The rules for what you can and cannot do in video games have changed over time, but one taboo still remains. It's a drug. In Fallout 3, you can slaughter innocents, engage in cannibalism, and launch nuclear bombs on entire villages, but it's the use of real drugs that has drawn the ire of the Australian Game Ratings Board, giving rise to fictional drug names like Med-X and the whole class of drugs being called “chemicals.”
Now Fallout has been adapted into a TV show, and as always, other mediums can cover much more than video games. So when it came up in the story this week, it was actually called a drug, not a chemical. That’s right, drugs. Perhaps this is the series' way of testing the waters so that it can be called dope more often in lore like classic Fallout?
Spoilers for Fallout Season 2, Episode 4.
Ah, it seems Fallout is finally able to acknowledge that chemicals are drugs.
I wasn't the only one who understood this problem. Many Fallout fans are quick to note that “chems” is one of the Fallout terms that has yet to make the leap to live-action.
That makes sense. The chemicals are clearly drugs, and it is much clearer to the audience to say that Lucy is addicted to drugs. Some theorize that the word “chem” is actually a post-war term, so vault dwellers would not be familiar with it. This means that our poor vault-dwelling Fallout characters were probably very confused.
Now, everything mentioned here only applies to the latest Fallout (Fallout 3 and above). It used to be perfectly okay for games to use the word “drug”, and Fallout 2 used it a lot. So Lucy and The Ghoul's use of the word is a return to the original game.
We'll see where Lucy's drug dependency takes her as the next episode of Fallout drops next Wednesday, January 14th. The last thing we saw before the credits rolled was her and The Ghoul searching for Deathclaw on the New Vegas Strip. Fortunately, her buff-out is still in effect…
- release date
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April 10, 2024
- network
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Amazon Prime Video
- showrunner
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Lisa Joy, Jonathan Nolan
- move
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Frederick EO Toye, Wayne Che Yip, Stephen Williams, Liz Friedlander, Jonathan Nolan, Daniel Gray Longino, Claire Kilner.
- author
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Lisa Joy, Jonathan Nolan
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Ella Purnell
Lucy MacLean
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