The first season of Amazon’s Fallout series packed an incredible amount of lore into just eight episodes, but there’s still so much ground to cover. A lot of the franchise’s iconic wildlife like mirelurks, centaurs, and cazadors were missing, and we only got a small tease for deathclaws in the last episode. There were no super mutants or nightkin, and as far as we know there weren’t any synths either, but you never know with that one.
The one creature I’m glad we didn’t see in Fallout season one, and the one I hope weneversee, is aliens. As funny as it might be to see how Lucy, Maximus, and the Ghoul would react to little green men, introducing aliens to the show would distract from what Fallout is all about. It’s bad enough that the games have increasingly embraced the existence of aliens in the lore over the years, the show doesn’t need to acknowledge them at all.
Aliens aren’t as central to the stories of Fallout as ghouls and super mutants, but they’ve been present in the games going all the way back to the beginning. The original Fallout featured a crashed flying saucer with alien skeletons inside, while Fallout 2 explained that certain technologies used in the Wasteland, like bio med gel and the military A.I. program Skynet, were based on alien technology.
Once Bethesda took over development on the series, aliens became a much bigger presence in the world. Fallout 3 teases an alien encounter with another crashed spaceship hidden in the desert, while the DLC expansion Mothership Zeta significantly expands on the history of the aliens, known as Zetans.
Zetans first made contact with humans during the space race in the 1960s when a USSA space capsule and its pilot were abducted. Following this event, the United States officially recognized the existence of aliens. For whatever reason, the Zetans remained in Earth’s orbit on their mothership for hundreds of years after the Great War. When the Lone Wanderer gets abducted in Mothership Zeta, they discover many other human abductees from various time periods, including a 15th-century samurai.
Zetans show up in New Vegas, Fallout 4, and Fallout 76 as well, and 76 also has an entirely separate alien species called Flatwoods monsters, based on real-life Appalachian folklore. The alien blaster pistol is also one of the best weapons in Fallout 4 and New Vegas, which elevates the brief encounter with the Zetan pilot from easter egg to important story moment in any playthrough.
I never enjoy being reminded that aliens exist in Fallout. I can see how they fit into the mid-century atompunk aesthetic in a pulpy, Mars Attacks kind of way, but they feel like a distraction for the themes of Fallout I’m actually interested in. Fallout is at its best when it’s critiquing consumerism and satirizing the greed and excess of post-industrial society.Bethesda’s Todd Howard even said in an interviewthis week that new entries will necessarily take place in the States because “part of the Fallout shtick is on the American naivete.” An understatement if there ever was one.
As a storytelling device, there’s a way to use aliens to extend that critique - Marvel’s Mojoverse comes to mind - but Fallout’s Zetans provide no substantial commentary. The show has so far done well to focus on the social themes of Fallout, and as mad cap and idiosyncratic as it can be at times, the story just doesn’t have room for silly space men with laser pistols.
At least, I hope not. The temptation to exploit every corner of the Fallout mythos will only increase as the series goes on and exhausts the main crowd pleasers - we’ve already made it to New Vegas, after all. A Zetan subplot might be good fan service, and it would certainly invite a lot of discussion, but would it help us reach a better understanding of humanity in the Wasteland? Would aliens give us better insight into the way that ambition and hyper-atomization in society can lead to our own destruction? Can they explain why war never changes? Probably not.
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