Fallout continues one of fiction’s longest-running bloody tropes

The Fallout TV show isn’t particularly beautiful – at least, not like a bride is supposed to be. Its characters spend most of their time trudging through the irradiated grime of derelict California, avoiding pools of who-knows-what and drinking animal piss if they really need to. It’s a tough reality to witness, but that’s what makes the Prime Video game adaptation’s violent first episode so critical; its bloodbath wedding welcomes viewers to Fallout’s no-nonsense approach to love and desperation. To do it effectively, Fallout mines the ancient trope for every last perversion.

The concept of a bloody wedding (or Red Wedding, as Game of Thrones popularized in 2013) goes back as far as humans were capable of idiotic passion — so, kind of forever. Jesus tells a parable in Matthew 22 in which heaven is a king throwing a wedding banquet, but those invited decide to kill the king’s servants instead. Even earlier, the Odyssey describes how Odysseus instigated a grisly massacre after a team of suitors attempted to marry the queen of Ithaca, his wife Penelope. “And therewith the head of the arrow through his tender neck thrust out, […] The thick gush of the man’s-blood, […] And the bread and the roasted flesh were defiled,” writes poet William Morris in his 1887 translation.

It was only natural for red weddings to make their way into contemporary media. Some of the most recognizable instances are in TV and film, including the aforementioned Game of Thrones, the 2003 revenge drama Kill Bill, Bella’s nightmare in Breaking Dawn, and the 2019 wedding slasher Ready or Not. But whether the cataclysmic wedding occurs in classic literature, a video game like Bloodborne, or famous art like Marc Chagall’s 1950 painting of red-soaked La Mariée, it challenges your expectations for the blushing bride. Fallout protagonist Lucy is at least prepared for this test — she’s spent her whole life learning how to be useful in crisis.

Before her doomed wedding, Lucy establishes herself as a toned and peppy Vault Dweller: the ideal post-apocalyptic woman. She has repair skills, she says, speech skills, gymnastic ability, and has no issue handling a rifle — she’s demure about it, too, disclaiming that she’s “not very good” at shooting despite impaling her Vault Boy target repeatedly in the heart. All that’s missing from Lucy’s life as a resourceful Miss America is a healthy Mr. Reproductive System, and so her Vault 33 council approves her application to breed with a Vault 32 tribute.

33 will provide the purportedly famished 32 with seeds in exchange for a husband, Monty (Cameron Cowperthwaite), at the Triennial Trade; Lucy prepares with red lipstick, pearl drop earrings, and an Audrey Hepburn wedding gown cut below the knees. She nearly perfectly follows Leola Coombs Kelley’s guide on “How to Conduct a Perfect Wedding” from 1957, which instructs a bride to wear satin white, but warns that “the formal wedding gown should just clear the toes to prevent tripping […] Anything shorter is ugly.” Oh, well; things are different after a nuclear apocalypse.

Most bloodbath weddings aren’t presented as flawless. Kill Bill’s somber black-and-white opening shot is of The Bride’s big day (Uma Thurman) already ruined, her dress smeared in blood that glues her tulle veil to the floorboards. The first boss fight in gory 2023 zombie game Dead Island 2 is with Becki the Bride, whose mutations have turned her form-fitting wedding dress into grim sausage casing.

Image: Prime Video

But Vault-Tec became so powerful by luring its test subjects with false promises of safety; it convinced people they’d rather eat nuclear-resistant green beans in perpetuity than risk the uncertainty of the real world. Fallout’s first episode deftly copies this deception by showing us a bit of Lucy’s wedding ceremony, which seems as lovely and interchangeable as any other: the bride and groom kiss under a wedding arch tied with sunflowers, and soon it’s time to enjoy the reception and talk sperm count. “I mean, sperm is pretty important in perpetuating America,” Lucy says at dinner. But trouble starts after she consummates her marriage.

Monty and the rest of Vault 32 are actually surface dwellers planning to take Lucy’s dad, Overseer Hank, hostage for reasons she doesn’t yet understand. In the moment, she can only accept the force of her instinct. She doesn’t stand idly as history recommends her to, a silent “bride of Hades,” as ancient Greeks described unmarried female virgins. Lucky for Lucy, she’s not even a virgin. So when her new husband starts to strangle her, she kicks him in the gut. When he sinks a carving knife into her already bruised abdomen, she uses a cracked blender to scoop out his throat.

