The dirty secret to making sci-fi believable

Over the last decade, there’s been a glut of sci-fi and fantasy series on television and streaming. With peak Game of Thrones, House of the Dragon, The Wheel of Time, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, The Expanse, The Witcher, Silo, Foundation, and more, keeping up with the deluge, and discerning which ones are worth your time, is daunting. But there’s a very simple trick to determining whether or not one of these shows is good, and it’s all about the costumes.

Costumes seem like an obvious barometer, but the measurements may not be what you’re expecting. Rather than looking for costumes with quality, attention to detail, or uniquely inspired designs, all you have to do is look for how dirty the costumes are.

Costume weathering, the process of adding details of wear and tear like grime, cuts, and scrapes, is a lost art on most productions. The easiest place to see the gold standard is in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. Those costumes aren’t just wonderfully designed, they’re wonderfully destroyed, too. The hobbits’ cloaks start out fresh and beautiful in The Fellowship of the Ring, but by the time Sam and Frodo make it to Mordor they’re torn and faded, with brilliant greens reduced to faded grays by mottled stains set in deep from weeks of sleeping on the ground and trekking through the muck. And the same is true for the clothes of every other character; Aragorn’s leather is worn and tired from years of nomadic adventuring, a strong contrast to the brightness of Legolas’ elven-made gear or Boromir’s quasi-royal Gondorian garb.

Image: New Line Cinema

It’s striking and gorgeous, the kind of detail that might not immediately stand out, but is an indispensable part of transporting viewers into Middle-earth. It’s also a key reason that the Middle-earth of Prime Video’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power feels so off. It’s less immersive and instantly more artificial, inescapably fake with an ever-present awareness that you’re watching actors on sets. This feeling stems from a few different aspects of that show’s production, but the one that’s most glaring is its pristine costumes: Dwarves who spend their lives in the depths of Moria are clad in unscuffed leather that looks like it was made mere moments before they stepped into frame. The cleanliness of the robes that adorn elves like Elrond and Gil-galad should make for striking contrasts with the dirty and dented armor of Galadriel the warrior, but instead her armor looks practically unworn, even when she’s in the middle of a fight. Even the proudly unwashed Harfoots wear clothes that look like they’ve never been patched. The clothes look rough, but they’re certainly not the well-worn tunics you might expect from a people that spend their time gleefully communing with nature and unafraid of the dirt and mud. Rather than transporting us to a world, all this cleanliness simply draws attention to the artifice on screen; how can this version of Middle-earth be real if it doesn’t even have dirt?

This problem even varies from show to show in certain franchises. Take Star Wars’ recent Disney Plus series, for instance. A series like Ahsoka has its heroes fight in dusty plains and haunted forest planets all without much of a noticeable grit on their cloaks to show for it. Meanwhile, Andor’s costumes are covered in grime in nearly every scene, and its effects are outstanding. Aside from just bringing us deeper into a more believable, more lived-in world, the wear and tear tells us something real about the characters and their opposition. When we see the rips and stains in the rebels’ clothing we get a sense of the movement’s desperation, paralleled perfectly by the carefully bleached whites and pleated pants of the Imperial officers who oppose them.

Even better, the contrast between the two helps us understand the harrowing gray area that Luthen Rael occupies: His beautiful flowing robes and general paunchiness are disarming for the Empire he’s covertly working to undermine, but they also set him apart as opulent and privileged in the company of his fellow rebels. With this small bit of costuming, we can clearly understand that Luthen exists uncomfortably between two conflicting worlds, destined never to fit squarely in either of them. It’s a wealth of characterization that comes from distressing a few items of clothing, and it’s communicated more elegantly and effectively than it ever could be in dialogue.

Image: Lucasfilm

Prime Video’s Fallout is the latest series to join the vaunted handful of shows with wonderfully gross costumes. The series, which mostly features carefully designed practical sets and impressive location shooting, takes great care in gussying down its characters’ outfits. And everyone’s costume tells a story in the Wasteland. The Ghoul (Walton Goggins), in particular, is covered head to toe in pilfered gear: a belt from one bounty, a shirt from another, a duster that looks like it came straight from one of Cooper Howard’s sets. Everything he has is cobbled together and shows its age nicely with bullet holes, stains, and dirt that’s been ground deep into the fibers.

And he’s not alone in the filth: Grifters wear patchy suits with yellowing white shirts to project an air of respectability, people who want people to know they’re dangerous wear their pristine guns in ratty holsters worn down from constant use, while those who want to hide their intentions wear coats and jackets in various states of disrepair with their weapons tucked carefully away. All of this gives Fallout a distinct sense of place that helps everything else about the show land more effectively. Jokes from a weirdo who can’t quite figure out a water filter just land better when it’s crystal clear how long it’s been since this man washed his pants.

While it’s easy to mistake these details purely for realism, they’re actually doing something far more important than helping the series look believable: They’re helping it build a more complete and coherent world. Fallout’s world is definitively different from ours, so we need everything we see on screen, from buildings and Vaults to hats and shoes, to fill us in on the details. It’s also a nice little visual metaphor for one of the show’s overarching themes about how the Wasteland changes the people who venture into it. Of course, there’s Lucy, whose bright blue jumpsuit fades into something a little more earthy as she scrapes by deadly situations and learns her own capacity for violence. But even Overseer Hank, the person who first imparts the lessons about how the Wasteland changes people, goes from prim and proper in the Vault to covered in dirt and grime when we meet him again and learn of his miserable deeds that he hides behind his pleasant facade.

Image: Prime Video

Fallout’s a series that’s impressively aware of how important all of these facets are, and it wants you to be, too. In fact, in the first season’s opening minutes, the show itself draws careful attention to them. When Vault 33’s new guests from Vault 32 arrive for Lucy’s wedding, characters start picking up on the subtle differences between their clean and well-maintained jumpsuits and the jumpsuits of their fellow “Vault Dwellers.” By the time they realize that something’s amiss, chaos ensues. It’s a delicate little storytelling trick that helps clue us in to the importance of details in the series, like the writers and director tipping their hats as to what’s going to be important going forward.

Careful consideration for the smallest details separates good shows from great ones. The salt-washed stiffness of the cloaks from the Iron Islands in Game of Thrones or the splendid, precise uniforms of Empire in Foundation help us sink into their worlds and glean details that lesser shows either cram into exposition dumps or dispense of entirely. Sure, there are other big and important things about a series, like writing, directing, or the performances, but nothing separates sci-fi and fantasy’s wheat from its chaff faster than the little imperfections that great shows work into their tiniest articles of clothing. The best shows always have a little dirt on them.

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