also outstanding as Detective Art Bell, a genuinely good man whom Sarah is forced to lie to (by pretending to be his deceased partner, Beth) and who always tries to do the right thing even as the morality of the situations he finds himself in becomes murkier.

Particularly impressive is Maria Doyle Kennedy as Siobhan or “Mrs. S”, Felix and Sarah’s Irish stepmother and the unquestioned matriarch of their family unit. Her role is small to start with but later expands dramatically as she uses her network of contacts in Canada, the US, the UK and Ireland to help the clones. The same is true of Skyler Wexler as Sarah’s daughter Kira, who starts off with not much to do but Wexler’s impressive acting skills for such a young age make her a key player in later seasons.

Kristian Bruun plays Donnie Hendrix, Alison’s husband (Alison is the only one of the Clone Club to be married). Frequently played for laughs (such as when he and Felix have to pose as prospective gay parents when they go undercover in a fertility clinic), Donnie does have a greater dramatic role as the show proceeds. Keen board gamer Josh Vokey as Scott, Cosima’s partner-in-science-crime, is also an underrated key part of the ensemble. Évelyne Brochu is also outstanding as Cosima’s French girlfriend Delphine and the source of much of what Felix refers to as the show’s “lesbian drama,” who also can’t help but wear the most fabulous outfits on the show. Ari Millen is also great as a second set of clones, playing multiple roles. They’re not as numerous as Sarah’s doubles, but Millen does impressive work depicting very different characters.

The show also brings in genre veterans where necessary: Michelle Forbes (Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, True Blood) has a brief but memorable role in the second season, Matt Frewer (Max Headroom, The Stand) is outstanding as recurring semi-antagonist Dr. Leekie and James Frain (The Tudors, Star Trek: Discovery) is deliciously evil as assassin Ferdinand. Also, special mention must be given to Alison Steadman, a British veteran of film, stage and television, cast slightly against type as Siobhan’s chain-smoking, permanently angry mother in the third and fourth seasons.

So, the cast, beyond just star Maslany, is outstanding. Where Orphan Black does trip up a little, and this is the most frequent criticism voiced about the show, is its storyline.

The main problem with the story is that it’s never quite original enough. As soon as it becomes clear that Sarah is a clone (by the end of the second episode, so this is hardly a spoiler), the viewer’s immediate assumption is that this is an illegal genetic experiment which has been overseen by a powerful corporation with government involvement…and that’s what it turns out to be. If there’s one set of clones, the logical conclusion is that there might be more, and perhaps a set of male clones as well; this is confirmed in the second season. If they’re all clones, they must be clones of a genetic original who will be important to the plot, and that turns out to be the case in the third season. Orphan Black never really sets itself up to do anything surprising in general terms with the plot. Anyone who’s passingly familiar with contemporary science fiction shows from The X-Files onwards will likely be able to see most of the major plot movements coming down the road.

That is certainly all true, but in general terms I found it not to matter very much. Execution is more important than surprises and Orphan Black tells its story of shady corporate operations, illegal genetic experiments and complex backstory revelations with confidence and verve. The plot twists are logical, the character arcs are well-judged and the show’s trademark fast pace makes it perfect for bingeing. Cliffhangers abound and, if characters are in a difficult spot, you can be assured that situation will be resolved quite quickly rather than allowed to fester on for many episodes at a time. The show’s relentless pace can sometimes be a problem (maybe a bit more time to stop and smell the roses would have been nice) but, in a sea of other series with plot elements advancing so glacially they can only be measured in ice ages, it helps Orphan Black stand out from the crowd. This is a show that knows how to set up, execute and resolve a story arc with brisk economy.

That said, the economy of storytelling does lead to repetition. The main enemy in the first two seasons is the Dyad Institute and their backers, an ideological cause known as “Neolution.” After Dyad falls from grace, Neolution becomes the primary foe of the third through fifth seasons, first through subsidiary organisations (Project Castor and BrightBorn Industries in the third and fourth seasons) and then the Neolutionists directly in the final season. There are also other enemies, such as the Prolethean religious cult, and various criminals and gangs. It has to be said that the show probably should have focused on one enemy more than bringing in lots of subsidiaries which end up just being variations on a theme.

Far more critical to Orphan Black’s success is its mastery of tonal variation. Each one of the clones has their own personal storyline as well as playing a part in the larger storyline and each one of these could easily be a TV show by themselves. Donnie and Alison’s façade of suburban bliss, soccer games with the kids and Tupperware parties hides a darker story of pill addiction, marital boredom and frustration that veers into drug dealing, murder, mayhem and an increasingly large number of dead bodies buried under the garage. It’s by turns genuinely disturbing, laugh-out-loud hilarious and at times gag-inducing. However, the show can then turn on a dime and delve deeply into Cosima and Delphine’s overwrought, tragic love story of woe, which teeters on the edge of outright cliché (not helped by Felix pretty much narrating this story from the sidelines with morbid fascination) before being brought back down to Earth. The Cosima-Delphine romance is arguably the most compelling in the show and, thankfully, the producers have the sense not to lean on the “kill your gays,” trope that too many shows have indulged in.

Elsewhere we have the story of Helena, the innocent young Catholic girl turned into a homicidal weapon of mass destruction by a deranged religious group that believes all clones must be destroyed. Helena, a deeply damaged individual who serves as something of a villain for the first season, eventually overcomes her “training” and joins forces with Sarah and her other “sestras” to defeat their enemies and even declares a maternal ambition (Maslany's faux-Ukrainian-accented proclamation of "What about my babies?" soon becomes a key catchphrase). Helena’s story arc is one of the most successful in the show, even if the fact she did kill several innocent people in the first few episodes of the series is brushed under the carpet a little too easily.

There are too many other stories to really relate all of them in detail: Sarah’s own insecurities and in particular her feelings of guilt and inadequacy which forces her to slam the “self-destruct” button whenever anything goes too badly wrong (or too badly right, in some cases). Dealing with the clone situation gives her purpose and sees her direct her creativity, spontaneity and capacity for invention and thinking on her feet in a productive manner, but at several key moments she does nearly fall off the wagon and spiral back into depression, alcohol and substance abuse because, hell, the situations she puts herself in are quite hairy, and traumatic. Then there’s the tragic story of Beth Childs, which the writers leave until the final two seasons, where we see her backstory in detail and discover what led her to taking her own life in the opening seconds of the show. For a show that only lasts fifty episodes (less than a quarter the run of The X-Files), Orphan Black packs a hell of a lot of story into its modest run-time.

This balancing of tonal variation, of sometimes going from laugh-out-loud, warm-hearted comedy to something bleaker and more depressing, or romantic, or action-based, in the space of a few minutes is a key part of the show’s success. If Orphan Black was too funny or too bleak constantly it wouldn’t work, but by moving between these tones and styles, to the point of sometimes feeling like an anthology series, it creates a much richer story and world. Orphan Black knows when to be harsh and brutal, but also when to be warm and funny.

