Spoilers, obviously. Cain spitballing as he goes.
Cain knows he has said he wouldn't review things multiple times, but a lot of people keep asking, and he's going to link someone else's review in the description he considers better. and agreed a lot with it.
Tl;DR, no rambling: He likes it.
Just as surreal to be home at his couch watching Fallout on his TV as watching it at the Chinese Theater. Hard to explain if you didn't work on it, talked with Leonard about it. That surreal feeling of seeing the thing you worked on really hard and all of those ideas and visuals happening in real life. impressive sets, great production values and props. Cain praises the acting, feels surreal to see Fallout recreated in real life. Compares it to Nuka Break, which had a far smaller production budget but was dedicated and you could feel the care and attention to detail. Really cool to be on the Nuka Break set. Watching this TV Show gave Cain the same feelings.
Paid a lot more attention to the story and the dialogue this time. Everything feels like Fallout, a hard thing to do. Easy to write post apocalyptic stuff that doesn't fit the Fallout mold, and would have been very easy for them to slide into being too silly.
Liked the lore drops, Cain missed a lot of easter eggs and saw videos and reddit threads explaining them. Loved that there was no exposition. No narrator, no character with a big wall of text or long VO, no "Just to remind you, these vaults were built...". You don't need to know that, you can figure it out. Makes the TV show a little harder to get into for someone who didn't play the games, but believes it can be figured out.
Lucy stopping to ask for directions from the guy working on the filter, that guy looked straight out of Fallout as one of the villager characters. Brings that Fallout feeling.
Not everything will be perfect or exactly like Fallout, because it's a TV show and not a game, but it captures the feeling.
Cain particularly liked that the three main characters felt like different ways a player character could approach the games. Lucy, the nice character, starts out innocent and didn't stay that way, wants to go out and do good. Maximus had his own goals, maybe it could be called selfish, but he had his own goals and wasn't going out of his way to be a bad guy. The Ghoul was the show's murder hobo. All of them had arcs that changed them over the show. You learn things about their background and why they are the way they are. Hoping for a season two to see those arcs develop further. Makes the show feel like a game, Lucy is the main protagonist, directly compares her main quest of finding her kidnapped dad to Fallout 3's plot of finding your dad and Fallout 4's quest for your son, notes Bethesda Fallouts have a trend of family members tied to the main quest so it isn't a surprise to see it here. It feels like she started off all about the main quest in the first episode or two,, and then all of these side quests begin. The main quest completes in the final episodes, but in a way that makes you want a sequel. Most questions answered, new questions arise you want answers to, good way for any TV Show or Video Game to end.
Not going to give it away, but Cain texted Leonard around episode 7 he had to watch it because of some cameos. Really surprised Cain when Erik Estrada showed up as the father of the people with metal detectors. Thought the voice was familiar and took him a minute to realize. Used to watch CHiPs, hopes he ages a tenth of well as Erik has. Some of the other surprise cameos also got Cain.
But there were also some lore surprises, such as Vault-Tec dropping the nukes and Shady Sands getting nuked. Has seen a lot of discussion about that. Cain's opinion is that Vault-Tec did talk about nuking first, but companies always have business plans that try to handle different contingencies. He doesn't think they actually nuked first. Barbara doesn't strike Cain as a stupid woman , would she really have sent her daughter to a birthday party on the day Vault-Tec was going to drop the nukes? They were planning on doing it, one of their strategies, enough to consider them evil, but Cain thinks they didn't do it and were caught off guard by the bombs.
Similarly, Cain think Shady Sands being nuked may have gone a bunch of different ways. People are complaining about the dates being off, Cain thinks what was taught to the kids was wrong. Either deliberately wrong (They lied to the Vault 33 kids about other stuff) or they are off but don't know they are off. Maybe the dates in the games are wrong, maybe the characters in New Vegas got the dates wrong. There is no master calendar to refer to. Fallout has a history of unreliable narrators with characters telling you things that are not true. As far as the show goes, Cain expects them to explain stuff in future seasons, and even if they don't Cain thinks lore drift is inevitable in big IPs. Star Wars is an example, Cain is old enough to have seen the first movie in the theaters. When the prequel trilogy came out and suddenly the Force was Midi-Chlorians it was a bit of a what moment for Cain but he still enjoyed Star Wars even if less so. Marvel was the same way, Cain was never a big guy comic book guy, watched the movies, liked them, people complained about them messing up the lore or Tony Stark was supposed to have blue eyes, Cain doesn't care.
When Cain sees people talking about this online, he hopes that they address it, but you have to understand not everything shown and told in the games is true. Maybe they are setting the audience up for a shocker in season two, not that Cain would know anything. Look back at Cain's videos about how hard it is to maintain an IP, sequels are hard. Could consider this Fallout season one to be a sequel to the game, apparently people online are calling it Fallout 5. Cain can see why, every single Fallout game changed a little in the games that came before. Lore has always drifted a little, 2 changed some things in 1, 3 changed some things in 2 and 1, 4 changed some things in all three. Who knows what canonical ending they had in mind that leads to this Fallout TV Show timeline.
Likes the show a lot, recommends this review that Cain likes. Agrees with everything/almost everything she says. If you listen to that, you are basically hearing most of what Cain thinks.
That said, it doesn't really matter what he thinks. He isn't in charge, you aren't in charge, whatever Bethesda does from this point forward is canon. Fun to talk about, not fun when people make personal attacks, stop that. Have fun with the show, look at the lore and easter eggs and pick things apart. Do it if it's fun for you, not if it's out of a spirit of being spiteful now. Cain skips over hostile comments now that he gets so many people commentating on his videos.
Can't wait for season two.