Fallout has never been a show that’s especially interested in plot. Yes, it doled out a few mysteries over the course of its first run, some even extending to season length (especially the question of who Lee Moldaver was and what she wanted with whatever was kicking around in Michael Emerson’s increasingly grody severed head). But the nuts-and-bolts story of the series has mostly forgone elaborate puzzle box shenanigans in favor of hewing pretty closely to a classic hero’s journey, the better to let the show spend the bulk of its energy on building out the world of the Wasteland, navigating its ongoing tightrope between bitter drama and black-as-pitch comedy, and fleshing out the souls of its leading characters. Scrape away the excess, and the story was simple: The bombs dropped, war doesn’t change, and people stay people even after everything has “ended.” ‘Nuff said.
This week’s installment shakes up that status quo. Building on breadcrumbs that Fallout has doled out throughout its second season—mostly during its always-excellent flashback sequences—the show’s storytelling hits a new acceleration point in the moment when The Man Who Knew admits, with desperation and fear shaking their way through Justin Theroux’s Transatlantic accent, that he doesn’t. “Who ends the world?!” Robert House demands of cowboy actor/potential harbinger of the end times Cooper Howard, who flees the billionaire’s swanky computerized penthouse as Theroux and his weird little mechanical hat allow the ridiculousness of the moment to come to the forefront. “Is it you?!”
This screaming climax arrives at the tail end of the meatiest scene of what will turn out to be a very protein-rich episode, after House invites Cooper up for a one-on-one chat shortly after he and wife Barb land in Vegas for the big Vault-Tec Cold Fusion deal. (One of the pleasures of recapping this show, meanwhile, is feeling like there’s a point at least once an episode where it’s smart enough to elide a moment that another show would have belabored with several extra lines; tonight, it’s Cooper immediately grasping that the “Robert House” the world sees on TV is a double, when the man leans in to pass on a message from his boss.) House, see, has been trying to predict the future, tapping his status as “a mathematician, a roboticist, and a casino owner” to try to bend probability to his whims. As it turns out, the polymath’s predictions about the fate of the world happened to “coalesce” into visions of apocalypse on the day that Coop and Barb’s daughter Janey Howard was born, an unexplained variable that the would-be mastermind finds “vexingly curious.”
Theroux has had a lot of fun, in his two scenes so far this season, playing up House’s arrogance, his smugness, his omnipresent need for control. Here, though, he gets just as much mileage from House’s fear: The man is genuinely terrified at being unable to see the face of the future, “irked” at his inability to understand how some washed-up cowboy actor contributes to the apocalypse. (We know enough about Howard family dynamics to at least hazard a guess; as The Ghoul will remark much further down the timeline tonight, “Family’s a fucked-up thing.”) House, meanwhile, lets some of the Howard Hughes DNA lurking in the character’s background out to play, muttering half to Coop and half to himself about a hidden third party who was behind the Deathclaws being active on the Alaska front in last week’s cold open, and, yes, donning what looks for all the world like a very high-tech version of a tinfoil hat as he loses all measure of self control. Seeing the man’s purring facade of being master of the universe slip is, ultimately, just as scary as his various messianic plans for saving Vegas or hijacking the human population’s brains.
Which acts as a handy little segue, as I note that this episode also serves as a snug little roundup of memorable guest stars from Fallout’s first season. That most especially means heralding the return of Jon Daly’s delicious Snake Oil Salesman, who reappears, at last, to skip merrily through the Wastes, flirt with a F.I.S.T.O., and then get one of Hank MacLean’s brain chips jammed into his spine. Daly was the perfect fit as a frequent background presence in Fallout’s first season, largely because of how well his performance embodies the unpredictability of the post-apocalyptic world. Equipped with a giggling cadence, the world’s most-exhausted-looking eye makeup, and manic energy that makes his character seem capable of anything (except for anything good), he was a joy then, and he’s a joy now. Seeing the SOS stumble into Hank’s clutches—and then turn out to be the perfect candidate for technological overwriting—is not only a fun way to bring back a fan favorite from last year, but also allows the show to find whole new ways to maximize how wonderfully unsettling Daly can be as the Wasteland’s smiling, twitchy face. If he was unsettling out of control, he’s twice as bad under it.