The show has a few other weaknesses. It has a problem holding onto guest stars. Michael Mando has a major role in the first two seasons and then vanishes without trace (in reality, poached by Better Call Saul). Michelle Forbes’ character is set up as a big deal in the second season, but she doesn’t appear again. Similarly, Michiel Huisman appeared in the second season in a major role and came back briefly in the third year, but he was nabbed by Game of Thrones (playing flamboyant mercenary Daario) and never appeared again, leaving some storylines flapping in the wind. This even extended to more core castmembers, with Évelyne Brochu contracted to appear in another show in the third season (which didn’t go the distance, allowing her to return later on). These problems are annoying but bearable; the show is always able to course-correct and carry on. The show also did the reverse: it brought back characters who’d apparently left behind for good to show how everything was connected and to make sure most of the loose ends were tied up in the finale.

The theme of Orphan Black is probably one of the oldest in narration: family. As the literal orphans of the title, the clones have no real biological families. Several of them have loving, adopted families (like Sarah, Cosima and Alison, and Rachel to an extent) but several of them were raised in much harsher circumstances (most notably Helena). As they uncover the mystery of their background, they form a tight unit and create a new extended family consisting of the clones, their friends and allies. This “clone club” bands together to defeat their problems and support one another through their individual issues. The impact of this is shown most clearly on Sarah, the staunch, punk-inspired loner who needs no one’s help and initially feels a failure as a mother, who finds then herself becoming almost the matriarch of a large, complex family of people who need help and support.

Orphan Black feels under-appreciated, but it’s a good time to revisit the show. Its web of complex conspiracies between various corporations felt a bit much during its original run, but watched as a whole it’s much more comprehensible. The character arcs and main storyline are executed reasonably well, and at fifty 44-minute episodes, it doesn’t go on for too long and outstay its welcome, but it’s also not too short and cut down in its prime. It tells a five-year story well and once it’s done, it moves on.

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Revisiting the Wasteland: Fallout 4 and the Post-Post Apocalypse

The Fallout video game series is set in the aftermath of a nuclear apocalypse, depicting survivors striving to survive in the ruins of the old world and trying to build new societies. Yet Fallout 4 opens with a scene of domestic tranquillity. A loving couple and their baby son live in a beautiful home with all mod-cons in Sanctuary Hills, a picturesque suburb of Boston, Massachusetts. They have the latest gadgets, some good food and even a robot manservant ready to attend their every whim. The only note of disquiet arises when a door-to-door salesman arrives, a representative of Vault-Tec who confirms that your family has a place reserved in nearby Vault 111, should the worst happen. Of course, this being a video game made by a company not known for their narrative subtlety, the worst happens about ninety seconds later as the newscaster alerts you to nuclear bombs dropping on New York and Pennsylvania, and it’s time for you to run up to the vault as mushroom clouds fill the sky. Once in the vault you discover another surprise: this vault isn’t a huge underground facility for multiple people to see out the war but a cryogenic storage facility. With very little warning, you’re put in a freezer and sent on a one-way trip into the future, in which your partner is killed and your son is kidnapped in front of you. 

Fallout 4 was released on 10 November 2015. It was actually the fifth game in the Fallout series, arriving five years after Fallout: New Vegas and seven after Bethesda revamped and rebooted the franchise with Fallout 3 (which I covered in a retrospective here). It was also Bethesda’s first game since their massive, all-conquering fantasy RPG Skyrim, one of the biggest and most meme-generating video games of all time. A lot was riding on Fallout 4 and, broadly speaking, it paid off. With more than 20 million sales, twice that of New Vegas or Fallout 3, it became the biggest-selling game in the Fallout series by far, introduced the series to millions of new fans and won generally positive reviews.

Five years later, the game’s long-term legacy is definitely a bit more mixed. Time has been less kind to it than Skyrim. Retrospectives on the game are few and far between, and most critical reviews these days cite it as a disappointment. Part of this is certainly down to choice: as recently as Skyrim’s release, there was a relative paucity of open-world roleplaying games, but in 2020 that is no longer the case. In the last decade, Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry series have effectively become open-world RPGs, Grand Theft Auto V has become the biggest-selling open world game in history and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt has matched Skyrim’s sales and outdone it in terms of critical acclaim. The Witcher 3 was released six months ahead of Fallout 4 and was a point of comparison in many reviews. The Witcher 3’s much more advanced engine and graphics, superior quest design, deeply gripping narrative, side-quests which were frequently more compelling and surprising than most games’ main storylines and rich atmosphere all knocked Fallout 4 into a cocked hat, and couldn’t help but make Bethesda’s design paradigm and creaking engine feel a little tired in comparison. Railing on Fallout 4 has become ubiquitous ever since, and combined with the underwhelming performance of multiplayer spin-off Fallout 76, has made people wonder if Bethesda have lost their mojo, a question that remains resolutely unanswered because their proper follow-up, Starfield, hasn’t been released yet (and virtually nothing is known about it, save it is a far-future space opera and Bethesda’s first new IP in the better part of thirty years). 

But it’s also the case that Fallout 4 may have been knocked a bit too hard. In some respects, it’s the most interesting CRPG that Bethesda has ever created, offering the player unparalleled freedom and power to effect and change the game world. It never quite delivers on that promise, but it hints at a much bolder and more inventive way forwards for open-world games that absolutely no-one else has followed up on, at least so far.

Fallout 4 is a game of several parts. As with every Bethesda RPG since 1994’s The Elder Scrolls: Arena, it is an open-world game where you can go anywhere you want, explore almost every building you see, fight hostile monsters and raiders, join forces with friendly travellers and trade with passing merchants. That freedom and openness has been a hallmark of Bethesda’s design paradigm and Fallout 4 delivers on that with success, with the large map more densely packed with “points of interest” than any of their previous games. 

The second part is a central storyline, a hook that leads you through the main narrative with numerous twists and turns and, for the first time since 1997’s The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall, numerous branching endpoints. At several key points you have to make choices about which characters and factions you are supporting, which can lead to radically varying endings. This hadn’t really been done before by Bethesda, and seems to have been very heavily influenced by Fallout: New Vegas, the 2010 game developed by Obsidian Entertainment using Bethesda’s engine. The storyline in Fallout 4 is generally considered to be “okay,” with a central hook (you have to find your kidnapped child) which is slightly in conflict with the traditional “chill out and do what you want in your own time” ethos of a Bethesda RPG. This wasn’t new, as Fallout 3 did the same thing with your supposedly urgent mission to find your missing father which you could put on hold to help defeat an army of giant fire ants or help out a guy who was turning into a tree, but the ludonarrative dissonance of Fallout 4 (the gap between the story and the actual player actions) was far more striking. 

Oh, I bet you will.

The third part is a battery of side-quests. These are missions that have nothing to do with the main story but consist of self-contained narrative subplots, occasionally several, as well as faction side-quests, where one or more of the game’s factions asks you to help them out in some fashion. Side-quests give you something to do with consequences without tying you into advancing the main story towards an ending. For the most part Fallout 4’s side-quests – which include investigating a Chinese submarine in Boston Harbor to helping the robot crew of the ancient ironclad USS Constitution get the vessel, er, seaworthy again – are amusing and entertaining, and a source of much of the game’s muted humour.

