Just when we thought we couldn’t get more excited about Walton Goggins’ upcoming ghoul character, Prime Video released a full Fallout trailer earlier this month showing us even more of this enigmatic character, both as a ghoul and as a regular guy just before nuclear annihilation.
The Fallout video game series created a complex post-apocalyptic world, combining a nostalgic past and a desolate future. It mixes a 1950s pop culture aesthetic with a Western-style desolation in a world destroyed by atomic bombs. Fans of the video games know the lore is deep and detailed. If done well, Fallout would make a fantastic television series. Prime Video undertook that challenge and will release the first 8-episode season of Fallout on April 11.
In the teaser trailer, many iconic elements of the games popped out immediately with the Vault Dwellers and the Brotherhood of Steel. The story will focus on a young woman named Lucy (Yellowjackets’ Ella Purnell) leaving the safety of the vault for the first time. Alongside her story is that of a young man in the Brotherhood named Maximus (Aaron Moten) who has never known the security of vault life. Popping out among so many Easter Eggs is another main character—a ghoul bounty hunter played by Walton Goggins.
The new ghoul in town
Ghouls are a special part of the Fallout series. Although they look a little like zombies because of their deteriorating skin and missing appendages, ghouls are almost the opposite of zombies. Whereas zombies are slowly rotting away, ghouls are preserved. Their exposure to nuclear radiation charred most of their skin and caused deterioration of some body parts. In some ghouls, their mental capabilities were also affected. However, many ghouls retain their minds and find themselves in well-preserved bodies that can heal while near radiation. Because of their altered bodies, ghouls can live much longer than humans.
In the Fallout series, Walton Goggins (Justified, The Righteous Gemstones) will play The Ghoul, a gun-toting ghoul who stands out amongst the ghouls. Goggins, known for his skill in both drama and comedy, seems like the perfect fit for the character. In the teaser trailer, The Ghoul looks like something out of a Western film as he takes out people easily with his pistol. The Ghoul’s skin is heavily altered and his nose is an open cavity, yet he still has Goggins’s charm. Another moment shows the Ghoul before the blast as a human trying to save a young girl while bombs explode nearby.
Life before the end of the world
His “before the blast” life is given more focus in the full trailer. Not only do we see his pre-Ghoul self running with a little girl during the nuclear attack as we did in the teaser trailer, but we see him doing an ad for Vault-Tec vaults, advertising them as a “veritable Camelot for the Nuclear Age.”
The trailer then alternates between showing us life pre and post-blast. We see The Ghoul holding Lucy at gunpoint. We see him walking through a deserted area with another star of the Fallout video game series, Dogmeat (the Fallout 4 German shepherd version)! And we see an expanded version of the shootout from the teaser trailer with The Ghoul delivering a hilariously charming line.
When Lucy (clearly having never encountered a ghoul before) shoots him with a drug-filled syringe hoping to take him down, he nonchalantly pulls it out of his chest and says, “Now that is a very small drop in a very, very large bucket of drugs.”
We then see shots of him walking with Lucy and seemingly taking lots of drugs. His voiceover heard across a montage of scenes speaks what seems to be one of the main themes of the show: “You look out at this wasteland and it looks like chaos. But there’s always somebody behind the wheel.”
And in a poignant blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment, there’s a shot of The Ghoul watching black and white footage of himself from over 200 years earlier on a TV screen acting in a Western as he points a finger gun at his younger self and blasts it in a melancholy gesture.
Lastly, we see more of his human self, also in a cowboy outfit, running with a little Black girl as the bombs hit, and later a shot of him kissing a Black woman in a vault as he’s shooting his commercial. Could this be his family? Was he an actor before he became one of the Wasteland’s most persistent bounty hunters?
Being over 200 years old has sharpened this Ghoul’s survival skills and given him one hell of a backstory. We can’t wait to see more of this unique character.
(featured image: Prime Video)
