When Westerns Meet the Wasteland

For seven months, Walton Goggins watched a Western every single day. John Ford films, Sergio Leone's Dollars trilogy, episodes of Gunsmoke—the actor consumed them all while filming Amazon Prime's hit series Fallout. Half the time, it was research. The other half? "So I don't lose my mind."

That confession reveals something profound about Fallout itself: a show that looks like dystopian sci-fi on the surface but beats with the heart of a Western underneath.

The Good, The Bad, and The Irradiated

Fallout's three protagonists mirror the archetypes from Leone's 1966 masterpiece The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. There's Lucy (Ella Purnell), the idealistic vault dweller representing "the good." The ruthless bounty hunter known as "the Ghoul" embodies "the bad." And Maximus (Aaron Moten), caught between loyalty and ambition, serves as "the ugly."

But here's where Fallout gets interesting: these designations prove deliberately unstable. As the characters—and viewers—become more exposed to wasteland reality, moral certainties crumble. The good aren't always good. The bad have reasons. And the ugly? They're often the most honest about the world's contradictions.

The show's second season, which concluded this week, literally builds over the Western's foundation. Filming at Gene Autry's historic Melody Ranch studio, the production team constructed "New Vegas" facades over the traditional Western set. Neon signs and steampunk props now overlay the classic saloon-and-general-store main street. It's a perfect visual metaphor: the promises of the frontier, corrupted by what came after.

Deconstructing the Cowboy Myth

Westerns have always sold a particular American fantasy: that individual righteousness can triumph over chaos, that moral codes provide clear guidance, that freedom comes from rejecting civilization's constraints. The cowboy represents the ultimate self-made man, dispensing justice with his own two hands.

Fallout systematically dismantles this mythology. Lucy's golden-rule morality becomes a liability in the wasteland. The Ghoul's centuries of violence haven't brought him peace, just more pain. Maximus discovers that his heroic Brotherhood of Steel leaders are fools or worse.

The show's real insight: there are no white-hatted heroes when the world needs saving from too much at once—autocratic leaders, warring factions, and mutated horrors that haunt former cities. The notion of a virtuous do-gooder saving the day becomes not just simplistic but dangerous.

The Frontier of Ideas

"There is something inherently appealing about the idea of being the master of your own destiny," executive producer Jonathan Nolan explains, "of being in a landscape in which there is no order, there is no civilization, and it's up to you to make these sorts of decisions."

But Fallout argues that this frontier mentality—this rugged individualism—isn't the solution to modern problems. The show's real villain isn't raiders or radiation; it's mindlessness. Characters repeatedly choose willful ignorance over uncomfortable truths. Corporate executives nuke the planet for profit. Vault leaders handle complaints by promising to "escalate them to themselves." Citizens become "sedate worker bees" rather than face reality.

Sound familiar? Co-creator Geneva Robertson-Dworet notes that "all sides of the political spectrum right now are talking so much in end-of-the-world terms." The show feels "alarmingly prescient in a way that we'd prefer to not have."

Beyond Black Hats and White Hats

The Western has repeatedly "reinvented and hybridized" itself throughout American history, from John Ford's post-WWI nationalism to Clint Eastwood's morally ambiguous anti-heroes. Each iteration reflects its era's anxieties and aspirations.

Fallout continues this evolution, using familiar Western imagery to examine distinctly 21st-century American themes: how end-stage capitalism breeds resentment, how technocratic overreach sows division, how blind patriotism undermines democracy itself.

The show's most powerful image might be the Ghoul impaled on a pillar, desperately repeating "I'm a human being" to maintain his consciousness. Like the dead coyotes strung on barbed wire throughout the rural West—sometimes trophies, sometimes warnings—he embodies the Western's central contradiction. From far away, he looks normal. Up close, he's terrifying.