Fallout 4’s quests are numerous, which is good for giving you something to do, but they do make for an at-times over-busy game. There are three times as many quests as Fallout 3, not to mention a much greater density of buildings, locations and points of interest on the map. This means that one of the strengths of Fallout 3 and New Vegas, the sometimes uncanny loneliness and sparseness of the landscape, contributing to the eerie atmosphere, is missing, which is a shame. But, as often has been used as a criticism of the series, it's been two centuries since the nuclear war and maybe it's way past time to see more concrete signs of civilisation rebuilding.

The fourth part is companion characters. Previous Bethesda games have had companions who could join you on your mission but, from Oblivion through Fallout 3 and Skyrim, they’ve been mostly pointless. They had some initial dialogue when you first join forces with them, and there might be a single quest associated with them, but otherwise they tagged along and were only really useful for serving as an extra inventory space. New Vegas took them to the next level, giving them unique dialogue for various quests and giving them more to do, including possibly turning on you if you do something that conflicts with their ethos. Fallout 4 builds further on this, with many more unique companion characters who have not just quests associated with them but entire quest lines. Taking a leaf out of BioWare’s book, you can romance several of the companions and they are much more present in the storyline, sometimes interrupting conversations with important NPCs if they have a perspective or knowledge that adds to the story. Eventually this material runs out – the game even tells you when you’ve “maxed out” your relationship with a character as a subtle way of hinting that they are no longer necessary and you can start again with a new character without missing anything important – but it’s fun whilst it lasts. You can also assign your myriad companion characters to a town or settlement of your choosing, where they can help defend the place.

The fifth and final part is the game’s unique feature, something that was sold as something of a killer app and which some players ignored completely and others got heavily into using: settlement building. For the first time in a Fallout or Bethesda game, you could construct new settlements, assembling multi-storey buildings, defences, food-growing gardens, water pumps and even entire underground vaults. As you built up these bases, you could attract people to live there, providing them with somewhere to sleep, eat and work. Settlements generate resources such as food and water. You can then recruit caravans, linking your villages, towns and vaults together through supply lines and trade routes. You can align these settlements with various in-game factions, resulting in their soldiers helping defend them. This can change the make-up of the map as you proceed through the game, with hostile, raider-filled wilderness being tamed by constant patrols of your allies moving between heavily-armed and protected strongpoints. 

Your authority, it is not recognised here.

It is, and it’s hard to undersell this, a brilliant idea. The Fallout franchise has been called post-apocalyptic but that’s not quite accurate. Traditionally, Fallout has been a post-post-apocalyptic series. It’s not really about surviving the war – the war was 210 years ago – but rebuilding in the aftermath, constructing new societies which will hopefully avoid the mistakes of the past. Fallout 3 had lowballed this a bit – using the logic that Washington D.C. had suffered huge damage in the war and fallout levels had taken a lot longer to fall away than in other parts of the country, so it was still early in the stages of rebuilding – but it was at the heart of New Vegas’s storyline, with the ultimate thematic choice being between siding with the well-intentioned but backwards-looking New California Republic, the chaotic and totalitarian Caesar’s Legion or taking control of the Wasteland yourself and forging your own path free from the restrictions of the past.

Fallout 4’s worldbuilding doesn’t quite stack up: Boston took only one nuclear hit during the war, some way to the south-west of the city itself, and most of the buildings and even some of the infrastructure is still intact two centuries later, so why hasn’t anyone got around to rebuilding before this? We do hear about the Commonwealth Minutemen trying to rebuild the region before you but failing due to poor equipment and opposition from Raiders and the isolationist Institute, but it does feel a little convenient that no-one was able to succeed before your character comes along. One possible explanation is that you’re the first person in Boston in decades to have a fully functional suit of power armour, allowing you to wipe out entire enemy encampments single-handed, which would be more convincing if it wasn’t possible to ditch the power armour early on and do everything without it.

As an idea, the settlement building is superb. For the first time in an open-world game, you can add to the landscape and tailor it to your design. You can found and build towns and bases, you can recruit allies and use them to defend people, and you can effectively start building up a new society. But, because Bethesda had cold feet about how popular the mechanic would be (especially the need to find and carry out vast quantities of junk to be recycled into buildings and decorations) and were considering removing it from the game altogether just months before release, they never fully committed to it. Settlement building is optional and, because of that, the game is reluctant to integrate it into the core narrative. Raiders and Super Mutants continue to hurl themselves recklessly against outposts even if you have surrounded them with thick concrete walls with a battery of laser cannons and missile launchers covering every feasible line of approach. No-one really mentions your rebuilding efforts save in the most generic way possible. In some cases, the presence of heavily-armed settlements unexpected by the AI can disrupt the logic flow in quests and break them.

In addition, you end up with beautifully elaborate, cool settlements which you can…not do much with. You can take screenshots and post them on social media to impress people, or stream videos showing how cool they are, but you can’t share them with other people for gameplay purposes. The interaction of the settlement building with a multiplayer element would have been cool, but the multiplayer-only successor game, Fallout 76, doesn’t allow you to build settlements or outposts on anything like the scale of Fallout 4. In addition, by the time you finally accumulate the skills, perks and resources needed to really build elaborate bases, you’ve probably finished the main narrative and side-quests and there isn’t much left to do in the game world. With a slightly smaller map than Skyrim’s and fewer locations to visit, there’s simply nothing to keep you hanging around as in the older game, even with this new feature.

Fallout 4 can’t help but feel disappointing in some respects. The game attempts to give you a personal stake in the story, but this ends up feeling contrived and unrealistic: why am I pretending to be a mock-1930s comic book character when my baby son is being held prisoner by forces unknown? The writing is better than any previous Bethesda game, but still often feels stiff and unconvincing, especially compared to Obsidian’s work on New Vegas. It has a busier, denser map with way more things to do, which is fun but takes away from the post-apocalyptic bleakness that was arguably the best thing Fallout 3 accomplished. Graphically it’s a huge improvement over its predecessors, but definitely is looking older and more dated than any of its contemporaries. It has far more interesting companion characters with more motivations and backstories (although none of them can hold a candle to noir throwback synth detective Nick Valentine), but they very quickly peter out and encourage you to switch to a new companion instead.

But the game does good things as well. Combat is vastly improved from Fallout 3 and New Vegas. Power armour feels chunky, empowering and genuinely impressive for the first time. Inon Zur’s soundtrack is easily the best musical score ever created for a Fallout game. The four-way faction interaction is complex (perhaps a bit too complex at times, but a huge improvement on Fallout 3’s near-lack of faction interaction at all), leading to more interesting divided loyalties and a murkier morality than Fallout 3’s much more obvious story of black and white hats.

