To not bury the lead: it's quite a mixed bag. Most of that bag is full of manure. There will be spoilers because fuck this show. The actors are all decent to Walton Goggins, there are multiple industrial strength problems with the plot itself as well as a fundamental lack of understanding the lore of the series. This is to be expected as Bethesda bought the series, they didn't build it. But even now, all the brains behind Elder Scrolls inception are long gone so everything going forward is going to be a bastardization of either property. But I digress.
If you asked me, the defining traits of the Fallout series are gallows humor and extreme moral grayness. That's not to say there aren't some purely bad elements like various cannibal cults and raider gangs, escaped convicts, and the Master.
The first problem with this show is that they hired Walton Goggins and he's not the lead. It was always going to be the story of a vault dweller fish out of water into the wide and wacky wasteland, you want your best actor to portray that. The girl they have doing that, let's call her Rey is looking for her dad. The element ripped straight from Fallout 3. In a nod to Fallout 1 the water chip breaks at some point as well, but because Rey isn't around to see it and it's never mentioned again it's not really a ticking clock. It was played off as a gag and ignored from there on. But that was vault 13's ailment, not vault 33. It was even mentioned in Fallout 1 that vaults were equipped with multiple water chips for redundancy purposes and in Fallout 2 further noted that 13 was given an extra GECK instead of an extra water chip. And this is half-remembered lore from 20 years ago. I know this series better than the creators of this show do. So the logical end gag for the guy saying the water chip is toast is "well, go get the spare water chip and install it! What did you think Vault Tec would not give us a spare?"
This is especially dumb because we find out that Vault 32 and 33 are essentially Uber-Control vaults, meaning best possible equipment and supplies because they are the vaults Management (tm) will be managing. Meaning Vault-Tec executives. Also Vault 32 is dead so 33 could easily just take their chip and continue on unabated. Instead the non-existent false semi-crisis that is never mentioned again is exacerbated by the wish to repopulate Vault 32 which is unnecessary and stupid. In fact the existence of multiple vaults semi-connected together is stupid at onset. Why not just 1 big vault with a floor that requires security clearance to access? Because the show's writers are fucking stupid.
And I haven't even stepped out of the vault yet to explain how the rest of the world is fucked.
Let's start with Ghouls. All ghouls were created when the bombs fell full stop. There were no ghouls created after the fact, and they were not concocted, they were essentially an accident. An unforeseen by product of destroying the planet. Possibly an evolution of the human race to meet the new environment. But they are all immortal. I've always thought feral ghouls were stupid. They never really had good rules for existing, but in Fallout 3 and 4, there were no risks of non-feral ghouls becoming feral ghouls. They were distinctly different subspecies. The ghouls don't all take medication indefinitely to maintain non-feral nature. It'd take too long to develop this sort of thing and there'd definitely be a shortage with no production and all usage for 200+ years by a sizable portion of the populace. They'd all be feral ghouls now unless humanity actually got it's shit together and then you're not in a post-apocalypse, you're in a new age.
And some asshole who fucks chickens in his spare time wouldn't know a magic formula to mix together to turn someone into a ghoul. That's not even the process of turning someone into a ghoul. It's completely stupid. At least the kid in the fridge in Fallout 4 went through the actual process. Though he would also be dead because Ghouls still gotta eat. And apparently now Ghouls are all fucking Deadpool because getting a magic Ghoul serum makes you regenerate a crippling foot injury in seconds.
This entire piece of lore was written to make Walton Goggins character look weak in some way. Being an addict, even being an addict by requirement of survival, is weakness. You don't live 200 years of hard wasteland life without being a badass. They had to counteract that because white male can't be strong in this day and age. Woke hollywood bullshit even infects Amazon and definitely infects Bethesda.
Let's move on to the Brotherhood of Steel. No, that's not really fair. Let's move onto retro-futurism post apocalypse of the vision of the year 2000 by the year 1950. Let's cross that image with an actual post apocalypse of the modern era. Regardless of circumstances, that Venn diagram does not, anywhere, include non-binary, transsexuals, pronouns, etc. The human race is in survival mode, if you're not willing to use the tools you were born with, you'd be ostracized and even more likely simply killed for being a waste of flesh and therefore resources to maintain that flesh's existence. At the very least you'd be seen as mentally deranged and asked to go fuck off into the wasteland. The Brotherhood of Steel wouldn't take you. Literally nobody would but a like-minded cabal of non-procreating nutters, which inside of 10 minutes would be murdered by raiders or worse.
Why do I mention this? Because there is a "they" in the Brotherhood of Steel. And "they"s pronoun is only used once. I caught it, most (all?) reviewers seemingly didn't. This modern day shit should not be in the post-apocalyptic retro-future of Fallout. Same with the (implied) lesbian shopkeeper. Lesbianism ends with the world. Gayness ends with the world. The species itself uses gayness to curb procreation due to overpopulation. Call it god or science. It doesn't matter, either way that sort of thing evaporates with 80+% of the population being either dead, non-procreating ghouls, non-procreating Super Mutants, or non-procreating Synths (should you use any Bethesda canon which I don't recommend because it's stupid). Everyone left will be straight. The species requires it to survive. Those that aren't will be correctly ostracized from civilization. Straight up, they aren't worth the resources it takes to keep them alive at that point.
That's why in the first two Fallout games, the good ones, there are virtually no gay or trans people (possibly straight up none at all - I don't remember any). It's not a thing for a society in survival mode. Being gay or trans is a luxury. It's for a society with a surplus. It's an errant behavior only achievable when a species is at or above saturation of it's environment. I'm not saying gay or trans people shouldn't exist in our current society, I'm saying their representation is outright nonsense in a post-apocalypse. They would rightly not exist in that instance. Especially in a retro-futurism like Fallout.
Ok, now that I'll be labelled a homo and trans phobe, time to add racist. Discount Finn (yes he's Finn, I don't care what his character's name is) is an awful character and not only shouldn't exist, shouldn't be a protagonist for any show, shouldn't be considered heroic, but isn't even anti-heroic. He's just the fucking worst. I would have preferred following Michael Rappaport playing a coward BOS member after selfishly getting his scribe killed, because at least theoretically he did something at some point to deserve the armor he died in. Plus Michael Rappaport is an objectively better actor. Pay the extra money and make him the character even if you're gonna modern day his ass and make him a pansy wimp in BOS Power Armor. Because he's essentially the same as Finn, but in a more interesting position than Finn. Finn is a useless coward moron loser that is beat by a fucking 110 lb They/Them to scribehood which makes him the biggest fucking waste of BOS recruits ever, should they be the Army analog the writers show them to be. Why would you want to follow this fucking pussy other than DEI requirements to get DEI money? I think there are better black actors who could portray less fucking lame black characters. I would like to have seen this character's story as a follow up or flash back on a season 3 bottle episode, as long as he's played by a better actor or at least portraying a character worth giving a shit about.
So yeah. Season 1 is very mixed. All the good stuff is very surface level. Production design and acting. Cinematography. All on point. But the plot and characters are all garbage. They should seriously fire everyone in the writer's room and start again. You only need 1 main character. You can bring more in over time. Think Walking Dead.
