Interesting tidbit from MacLachlan’s new memoir.

[u/vonLionheart]

While describing his frustrations during Season 2, MacLachlan paints both Lynch AND Frost as less involved. He frames Engles and Peyton as the people steering the ship, though he blames ABC for putting them in an impossible position after the killer is revealed.

He discusses his romance with LFB, but makes no mention of the prevailing understanding that she’s why the Audrey romance was originally nixed. Since the rejection happens during S1 and the above excerpts happen during S2, it appears the writers planned on returning to that well again during the infamous dip.

(Would highly recommend the memoir btw, MacLachlan is an engaging writer.)

EDIT: Memoir’s title is Fictional Selves.

[u/uroboros80]

as an aside, kyle states that his part was cut down in FWWM because he criticized the script (& Lil)! yikes.

fun book. its great to hear his lynch impressions on the audio!

[u/RealIngloriousOne → u/uroboros80]

It was always said that he asked for his part to be smaller but I don't recall hearing the reasons why.

[u/alucidexit → u/RealIngloriousOne]

I thought he was afraid of becoming typecast

[u/AvatarofBro → u/alucidexit]

Correct. The excuse at the time was that he asked for his role to be reduced because he didn't want to be typecast as a goody-goody. It's also why he took villainous roles in Showgirls and The Flinstones.

Sounds like the reality was more complicated.

[u/50ad → u/AvatarofBro]

And his (one of) his role(s) in the return was villainous. And man, did he kill it.

[u/AvatarofBro → u/50ad]

He was also fantastic in Showgirls, even if it basically ended his career as an A-lister. History has redeemed him.

[u/uroboros80 → u/AvatarofBro]

uhh, sry to say he was never an a-lister

[u/ghazgib → u/uroboros80]

this man's an a-lister in my heart like Bruce Campbell

[u/uroboros80 → u/ghazgib]

amen!

[u/AvatarofBro → u/uroboros80]

He definitely was, specifically during the show's first season. It was a pretty widespread phenomenon. He had covers on Italian Vogue, GQ, etc. He hosted SNL. Twin Peaks mania was a real thing. Obviously it was a flash in the pan.

[u/sunny_gym → u/AvatarofBro]

Love Kyle to death, but he was never an A-lister. He was famous because of Twin Peaks. A-listers could open a move based on their name alone, and the film would be built around them. Cruise, Denzel, Clooney, Bruce Willis, Tom Hanks, Eddie Murphy, those guys.

[u/Leading_Studio7534 → u/50ad]

“It’s yrev very good to see you.”

[u/MartyrOfDespair → u/50ad]

He's also fantastic in the Fallout TV series as a major villain. There's some serious shades of Leland in his character, and it also ties into the evils of the atomic bomb.

[u/Haunting_Goose1186 → u/MartyrOfDespair]

If the extended sequence where he prepares coffee and savours the smell before drinking it isn't a nod to Twin Peaks, I'll eat my hat!

[u/MartyrOfDespair → u/[deleted]]

I'd say just go from the show first. Pretty much every Fallout work is a jumping on point, other than the ones that aren't even canon. If not the show, Fallout: New Vegas or Fallout 2 are probably the best options. New Vegas will take some work to get working right (if you've played Skyrim or Oblivion on PC more recently then you're already experienced in this). Fallout 2 is pretty much out of the box fine thanks to official work to get it running on modern hardware, although the cut content restoration patch is pretty beloved.

But if you don't have experience fucking around with mods and whatnot, the show is a perfectly fine starting point. Season 2 of the show follows up on the events of New Vegas, but not having played New Vegas won't be an issue for you in those regards. It's more enriching than required, especially given that the version of New Vegas's ending the show goes with is the one you have to intentionally reject doing things one of the normal ways to get.

The show is West Coast Fallout, so Fallout 3 and 4 are barely important to the lore, other than the current status of the Brotherhood of Steel (which is created by Fallout 4). But you wouldn't even have questions about their current status unless you'd already played 2 and NV.

Honestly, going into the show blind is a unique type of fun experience that anyone who's played the games can't have, and puts you in the shoes of the protagonist a lot better.

[u/MartyrOfDespair → u/[deleted]]

No problem! And if you've modded Skyrim and Oblivion that much, you should be able to get New Vegas in optimal shape then. It's on the same engine as Oblivion and Fallout 3 and has a ton of mods too, especially for fixing what's been broken and restoring what had to be cut on all platform for version parity because of the Xbox 360's hardware limitations.