For the game’s most interesting feature, the settlement building mechanic is excellent, well-implemented and a lot of fun. But Bethesda’s refusal to fully commit to even having it in the game until way too late for the rest of the game to reflect it means it feels undersold, more of an optional add-on than an integral part of the game. It leaves a huge amount of possibilities on the table. The idea of changing the game map and world to suit your character and chosen faction is a fantastic one, with huge potential for changing the whole approach to open-world gaming, something Bethesda have needed to do for some time. But as a feature it’s left underdeveloped and feeling cosmetic. Hopefully in Starfield, The Elder Scrolls VI and the inevitable Fallout 5, Bethesda find a way of developing the concept further and fulfilling more of that promise.

As it stands Fallout 4 feels a little hard done-by. In many respects it’s a more fun and enjoyable game than Skyrim, and certainly a game that gives even more freedom and power to the player. It’s true that it doesn’t really live up to its potential, but for a few dozen hours it can be fun to wander through the Boston Commonwealth, set the world to rights and build your own vision of the post-post apocalypse. Maybe Fallout 4 would feel stronger if it didn’t have the greater narrative complexity and weirder atmosphere of the Mojave Wasteland looming over its shoulder, but that’s a tale for another time.

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She Saved the World...a Lot: A BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER Retrospective

Originally airing between 1997 and 2003 (and loosely based on a 1992 movie), Buffy the Vampire Slayer was one of the most popular genre TV shows of the 1990s. Created and produced by Joss Whedon, the show spawned a larger franchise – the “Buffyverse” – which came to incorporate novels, video and board games and a canonical, eleven-year comic series which continued the story from the TV show. It also spawned a spin-off show, Angel, which ran from 1999 to 2004. Almost every book, TV show and movie featuring supernatural creatures in a modern setting published since 1997, from The Dresden Files to Sookie Stackhouse (itself adapted to TV as True Blood) to the Twilight series, lives in Buffy’s shadow.

Buffy started as a joke: Joss Whedon getting annoyed at yet another helpless young woman going down the wrong alley or trusting the wrong guy and getting killed by a (usually male) monster or serial killer. Working as a scriptwriter on the mega-hit sitcom Roseanne gave the very young Whedon some pull in Hollywood, so he wrote a spec script which started with the same scene, but this time the young woman defeats the monster and kills it in hand-to-hand combat. The resulting movie made some noise on release for its casting of the then-hot Luke Perry (from Beverly Hills 90210) and Kristy Swanson (seen as a potential up-and-comer) in the title role, and did okay at the box office. Whedon was unhappy with the final film, which had dramatically cut his script, removed most of the best lines and exorcised the final set-piece battle in which the school gym is spectacularly blown up. He was also extremely unhappy with Donald Sutherland’s performance and felt his vision for the film had been butchered, turned more into a comedy than the comedy-horror hybrid he’d envisaged. He moved on, becoming a script doctor working on films such as Twister, Speed and Toy Story, and tried to forget about the experience.

Unexpectedly, 20th Century Fox didn’t forget about it. The movie had performed perfunctorily at the box office but picked up a long tail on home video and rental, making a pleasing amount of money and working as a kitsch cult favourite, although not enough to justify a film sequel. Along with the film’s producers they worked on the idea of turning the film into an ongoing TV series instead and invited Joss back to write for the show and run it. Whedon agreed, surprising many in the business as he turned his back on the lucrative world of movies for TV, where he had much greater creative control instead. Whedon’s last film script at this time was the first draft of Alien: Resurrection, which was also butchered by the director and in rewrites, causing him to later remake the same idea (of a disparate crew of reluctant allies working on a transport ship in the future) as a TV show…but that’s another story.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer was produced by Fox but aired on the WB network, where it picked up very strong audience figures for the young channel. The show was a near-instant success, propelling its young and photogenic cast onto the covers of magazines worldwide. More startlingly, it attracted a degree of critical acclaim. After a few ropy opening episodes, the Season 1 finale and then most of Season 2 saw a huge uptick in the show’s critical reception, as Whedon took the show in unexpectedly dark directions.

The doomed relatonship between Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and Angel (David Boreanaz) provided the main dramatic thrust for the first three seasons of the show.

The show’s premise is broadly similar to the movie’s (which, confusingly, in the show canon is referenced only in the form of Whedon’s original script, not the final product). Into every generation is born a Slayer, one teenage girl in all the world who has the strength, speed and stamina to fight against the vampires, demons and other forces of darkness. When one Slayer dies another is called. An organisation known as the Watchers’ Council identifies potential Slayers before they are called and helps train and prepare them for the role, but in the case of Buffy Summers they completely miss the signs. Buffy thus has to train and learn how to be a Slayer at the same time as dealing with ordinary teenage concerns: dating, studying and family trauma (her parents have recently divorced).

For the show, Buffy relocates to Sunnydale, California, a fictional town which just happens to be built on top of the Hellmouth, a portal leading to a myriad of unpleasant hell dimensions. The Hellmouth has been relatively quiet for seventy years (although there’s still more supernatural activity than normal there) but has recently become more active due to the presence of the Master, a vampire lord who has been imprisoned nearby. As the Master’s prison weakens, so the Hellmouth gets more active and more weird stuff starts happening.

Buffy is aided in her task of guarding the Hellmouth by a new Watcher, Rupert Giles, and two friends who discover Buffy’s secret in her first week in her new high school: Xander Harris and Willow Rosenberg. This foursome forms the core of the “Scooby Gang.” Over the course of the seven seasons, there are numerous additions to and departures from the Gang, but this core group remains (mostly) constant. The presence of the Hellmouth helps the writers explain why Buffy is constantly coming up against weird creatures in the same location, the show lacking the budget to have her constantly on the road travelling to trouble spots (as is suggested is the normal life of a Slayer); the WB’s later supernatural, demon-hunting series (now on the CW), Supernatural, actually employs this idea instead.

The show’s initial focus is on action, with Buffy fighting a new “monster of the week” each episode, including crazed Inca mummies, a giant praying mantis (probably the nadir of the show’s episodes) and – apparently – a serial-killing sentient puppet. However, she also has a recurring problem in the form of the Master’s plan to break free and open the Hellmouth, thus ending the world (or flooding it with demons). The show also gives Buffy a potential love interest, Angel, a “reformed” vampire who has had his soul restored by a gypsy curse. The twelve-episode first season culminates in a final battle where the Master is defeated.

Although the later seasons are much longer (22 episodes apiece), the first season establishes the show’s basic format: a threat – the “Big Bad” – is established in the opening episodes, which at first is in the background and vague and then grows more powerful, usually becoming prominent by mid-season, where there is usually a twist or reversal which ups the stakes and drives the back half of the season. Buffy also has personal challenges to face at the same time, involving romance, her academic career or her family life. With some variations, each season of the show broadly follows this arc, with occasional moderate changes in format driven by events such as Buffy and her friends graduating from high school to college at the end of Season 3. Whedon chose this format over the “one big story unfolding across the entire series” approach favoured by one of his favourite shows, Babylon 5, because it gave greater closure to each season (making it less problematic if the show was unexpectedly cancelled). However, he later acknowledged this was somewhat contrived – a new threat showing up in September that was normally defeated by May, with there being no threat at all over the summer – and seeded in more long-running story arcs into the later seasons, whilst also including a series-long, ongoing threat in the spin-off show Angel (that of evil law firm Wolfram & Hart).

