“When you put it like that, it sounds downright morally questionable.”

I expressed this sentiment in my review of the first few episodes, and it bears repeating: I’m incredibly annoyed with Amazon’s decision to release all of Fallout’s first season at once. It’s anyone’s guess as to why they made that decision, from a decision to bypass spoilers to thinking it would lead to higher viewership to some cynical strategy for increasing ad-free subscriptions. (The latter theory was suggested by a friend of mine, and given how obvious the black pauses in episodes telegraph where commercial breaks are supposed to go, it’s my odds-on favorite explanation.) Whatever the reason, Amazon obviously made it out of “fiduciary responsibility” as opposed to any creative decision—and in doing so, either intentionally or unintentionally, wound up underlining the series’ sharpest point.

But we’ll get to that later. The main reason why this decision annoys me is that as I was going through the first season, I spent the time wishing I was reviewing it on a weekly basis for all of you. Fallout left a strong impression in its first three hours, and that positive impression only continued as the season did. Embracing the true law of the wastes, the narrative has been “sidetracked by bullshit every goddamned time,” sending Lucy, Maximus, and The Ghoul on a series of side jaunts: nearly getting dissected in a supermarket, taking refuge in a mutant-loaded vault, running afoul of bandits masquerading as a legitimate militia. The series didn’t fall into the “X-hour movie” trap that so many streaming services do, laying out episodes that were distinguishable as episodes.

More satisfying, they were distinguishable as Fallout. I spent a lot of time gushing about the aesthetics and Easter eggs of the first episodes, and I continued to watch the series in a perpetual Pointing Leo meme state as those references persisted. Every episode has featured sequences that are alternatively hilarious, violent, gross, tragic, and even step into bizarre “Wild Wasteland” territory on a couple of occasions. Allowing the characters to get distracted repeatedly never felt like killing time; it felt like an enrichment of the experience, the sense that the creative team was as excited to dick around in this sandbox as anyone else who’s fired up one of these games in the last 27 years. As a fan of the series for all of those 27 years, this has been about as rewarding an adaptation as I could have hoped for.

“The Beginning” keeps that feeling of appreciation going to the end, even if there’s only one fully bizarre element in a Robobrain Roomba and only one bit of gonzo Bloody Mess violence in Brotherhood adept taking a tumble into spinning Vertibird blades. This is a finale that’s all about tying up loose ends strung throughout the season, while scorching some of the earth behind it, and setting our quartet of wastelanders (the rebranded Dogmeat gets the bump to series regular in my eyes) off on their next objectives. And while it might be a bit too prompt in the way it ties off some of those loose ends, it makes its reveals land with appropriately atomic force.

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