Mass extinction is just the starting point for Fallout, which was developed for TV by Westworld creators (and husband and wife) Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy. After the incendiary mushroom clouds, the story flashes forward 219 years. How did humanity fair over those blighted two centuries? Lucy, one of the lead characters (played by Yellowjackets star Ella Purnell), has no clue. She has lived her entire life inside a subterranean vault, where every need and want has been satisfied while generations and generations await the day when it is safe to surface. When a crisis forces Lucy to venture above on a rescue mission, she finds that the planet above remains a hellscape crawling with giant insects, voracious mutant animal “abominations,” and a human population of sunbaked miscreants who make the manners, morals, and hygiene of the gunslinging Old West look like Downton Abbey. “The games are about the culture of division and haves and have-nots that, unfortunately, have only gotten more and more acute in this country and around the world over the last decades,” Nolan tells Vanity Fair for this exclusive first look. Lucy is nice, but Lucy is naive. In the Fallout universe, the human beings fortunate enough to ride out the apocalypse in underground communities only had that option available to them because they had money. Forcing doe-eyed Lucy out into this sadistic, Darwinian remnant of civilization opens the door for Fallout to engage in some social satire as well as action and adventure. Like HBO’s hit The Last of Us, which was also adapted from a blockbuster video game, the end of the world offers a rich opportunity to comment on the real one.