Spike (James Marsters) was an early-series villain who returned later on as a friend and ally.

The reasons for Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s commercial and popular success were obvious: the young and photogenic cast and the stories mixing action, drama, soap opera elements and romance. The reasons for its critical success were initially less clear; contemporary young dramas such as Charmed, Roswell and Dawson’s Creek seemed to be somewhat more risibly received by adult critics whilst Buffy was wowing them as early as the end of Season 1. The reasons for this are numerous. The first is that Buffy is the rare show that completely masters tonal variation, a hallmark of Joss Whedon’s work (who also does the same thing in Angel, Firefly and the two Avengers movies he worked on). Buffy is an intense teenage character drama one minute, an all-out action show the next and then a comedy. During and after Season 4 it also developed a nice line in unexpected experimentation, with one episode taking place almost completely without dialogue and another being a musical filled with original songs referencing and pushing forwards the plot.

The second is that the show has pretty good dialogue. Whedon – 32 when the first season aired – knew he wasn’t “down with the kids” so developed his own language cadence and lexicon for the show which both felt real (the weird teenager in-references and jokes feel genuine) but weren’t based on real contemporary slang, also preventing the show from dating. More cleverly, he was also able to make Giles sound like a genuine English guy (thanks to Whedon spending three years in the UK as a teenager) and developed more elaborate and flowery dialogue for the vampire characters who had lived for centuries.

The third is that Buffy is self-aware, and usually the first to poke fun at itself. Its premise and even the name of the show are batty and weird, and it leans into it. The fact that all vampires seem to inexplicably learn kickboxing in the time between dying and raising from the grave is noted, and Buffy’s tendency to give wonderfully uplifting speeches but which then can get a bit repetitive becomes a recurring gag in the final season. Giles’s tendency to get immediately knocked out by whatever threat has arisen is also noted, with the other characters starting to worry he’ll “wake up in a coma.” For those who think metacommentary in a TV show is a new thing, watching twenty-three-year-old episodes where characters mock the dramatic angst and doomed tragedy of the Angel/Buffy relationship can be amusing.

The fourth reason is that Buffy is a metaphor, and a successful one. The show uses the vampires, werewolves and supernatural creatures as reflections and stand-ins for the traumas of life, at first applied to teenagers and later to life in general. An unpopular girl is so fed up at being ignored and lonely that she literally fades out of view and becomes completely invisible. The most popular girl in the year, Cordelia, is constantly being complimented and having sycophants hang on her every word, but is lonely and unhappy until joining Buffy’s crew gives her a sense of purpose and fulfilment (despite Buffy’s group being considered weird rejects and outcasts at school) because they are actually achieving something. In Season 2, Buffy loses her virginity to Angel, inadvertently breaking his curse and turning him back into a vicious, amoral killer, a nod at the “nice guys” who turn into arseholes the second they get what they want from the girl. More controversially, numerous young, lonely and male students are shown dabbling with various dark arts to kill or hurt their fellow students, often after being rejected by female crushes. One even pulls out a gun in school, although this is to kill himself rather than his classmates, but this was so problematic in the wake of the Columbine massacre that the episode was delayed by several months.

The metaphors are usually reasonably elegant, but occasionally get preachy: Willow’s addiction to using magic in Season 6 is a worthwhile storyline, but is clumsily presented, with Willow visiting “magic dens” where people get off on doing spells like they’re 1960s acid-trippers. This wasn’t so much “on the nose” as “snapping the nose clean off.” Faith’s third season descent into being a “bad girl” is also pretty clichéd, saved only by Eliza Dushku’s performance and her later redemptive arc on Angel (which then feeds back into Buffy’s final season).

The relationship between Tara (Amber Benson) and Willow (Alyson Hannigan) was extremely popular with viewers, and the resolution to it remains controversial.

As Buffy went on it matured, and the audience matured with it. The final three seasons (the sixth, in particular) are sometimes criticised for going “too dark,” with Buffy embarking on an inappropriate, creepy and mutually destructive relationship with the vampire Spike (who, unlike Angel, doesn’t have a soul) and several popular supporting characters being killed off. In the case of Buffy’s mother, this felt necessary to drive a new wave of storylines about Buffy’s independence and making her stand alone, but in the case of the extremely popular Tara it felt less justified and more gratuitous (and problematic, with Tara being a then-rare example of a lesbian character in a happy relationship). 

The addition of Buffy’s “sister” (actually a magical construct) Dawn to the show also upset some fans, who felt it added an element of soap opera to the show and also contributed to the ever-expanding cast, which added some story variety but also dissipated the tight focus on the core foursome. Whedon certainly seemed to have issues jettisoning actors he’d befriended once their main contribution to the story was done, having the likes of Oz, Anya and even Spike hanging around for maybe a season too long apiece as he tried to work out what to do with them. The final season, which has about a dozen new recurring characters (between multiple villains, new allies and the “potential Slayers” Buffy takes under her wing) showing up, is particularly guilty of this. Another element which has aged poorly is Xander’s borderline sexism towards girls in the first season which thankfully improves dramatically in the second.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer isn’t perfect, but it’s one of those shows where the imperfections make it more interesting. It’s a show that tried to wear several hats simultaneously – action, comedy, romance, horror – and actually succeeded in doing so. It could be funny, scary and thought-provoking, and occasionally (in the case of the harrowing Season 5 episode The Body, comfortably one of the best episodes of television ever made) genuinely tear-jerking. It was also a show way ahead of its time in many respects, with the series doing metacommentary, genre savviness and social commentary arguably better than most shows attempting the same today.

Buffy has aged like a fine wine (apart from some of the dodgier effects and a half-arsed HD remaster which should be avoided like the plague) and is still richly compelling and entertaining television, the forerunner of so many modern shows, books and movies which have never quite managed to hit all the same notes simultaneously. If you’ve never seen it, I recommend giving it a whirl, and if it’s been a while since you last visited Sunnydale, you might be surprised at how welcoming the Hellmouth can be on a return trip.

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The Power and the Glory: A Rome Retrospective

Julius Caesar (Ciaran Hinds) returning victorious after the Battle of Pharsalus.

HBO’s Rome is quite possibly the most underrated show in that broadcaster’s canon of very, very fine TV programmes. Airing for just two seasons and 22 episodes in 2005 and 2007, Rome arrived in a blaze of publicity, hyped as the most expensive ongoing TV show ever made, a cross-ocean co-production between HBO and the BBC. Critical indifference and declining viewing figures saw the BBC pull out of funding the series after its second year and HBO, uncharacteristically panicking, chose to cancel the show. A later critical reappraisal and very healthy DVD and Blu-Ray box set sales made HBO realise they’d made a terrible mistake, but it was far too late to remount the project. The actors had scattered to numerous other projects and the moment was lost.