A healing stimpak and tranquilizer pistol help her stay alive once she finally leaves her sweetheart behind, to hopefully die alone on the ground. With bullets slung across her chest and dark blood blooming around her stomach, Lucy now looks like Ready or Not’s Final Bride Grace — goodbye, Audrey Hepburn. Lucy abandons a bride’s stereotypical elegance because she has no other choice.

Image: Prime Video

Image: Prime Video

But, with all of her Vault 33 education, she manages to hold onto some of it. Even disheveled and beaten, Lucy fares better than her wedding party. Fallout protects her with a sense of specialness, her inherent belief in justice and the determination to pursue it. This is, again, unusual for the bloodbath wedding trope. Though Roslin survives her notorious Red Wedding in Game of Thrones, two other wives, Catelyn Stark and Joyeuse Frey, are unceremonious victims of battle. They don’t get to supplant their “wife” status with complex personhood, like Lucy does. The math of their deaths is simple: Catelyn cuts Joyeuse’s pale throat to punish the woman’s husband, and then her own throat is slit, and blood pours out like wine.

Still, Vault 33 sees similar carnage, and worse. Its residents are no match for the surface dwellers’ uninhibited brutality, and, in excruciating, V.A.T.S.-type slow motion combat, we spend the next few minutes watching them get crushed into powder. An infiltrator smooshes a handful of wedding cake into his mouth before someone else starts shooting, and a man’s blood sprays into the air like peaking ocean waves. Another man gets punted across 33’s cornfield like he’s a football. You have only a moment to feel his skeletal pain before a surface dweller shoves an assault rifle into someone else’s mouth. After blasting the back of his skull, the trespasser demolishes a small crowd and innocent jelly mold with brain-stained bullets.

“Remember, there’s a danger in overdoing [wedding parties],” warns Good Housekeeping’s 1957 Complete Wedding Guide. “Gaiety and fun [can turn] into strained nerves and exhaustion.”

Image: Prime Video

But Lucy is the Overseer’s daughter — a leader, then a woman — before she is a wife. The rules for her are slightly different. She can’t fully become Agamemnon’s antihero Clytemnestra, who butchers her husband after he sacrifices their daughter to a god. “How should a woman work, to the utter end,” Clytemnestra says in defiance of an admonishing chorus, “My husband, dead by my right hand, a blow / Struck by a righteous craftsman.”

Fallout doesn’t want Lucy totally veering into traditionally masculine territory the way Clytemnestra does. Lucy, instead, teeters around it (she has a gun, but it’s non-lethal; she’s dirty, but she’s also wearing pure white). She never wholly abandons her ’50s values, which encourage her to be constantly deferential to her father. So there’s panic in her wide doe eyes when she joins the fray, gawking at the spilled blood and devastation, barely reacting to the sparks and bullets flying right over her head. But she collects herself when her family is at risk, popping a tranquilizer into a woman’s eye a second before she can slice apart Norm (Moises Arias), Lucy’s brother, with a machete.

Image: Prime Video

For this small moment, Lucy gets to be an avenging angel, a loose foreshadow of the hardened morality she’ll grow into later in Fallout. But, for now, Lucy lives in a blurry Romeo and Juliet world, so much like the one they experienced after their blighted wedding: “All things that we ordained festival / Turn from their office to black funeral,” remarks Lord Capulet, “Our bridal flowers serve for a buried corpse.”

Lucy seems to be sleepwalking toward the same fate. Her maimed husband approaches her with pieces of his face flapping open like a jacket, but then her dad, Hank, smashes the back of his head. Barefoot Lucy watches quietly as Hank drowns Monty in a barrel, and the last thing she sees on her wedding night is a bomb that trashes the already sparse remains of Vault 33.

And there goes another cursed wedding. Fallout makes it look as nasty as centuries of poets, bards, and Quentin Tarantino have necessitated it to be. But the show also manages to pull new information from it — Lucy’s wedding is at once the start of her tarnishing innocence, as well as the audience’s, and it forces her to demonstrate her competence. Always the survivor, never the bride.

Fallout is streaming on Prime Video.