Fallout: Heavy Is the Flag
As the Doomsday Clock sits seconds to midnight, what better way to take one’s mind off of the world’s spiral into armageddon than a new season of the post-apocalyptic video-game adaptation Fallout? Two centuries after the world was cleansed via nuclear mushroom cloud, from the ashes emerged new factions, looking to plant their flag in the desert soil. Fallout: New Vegas tasked the player with choosing who should prevail in the war over the Hoover Dam, and as Fallout’s second season turns its eyes toward the Mojave Wasteland, contending with what it means to choose a flag to march under. It is a reckoning with the endpoint of the American experiment: a nation sustained by symbols and ideologies, and repeatedly undone by its inability to grow past them. Fallout uses the Mojave’s competing factions to argue that war persists not because of ideology itself, but because people surrender moral agency to symbols. Only people willing to change themselves, not just their banners, can break the cycle.
Resolving the decades-long dialectical conflict between the NCR and the Legion is central to Fallout's newest season. For Hank McLean, the answer is quite simple. He sees the perpetual cycle of warring factions as unsalvageable, as functionally identical nations squabbling over meaningless circumstances. The rape and tribal subjugation that define the Legion differs nought from the NCR’s expansionist ambitions or taxation. Neither flag must be allowed to hang. To Hank, it is factionalism that is at the heart of human suffering, and if people continue to commit themselves to their symbols, their ability to choose must be extinguished. The world must begin again. Yet, what Hank offers is not renewal, but a distinctly American faith in systems and efficiency that dictates that disorder can be solved through structure rather than introspection. His solution of mind control, while being able to pacify the dogmatic soldiers of the NCR and Legion, is regression, warping them into ideal cogs in the corporate machine. He has taken away their ability to choose, trying to force pre-war America onto a post-war wasteland that cannot accommodate this anachronism. Hank is trying to end war through control.
Hank’s ambitions parallel that of Ulysses, the primary antagonist of Fallout: New Vegas’ DLC Lonesome Road, a former member of Caesar’s Legion who has grown tired of the battles over Hoover Dam and Mojave. Ulysses has a tunnel visioned obsession with symbols and the power they carry, going so far as to wear the old American flag on his back. Ulysses longs for a symbol of worth. The day he sets his flag down, it will be over his body, or over a nation he believes in. He is the danger of American mythmaking reborn, holding the conviction that the right symbol can redeem a broken world. He has been consumed with finding such a nation to the point that because neither the NCR nor the Legion is the perfect symbol, we must reset to square one. The Mojave must be bathed in fiery hellscape once again to facilitate a new beginning. Yet in seeking to destroy every flawed symbol, Ulysses reveals his own inability to change. Ulysses, much like Hank, claims to see past the differences between the Bear and Bull, that he recognizes how they are factions too blinded by iconography to be worth fighting for. But Ulysses is a hypocrite. He worships institutions so completely that, when none prove worthy, he chooses annihilation over adaptation. Hank and Ulysses before him embody men who have let the search for a symbol consume every fiber of their being. In trying to wipe out war, they forget their history, and ironically perpetuate it further. Whether it be total control or annihilation, the solution to war does not exist through quick means.
Where Hank and Ulysses seek escape through violent catharsis, Maximus offers something quieter and more difficult: change. For most of his life, he has spent it worshipping the codex of the Brotherhood of Steel, letting its dogma direct his way of life. He wholeheartedly believes in violence as the language of the wasteland, letting others die for even a chance at being seen as worthy. When sworn in as a squire, Maximus is instructed that his most sacred duty is to protect the Brotherhood, after which it is his most sacred duty to protect the mission of the Brotherhood. Over all else, over ideals or self, Maximus must kneel under the Brotherhood’s iron boot. Yet again and again, the Brotherhood lets him down, as they devolve into fraternizing cliques vying for control of the whole and paranoid eugenicists. Deep down, the Brotherhood codex and Maximus’ conscience are incompatible. Within Maximus’ rash and heavy-handed exterior is a lost boy trying to hurt those who hurt him, and as he watches those he deems the Brotherhood’s best threaten to kill defenseless children just as he once was, he recognizes the flag he serves is just as dangerous for the wasteland, that they are just like the forces that destroyed his home of Shady Sands fifteen years ago.
Maximus’ journey in this second season is making his way back to where he started, unlearning his way of life, and becoming the good man his father told him he would become. In abandoning the Brotherhood and stealing Cold Fusion from the West Coast chapter, he shows that change is possible. Instead of fighting for power, he fights for the people of New Vegas, using a rusted NCR power armor suit to give them their city back. When Ulysses wore the American flag on his back, it ate at his mind like a tumor. If anything, the flag wore him. But Maximus brandishing the NCR’s symbols is not nostalgia for the institution itself, but a tool used in service of the people standing beside him. He embodies its ideals without the rot, a longing for a wasteland for everyone. He resurrects the NCR as a promise to those ideals.
Should Courier 6 prevent Ulysses from achieving his goals, whether by word or sword, he leaves a final message, musing that “war – war never changes. Men do, through the roads they walk”. The Mojave is a graveyard of American ideas brought back from the dead without reflection or evolution. Hank and Ulysses fail because they believe that whether it be through control or annihilation, that history can be escaped through force. In their desperation to escape history, they recreate its worst impulses. They cannot imagine a world where growth can happen. But if even Maximus, the most loyal instrument of the Brotherhood can change, then anyone can. What he represents is the choice to be better. It is a slow, often painful road that means confronting who you are every day, but the future cannot be decided by those who would let their flag lead them where conscience cannot. If war never changes, then people must, by setting down the banners that have taught them to hate, and choosing instead who they wish to be.