Still, although Rome’s time in this world was brief, it was certainly memorable, and more and more people are rediscovering the show every year. Its brief run is also nowadays a strength: convincing someone to watch a show that lasted for eight or ten or fifteen seasons and hundreds of episodes is tough, but 22? You can bash that out in a couple of weekends, tops.

Rome tells the story of one of the most pivotal moments in pre-modern history: the transformation of the Roman Republic, a nation without a king, into the Roman Empire, whose ruler was the most powerful human being in European history this side of Napoleon Bonaparte. It tells the story of Gaius Julius Caesar and his second-in-command Mark Antony, and the woman they both loved, Queen Cleopatra of Egypt. It tells the story of Caesar’s family, the Julii, and their initial friendly relations with another family, the Junii, that turned sour and ultimately led to the most famous son of that house, Marcus Junius Brutus, betraying Caesar in a moment of profound infamy. It is the story of Caesar’s nephew Octavian, a studious and quiet boy who will ultimately become the most powerful man on Earth. It is also the story of a dozen or so historical figures of only marginally less importance: the great orator Cicero, the senators Cato and Cassius, and Pompey Magnus, the great general and hero of the Republic who saw his formidable reputation eclipsed by that of his former best friend, Caesar.

Mark Antony (James Purefoy) and Cleopatra of Egypt (Lyndsey Marshal).

If Rome was all of those things alone, it would still be a triumph, but the show’s masterstroke was to be more than that. Rome tells the story of the rich and the powerful primarily through the eyes of two ordinary soldiers: Lucius Vorenus and Titus Pullo. Surprisingly, these are not total fabrications, being the only two common soldiers mentioned by Caesar in name in his memoir of the Gallic Wars. With virtually nothing else known about them, though, the show’s writers felt happy to invent their family backgrounds, their relationship and how they interacted with Caesar and the other mighty figures of Roman history over a period of twenty-five years. Vorenus and Pullo are our Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (only somewhat less likely to die), our ground-level eyes on this epic period in history. They’re also our eyes into everyday life in Rome for its ordinary citizens, freedmen, and slaves. There is a tendency in history to get caught up in the soap-opera like events of the rulers and their families, and exciting things like battles and political intrigue, but Rome remembers the little people, the man and woman on the street who wield tremendous power of their own: at several key moments in the series, the opinion of the street results in major shifts in the balance of power.

The show also delves into religion and how the different myriad cultures that make up the Empire interact with one another. Rome was not a monolithic bloc, but instead a grand melting pot of dozens of faiths, kingdoms, tribes and beliefs. One relatively minor character, a Jewish horse-trader and part-time thug named Timon, grows in importance as the complex interactions between Rome and its client-state in Judaea rise to the fore.

Titus Pullo (Ray Stevenson) and Lucius Vorenus (Kevin McKidd) of the XIII Legion, the ground-level soldiers through whose eyes much of the series unfolds.

Each episode of Rome is a mixture, often very cleverly-constructed, of historical fact, dramatic invention and family soap opera. It may be instructive to give a summary of the very first episode of the series, The Stolen Eagle, to explain how this works:

The episode opens in 52 BC. The army of Gaius Julius Caesar is besieging the Gallic fortress-town of Alesia, where King Vercingetorix has taken refuge with his army. A much larger Gallic relief army has arrived but, anticipating their arrival, Caesar has built an enormous defensive fortification stretching for twenty miles right around Alesia. The lines come under attack from the relief army and also from Vercingetorix’s forces within Alesia, but the Romans defeat the vastly numerically superior Gauls and take Vercingetorix prisoner. Key in the battle is the discipline and valour of Centurion Lucius Vorenus of the 13th Legion, although he is disgruntled with his subordinate Titus Pullo, who lacks battle discipline and frequently breaks ranks to seek personal glory in the field. Pullo ends up in the stockade for striking Vorenus mid-combat.

Back in Rome, the Senate is divided about Caesar’s constant stream of military victories over the preceding eight years. Caesar has brought all of Gaul under Roman control, extending the Republic’s borders and creating vast new provinces to be controlled by his allies. Caesar’s fame has also grown through his brief and mostly pointless, but still unprecedented, military sojourn on the island of Britain. Caesar has won him and his army honour, glory and gold, and his popularity with the common people is at an all-time high. The Senate is divided into two parties: the Populares, who support Caesar, and the conservative Optimates, who are wary of him. Holding the line in the middle is a neutral faction led by the noted orator and speaker Cicero, who privately sympathises with the Optimates but publicly will not speak against Caesar. The Optimates turn to Pompey Magnus for aid. Pompey is a great military hero in his own right but his conservatism and decision to remain in Rome rather than rule over his own provinces in Spain in person has made him popular with the Senate. Pompey is a close friend and ally of Caesar’s, not to mention his son-in-law by marriage, and refuses to countenance betraying him, despite being troubled by Caesar’s apparent idolisation by the masses and his own troops.

The Newsreader (Ian McNeice), who relates the important events of the day and stands in as a useful font of exposition.

In a similar boat is Marcus Brutus, a young man who looks up to Caesar as a mentor but is also a staunch supporter of the Republic who is suspicious of any one man who puts his ambitions ahead of the good of the state. Brutus is a direct descendant of the man who, centuries earlier, killed the last King of Rome and founded the Republic. Brutus’s mother Servillia is also a former lover of Caesar’s, and yearns for his return from war. These loyalties to Caesar have aligned their family, the Junii, with Caesar’s own Julii, the matriarch of which is Caesar’s niece Atia, a hedonistic but also ruthless woman who is an occasional lover of Caesar’s second-in-command, the charismatic but short-tempered Mark Antony. Initial friendly relations start to turn sour, however, as the somewhat reserved and intelligent Servillia finds herself constantly clashing with Atia, whom she considers her intellectual and social inferior. Atia also causes division with her own family: her hot temper and quick decisions befuddle her son Octavian, a clever, reserved and logically-minded boy, and annoy her daughter, the prim and proper Octavia. The feud between the Junii and Julii begins to become more serious when Atia gazumps Servillia at a horse auction to secure the finest steed in Rome. She then sends Octavian to Caesar’s camp with the horse as a gift. The move appears to be thwarted when Octavian is captured by brigands in Gaul, although in reality they are agents in the employ of Pompey.

Pompey’s close alliance with Caesar is tested when his wife, Caesar’s daughter, dies in childbirth (along with the child). Caesar moves quickly to have Atia force Octavia divorce her husband (to Octavia’s distress) and promise Octavia in marriage to Pompey. Pompey is tempted and beds her, but is also being courted by Scipio, an enemy of Caesar’s, who offers instead his daughter Cornelia.

Meanwhile, one of Caesar’s eagle standards has been captured by Gallic raiders and Lucius Vorenus is ordered to recover the eagle by any means necessary. He recruits Titus Pullo from the stockade, reasoning he is the most expendable man in the legion, and they set out to find the eagle. After subjecting local villagers to a mixture of torture and bribery, they learn the identity of the thieves; by happy coincidence, they find not only the eagle but also the captured Octavian. Returning both to Caesar earns them the friendship and respect of Octavian, and the notice of Caesar. Pullo, who values personal loyalty, is very happy but Vorenus, who is morally opposed to Caesar’s growing cult of personality, is less-pleased. Antony and Caesar recognise Pompey’s agent and behead him, sending the head to Pompey to let him know his plan has been discovered. Furious, Pompey marries Cornelia and breaks all ties with Caesar, throwing his lot in with the Optimates.

