Elise Ehrhard’s main job at the Media Research Center is to hate-watch TV shows and complain that they’re not right-wing enough for her and her employer. She found a new show to hate-watch for an April 16 post:
Amazon Prime’s memorable new hit series Fallout, based on the popular video games by Bethesda SoftWorks and Interplay, is marred by a number of left-wing biases.
The series follows Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell), a resident of a “Vault-Tec” bunker in the year 2296. Vault-Tec bunkers are a high-tech underground network of vaults designed to survive a nuclear blast. Generations have lived in them since nuclear fallout from the fictitious “Great War” centuries earlier. Lucy’s father, Hank (Kyle MacLachlan), is the overseer of the vault where she lives.
After Hank is kidnapped by invaders from above ground, Lucy leaves the secured vault to go up to the surface for the first time in her life to find him. She journeys across a wasteland filled with ghouls, warriors and various unsavory characters.
The series bounces back and forth in time between a pre-fallout 1950s-style world and future years.
Up on the surface, the audience is introduced to the “Brotherhood of Steel,” a post-apocalypse paramilitary order. The brotherhood includes “Dane,” played by “non-binary” actor Xelia Mendes-Jones, a biological woman. Dane is supposed to be one of the boys but is really a butch-looking woman with a light mustache. Dane’s leader uses the pronoun “they” when speaking to her, albeit very briefly. The “transness” of the character is never spoken of or emphasized in any way, yet Dane’s presence in the brotherhood still requires suspension of disbelief.
Ehrhard clearly believes that Dane’s “transness” makes her an unsavory character. Her other piece of evidence of the show’s purported “left-wing bias” followed:
Upon finding her father, Lucy learns that the man she thought of as a loving dad is actually a cold-blooded murderer who works for a diabolical corporation. Up until that moment, Hank was one of the few white male characters in the show who had not become weak, cowardly or cruel. A preponderance of bad guys is par for the course in a post-apocalyptic word, but the fact that a white male leader always turns out to be a horrible person in contemporary television is frustrating.
Fallout is a strong series in many ways, with real character development and a coherent plot. It will likely be able to keep its fan base into future seasons. Unfortunately, an underlying leftist worldview ultimately seeps through it despite all its strengths.
Given that white men pretty much run the world, it’s hardly a “leftist worldview” to note that some of them are horrible people — power corrupts and all that. And Ehrhard never explained why Dane must be hated and dismissed as “leftist” for failing to be heteronormative. That sounds like it’s her problem, not the show’s.