Summary
Amazon’s highly anticipatedFallouttelevision series premiered on the Prime video streaming service on April 10. The entire first season dropped at once and the show has received exuberant reviews by many fans of the games.Fans have been catching referencesto the games left and right, and a new one has been highlighted.
Based on one of the biggest franchises in gaming, fans have speculated about a live-actionFalloutadaptation for years, raising high expectations for the new series produced by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy ofWestworldfame. The series has receivedpraise from ardentFalloutfans, as well as from casual fans with little to no knowledge of the franchise. It’s a difficult knife’s edge balancing act to please both parties that the TV series has seemingly pulled off.
In a show filled to the brim with references to the games,Twitter user NoSleepCosplay has sharedthat the TV series features their work (pictured below) in a cameo in episode 2 of season 1. The moment happens shortly after the show’s protagonist, Vault Dweller Lucy (Ella Purnell), departs the vault for the hostile wasteland environment outside. She stares at a broken-down assaultron model half-buried in the sand, a sign of the unforgiving wilderness to come, before pressing further on.
The assaultron is a deadly model of robot designed for combat that first appeared inFallout 4. This marks the first and (so far) only appearance of one in the TV series. The defunct assaultron, lovingly named MOX-13 by the cosplayers, was not too heavily modified for the show, even featuring the design’s original “Nukelanta” sticker. The cosplay account also shared that executives from the TV series reached out to them to ask for the assaultron’s use in the show.
Despite being the only assaultron sighting in the live-actionFalloutadaptation, the moment is important as a signifier of the harsh and alien landscape that Lucy will be subjected to. Her character grows up sheltered from the outside world, marking this robot as foreboding to her on her journey of discovery. It also potentially serves as a tease for functioning assaultronsin the show’s future, though this has not yet been confirmed. Still, it would make much more sense than a one-off appearance of the technology that is never seen again.
Among the other references, this cameo in particular shows how much theshow’s creators care about theFalloutfranchise and its fans. Rather than just providing its own version of the assaultron, creatives reached out to impassioned fans to collaborate and feature their work in an official, canonized Fallout television series. Hopefully the showrunners will continue to foster this connection with fans even further into new seasons of the hit show.
Fallout
Fallout is a franchise built around a series of RPGs set in a post-nuclear world, in which great vaults have been built to shelter parts of humankind. There are six main games, various spin-offs, tabletop games, and a TV series from Amazon Studios.