Atia (Polly Walker), the ruthless matriarch of the Julii family.

As we can see from this, a typical episode of Rome is extremely busy, and does several things at once. It relates an actual historical event, it explains the personal, political and military ramifications of that event and it also has invented, original drama to keep the viewer interested. There’s also an element of simplification involved: the Optimate and Populare parties are never named as such in the show (instead being described as the Caesarean and Republican factions) a lot of the fine detail of the period is missing. For example, Caesar and Pompey are described as co-consuls, but this is inaccurate: it was Caesar wanting to be consul after his return from war, as he might expect having won a series of huge military victories, and the Senate’s refusal to grant him the position that primarily triggered his rebellion against the Senate. There is also some more fantastical invention: Octavian was never kidnapped by Gallic brigands and rescued by two common Roman soldiers. There’s also some action, sex and violence: episodes of Rome can vary on how much of these things they contain, with some episodes being very bloody and others not at all, but generally some of these events happen to maintain viewer interest (how useful that actually is remain debateable).

Rome’s success was grasping the complexity of Roman life and getting not just the bare facts but the everyday feel of that lifestyle across to the audience rather than begging bogged down in detail. One interesting fresh approach, in marked contrast to almost every previous Roman film and TV drama, was showing Rome as a colourful city, the beautiful stone and marble buildings being covered in gaudy paint and obscene graffiti, as was really the case. The Roman military’s iron discipline, such as the arrangement so that each line of infantry will only fight for four minutes before being rotated to the back of the line for half an hour of rest, is also depicted. Unfortunately, despite Rome’s titanic budget, the show frequently wimped out on major battle scenes. The only battle they really had a go at depicting was Philippi in Season 2 and even that is a somewhat bare-bones affair compared to say Lord of the Rings or what HBO achieved on the later seasons of Game of Thrones. As a result, despite Pullo and Vorenus being soldiers, we very rarely seem them actually fighting as soldiers. More frequently they are seen operating almost as henchmen or mercenaries, fighting in very small groups and skirmishes.

The show also, by necessity, lowballs the timeline. The show opens in 52 BC and ends in 27 BC, spanning a period of twenty-five years, but virtually no attempt is made to show the passage of time, aside from the recasting of Octavian with a slightly older actor in Season 2 (Vorenus and Pullo, for example, start and end the show as thirty-somethings). There are also wild inconsistencies in the aging of the children in the show: Vorenus’s son is shown as a newborn in the second episode but appears to be around 10 in the series finale, whilst Caesar and Cleopatra’s son is conceived, born and apparently grows to around 11 or 12 in later episodes. For those who enjoy paying attention to the details, these things are grating, but in the grand scheme of things they’re not very important.

What is important is the characterisation (excellent), politics (rife with intrigue) and how Rome portrays the culture in both the macro and micro, the lavish detail given to religious ceremonies, feasting customs and the architecture of the city, recreated in a lavish open-air set in the Cinecittá Studio in Rome (near where Ben-Hur was filmed). The set was damaged by fire in 2007 but is mostly still standing, and has been used for other productions since filming ended (most notably the Fires of Pompeii episode of Doctor Who). This epic scope was remarkable for television, and arguably not matched until Game of Thrones hit screens four years later.

Octavian (Simon Woods), the boy who would be emperor, and Marcus Agrippa (Allen Leech), a constantly-underestimated young man who turns into one of the greatest generals of antiquity.

Rome is also interesting for how matter-of-fact it is. At different points in the series, both Pullo and Vorenus do things which are deeply amoral, if not outright evil, and also perform great acts of self-sacrifice heroism. Mark Antony is scheming, ruthless and selfish, but also capable of tremendous generosity to the (tiny number of) people who earn his respect, including Atia and Vorenus. Caesar’s motivations, probably the most fiercely-debated in history, are left pleasingly ambiguous in the series.

Could Rome one day return? Perhaps. A few years ago, HBO began developing a new TV series based on Robert Graves’ novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God, which would have used the still-standing Rome sets and would have effectively worked as a sequel to that series, picking up on Octavian as a much older man and the misadventures of his heirs, the insane Caligula and stuttering Claudius. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to take off. A shame, as the power and glory and rich worldbuilding of Rome deserves to be seen on screens once more.

If you haven’t seen the show yet, do yourself a favour and check it out. Beyond the veneer of nudity and violence, it’s a compelling political and character drama, set against a rich backdrop, and well worth viewing.


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Revisiting the Wasteland: FALLOUT 3 and the Art of War Never Changing

You never forget your first time in the Wasteland, and for many millions of people that first time was in the video game Fallout 3. After an odd half-hour in which your character is born in an underground vault, has a rubbish birthday party and then a frantic escape from said vault (possibly killing your best friend's dad along the way), you emerge, blinking and startled, to behold a vast, desolate wilderness. Sitting on the distant horizon are a cluster of buildings, clearly recognisable among which is the needle of the Washington Monument and the partially-collapsed dome of the Capitol Building. The scale of the landscape takes your breath away and must rank among the most iconic moments in all of gaming.

The Capital Wasteland in all its blasted glory.

Fallout 3 was released on 28 October 2008 and marks an important moment in the history of gaming, for both Bethesda Softworks and the wider Fallout franchise. The first game in the series - Fallout (1997) - had been developed and released by Interplay's internal RPG development over a full decade earlier. It was a top-down, isometric RPG with a strong focus on character development and turn-based combat. The retrofuturistic, post-apocalyptic setting and iconic factions such as the Brotherhood of Steel and Super Mutants caught the attention of tens of thousands of fans, and resulted in a true cult classic.

The game's creator, Tim Cain, went off to other projects so a newcomer named Chris Avellone was drafted in to create the sequel: Fallout 2 (1998). Fallout 2 had a lot more humour and a darker, more adult tone than the first game whilst introducing new factions like the Enclave. It was also well-reviewed and sold reasonably well, but it was massively overshadowed by the release a few weeks later of Baldur's Gate by BioWare (and published by Interplay). Black Isle were drafted into making Dungeons and Dragons games using BioWare's Infinity Engine, and the Fallout franchise fell by the wayside. Another studio developed a so-so tactical combat spin-off game, Fallout Tactics (2001) before Black Isle finally put Fallout 3 into development, giving it the code-name "Van Buren". Development was well underway when Interplay finally collapsed altogether in 2003, halting work on all games in progress.

Liberty Prime, a robot programmed to "destroy communism", remains the game's comic highlight.