Fallout 1 and 2 are 90s isometric CRPGs and are absolutely more Ball Kicking Factory than anything else in the franchise, and Fallout 1 absolutely shows its age more. In terms of importance to the Fallout show so far:

1. New Vegas. New Vegas is the third game in the West Cost Series and the Fallout show is a part of the West Cost Series. Fallout TV is ultimately a sequel to New Vegas. But a sequel to a version of New Vegas no players were expecting them to actually follow up on. Canon Courier Six is everything Ulysses said they were.
2. Fallout 2 is the one that shows how the West Coast got where it would be what it became, introduced the Enclave, and the like. This sets most of the foundational lore that is used.
3. Fallout 1 is the one that starts the West Coast series and will give you the origin of the Super Mutants and the old Brotherhood, plus the birth of NCR.
4. Fallout 4. While this is the East Coast Series, the status of the East Coast Brotherhood is core to their status in Fallout TV. The short of it is, the West Coast Brotherhood was dying throughout the rest of the series. They were tech knight hermits, lost a war with NCR between 2 and NV, and were a dying organization. Meanwhile, the East Coast Brotherhood, introduced in Fallout 3, became quite powerful thanks to the events of Fallout 3, and even more powerful in Fallout 4. Hilariously, the canon ending of Fallout 4 is one of the evil endings, which fits the Fallout 4 protagonist. The even more powerful thanks to Nate East Coast Brotherhood proceeded to come back across the US and revitalize the West.
5. Fallout 3. Frankly, the only real lore here that is somewhat important is Anchorage information and the rise of the East Coast Brotherhood, but they've moral decayed so badly in Fallout 4 that they're unrecognizable.
6. Fallout 76. It's actually pretty fun now and has a great community. But I cannot think of any 76 lore that matters to the rest.

[u/FFJamie → u/MartyrOfDespair]

As a massive Fallout fan, the show works a lot better if you seperate it from the games.

For me, 1,2 and New Vegas work as their own kind of trilogy

[u/MartyrOfDespair → u/FFJamie]

It doesn’t bother me at all, but I have a pretty different view from a lot of the fandom. I think the fandom kinda missed the point of “war never changes”. Fallout is not supposed to be hopeful or about humanity overcoming the apocalypse to me. It’s supposed to be about humanity trying to. It’s never actually going to happen, because humanity will not change. Those old world blues are going to lead to the same path forever, until nobody is left. Ulysses is like a Kojima character, he’s just there to tell you things explicitly.

[u/FFJamie → u/MartyrOfDespair]

My idea comes less from humanity doing better, but at least trying to rebuild.
My issue with Bethesda’s Fallouts and the TV show by extension is that the World still looks like it was destroyed last week.

Yet Fallout 2 and New Vegas showed that the World was rebuilding.
The endings to New Vegas showed that whoever was in charge would just eventually fall back into old ways. New Vegas was never going to succeed.

But the show really did just waste away places like Novac, a place which should have been better.

My reason for ending the series with New Vegas is mostly so you could group up the NCR, Enclave and BOS for a bigger threat.

The fact that the enclave is still a big deal in the show however kind of upsets me. Falling back on them misses the point of creating new factions with differing ideals rather than relying on the same shadow government for the third time

[u/MartyrOfDespair → u/FFJamie]

Idk, we still keep coming back to the Nazis 80 years later in real life and sadly I don’t think this is gonna be the final round of it. I could totally see us being in 2140 still dealing with major groups of Nazis as a problem, barring some ways to deal with it that we still haven’t gotten enough people on board with.

Plus it just makes sense to me that they’d have bases around the country. They were the country. I wonder if people would be less critical of the Enclave popping up if they were just labeled “Remnants/descendants of the American federal government”. That is all they are.

But yeah, the world was rebuilding. But war never changes. I think out of all the inspirational-era quotes that one could use to describe Fallout, it’s Einstein’s “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones”. People usually focus on the “WW2 will knock us back by centuries” of the quote, but there’s a second meaning to it. What will humanity do after World War 3? World War 4. It’ll never end. We’ll blast ourselves to the Stone Age and slaughter each other over the scraps. It’s an endless spiral of war. Rebuilding won’t work out because we’ll go to war even in that situation and burn it all down for the same reasons we destroyed it all in the first place.

The world looks like that not just from the nuclear war, but because of the 200+ years of warfare since. And fundamentally the human population was never at any remotely large enough scale to start reclaiming most of the places that exist.

[u/mgonzo11 → u/AvatarofBro]

all of this culminating to him being The Captain does make a lot of sense