Meanwhile, the game studio Bethesda Softworks had been establishing a name for itself in the 1990s with sports games and porting games for other studios from one format to another. Getting bored of that, they unexpectedly switched to making epic fantasy RPGs with the well-received Arena (1994) and Daggerfall (1996), the first two games in their Elder Scrolls series. They attempted to expand the universe with two spin-off games, Battlespire (1997) and Redguard (1998) which were both critical failures and left the studio teetering on the brink. Some much-needed recapitalisation later, they decided to go all-in on one game which would be their make-or-break moment. That game was Morrowind (2002), the third RPG in the Elder Scrolls series. Morrowind was a huge hit, especially on console (it was Bethesda's first console game, getting a port from the PC to the original X-Box), and Microsoft asked for a cutting-edge sequel to help sell their X-Box 360 follow-up console. This resulted in Oblivion (2006), which was a monster smash hit and transformed Bethesda's fortunes altogether.

However, in 2004 Oblivion was still in development and Bethesda were faced with the prospect of laying off some of the pre-production and design staff who were no longer required with the game in full development. Feeling this was a waste of talent and resources, Bethesda decided to start development on a second game, which would allow the main team to transfer over as soon as work on Oblivion was completed. It was also decided that this should be a different franchise to Elder Scrolls, so the designers would not get bored of working constantly on the same series. Bethesda's creative game director Todd Howard was asked what type of game he'd like to make and he suggested a post-apocalyptic setting, "like Fallout". Initially the game was going to be a "spiritual successor" to Fallout, but Bethesda's management decided to investigate the rights and situation and discovered that Interplay were on the brink of bankruptcy. To help save them, Bethesda offered to buy the rights to the entire Fallout franchise from them. Interplay agreed, allowing Bethesda to make a brand-new Fallout game.

The White House's Christmas 2277 decorations left something to be desired.

Work on Fallout 3 began whilst work on Oblivion was still ongoing, and used the same GameBryo Engine. Early on the developers ran into some technical issues. Oblivion, famously, looked amazing on release in 2006 but the developers had carefully used mountains, hills and trees to prevent players from seeing too much of the environment in any one go, saving video memory. The game could also be on any scale it liked, as players lacked a real-world equivalent to compare things to, complete with small medieval towns and constrained cities. Fallout 3 on the other hand was based on a real location, the distinctly un-mountainous and rather large DC metropolitan area. This pushed the developers to the limit of their technical ability as they attempted to make the game look vast, epic and convincing whilst also not crashing every five minutes. A few compromises later - including the green tint to everything to reduce the number of colours on screen and the dividing up of DC proper into distinct, small zones connected by metro tunnels - they had the makings of a memorable game.

Fallout 3 was released to widespread critical acclaim and commercial success in 2008, although fans of the first two Fallout games were largely unimpressed, complaining of a "dumbing down" of story, world and character in the pursuit of money. Their complaints are not entirely invalid, and Fallout 3 has some significant problems with worldbuilding, dialogue, general writing and quest design, and these should not be dismissed.

Deathclaws remain the game's most potent threat.

But what Fallout 3 did better than the first two games in the series - and arguably the three that have followed - is atmosphere. There's a sparseness to Fallout 3 which remains uncanny and strange. Fallout: New Vegas has a map which is more linear, directing players along somewhat (but not totally) similar roads. Fallout 4 is a much more densely-clustered map where you can barely walk six feet without tripping over three quests, a settlement (which needs your help) or a fight between opposing factions. Fallout 76 is a heavily-bugged multiplayer fiasco which we needn't go into here.

But Fallout 3 is a weirdly lonely game. There's plenty of points of interest on the map and random mutated monsters and raiders wandering around, but there's also quite a lot of quiet trudging across the landscape between distantly-glimpsed structures. Something Bethesda had teased in Oblivion, but really delivered in Fallout 3, was the idea of seeing something intriguing in the distance and being able to walk over to it and investigate further. Fallout 3 does this by placing the Capitol and the Washington Monument on the horizon the second you leave Vault 101 early in the game, and your path will eventually lead to those structures (shades of Half-Life 2, where you see the huge Citadel in the opening moments of the game and your entire journey will eventually loop round and lead you back there). The game did allow you to play with a companion character, but given their extreme fragility (at least until you meet the extremely tough Fawkes), it was often less hassle to travel by yourself.

Mods have dramatically improved Fallout 3's appearance by replacing the game's original muddy textures with 4K versions, revamping the lighting engine and improving everything from draw distance to the models for bottles. They also increase the amount of video memory that can be used, hugely improving performance.

This sparseness is down to a surprising paucity of quests: Fallout 3 has only 59 quests, approximately half the number of New Vegas and one-third that of Fallout 4. That's actually not a major criticism, as in Fallout 3 you're spending less time checking off boxes and more time exploring for your own enjoyment, ransacking buildings for supplies and roaming off the beaten path to check out what appears to be an abandoned power station or hospital. Arguably not since STALKER: Shadows of Chernobyl had been released almost two years earlier had a game put you in such a desolate, haunted landscape and allowed you to explore it as you will (and STALKER, despite being a far more hardcore and tougher game, was considerably smaller in scope).

The game also enjoyed a terrific musical score by Inon Zur, which took in everything from an epic, stirring orchestral motif to bleaker, more haunting moments mixed in with hits from the 1930s and 1940s.

Holy foreshadowing!

Fallout 3's writing was not great, but it's easy to forget that it did have some splendidly inventive quests, some of them liberally borrowed from pop culture. The slaves with exploding neck collars are taken from the movie Battle Royale (2000), the quest with the giant fire ants is based on classic pulp SF movie Them! (1954) and a VR-gone-badly-wrong black-and-white sequence is inspired by the movie Pleasantville (1998). Liberty Prime, a gigantic "anti-communism" battle droid, is a clear nod at Transformers with a design homaging The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). The society made up completely of kids at Little Lamplight seems to be an inverse version of The Lord of the Flies (as it appears to be the most stable town in the game, even though it's best not to ask where the fresh kids come from).

Other elements of the game have aged better than expected - the VATS-driven combat, which emulates the turn-based approach of the first two games, remains splendidly punchy and gory, although trying to play Fallout 3 like a first person shooter rapidly turns into an exercise in frustration - but others have not, particularly graphically. Thankfully, the hard-working modding community has made a plethora of mods which dramatically improve the game's appearance, adding 4K textures, removing that weird green tint from everything and improving lighting and draw distance to more realistic levels (as well as easing the game's weirdly restrictive memory limit, that left the game still chugging for people with monster graphics cards). I'll address how to add those to the game in a future post.

I spent 35 hours replaying Fallout 3, completing the base game and the Operation Anchorage and Broken Steel DLCs (the latter of which is essential to get rid of the original's diabolically bad ending), although I still have most of the map left unexplored (including areas I never visited in my original 2008-09 playthrough). I think I'll keep a-wandering through the Wasteland a while longer. Fallout 3 is not the best Fallout game by any means or (these days) the most approachable, but it does have a unique, haunting atmosphere and an eerie beauty which the other games lack. It also took a niche gaming series that definitely did not deserve to remain obscure and turned it into one of the biggest names in video game history, and in that sense it remains inarguably the most important game in the franchise.

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