Not quite as vital, meanwhile, but still nice: the reappearance of Dale Dickey as former Filly shopkeep Ma June, who we find squatting in the old Vault-Tec headquarters when Norm and his cadre of management trainees come trundling in. Norm, for his part, is rightly dubious when June tells him his sister is almost certainly dead and just as un-inclined as Lucy was to turn around and head straight home when she (out of something resembling the kindness of her heart) tries to warn him off. In fact, it feels somewhat telling that Fallout busts out not just one but two characters who basically served as “Turn back!” signposts in the show’s first season here—not that it stops either MacLean kid from blowing past them, at their own peril, as the show’s pace continues to increase.
For Norm, that means trying to figure out what the hell Vault-Tec middle-management mastermind Bud Askins was actually up to, eventually recruiting the only non-crazy survivor in his crew, Claudia, for a little snooping/light flirtation. Poking into Barb Howard’s computer doesn’t turn up any information about the “Future Enterprise Ventures” program—but does pull up an entry on the Forced Evolution Virus, which Fallout lore dorks will know is extremely bad news. (Shout-out to the person who reached out to me on Bluesky a few days ago to note that Vault-Tec true believer Ronnie was emphasizing the F.E.V. initials last week.) Unfortunately for Norm, he’s a pretty hardcore sneak/science build, so when Ronnie catches him digging around in the company’s dirty laundry, he swiftly gets himself choked out.
Which finally brings us around to Sister Lucy, who might have the worst time out of any of our far-flung cast this week. (After all, Daly’s brainwashed pervert at least seems to enjoy having his sense of self brutally shattered.) Lucy and The Ghoul make a pretty easy escape from the Deathclaws roaming the Strip, admittedly, ending up in the far more thriving community of Freeside on the outskirts of Vegas. (And, as a longtime Fallout: New Vegas fan, can I just say how nice it is to see one location from the games pop up in this show without somehow having been blown to shit?) After her noseless partner in crime sends her off to get her little Buffout fix, uh, fixed—courtesy of a dose of instant anti-addiction drug Addictol—Lucy suddenly finds herself in a rough situation when she notices that the local general store has recently jacked up its prices, now sports a proprietor who looks a little “off,” and contains a trash can filled with the folded-up remains of a guy who sure looks like that portrait of the actual owner hanging over the cash register. Whoops!
The scene that follows is another one of those moments where Ella Purnell makes minor miracles occur with her commitment to this part. I’ve noted it before, but Lucy MacLean is, on paper, a character that I don’t know that I could actually stand: relentlessly positive, obnoxiously fussy, and sometimes almost perversely determined not to learn the lessons that the Wasteland has to teach. But Purnell renders the lead-up to killing the random guy who’s taken over the store so funny (all but begging him to come up with a reasonably convincing lie), and the aftermath of realizing that she’s unequivocally taken a human life for the first time so bleak, that it makes moments that should read as cornball—answering a hollow “I don’t know” when a random customer barges in and asks her “Who are you?”—read as completely authentic.
And that’s before we get to the dramatic conclusion of this episode, when Lucy finishes yartzing out all the drugs in her system and stumbles back into The Ghoul’s hotel room—only to find the brainwashed Snake Oil Salesman already there, with a deal from Hank on the table. It’s simple: The Ghoul betrays Lucy and drags her back to Vault 33, and Hank will leave Barb and Janey right where he’s so recently found them, in cryo pods in the Las Vegas Vault-Tec management vault. I have, in the past, gone a little hard on Walton Goggins when he’s in Ghoul mode, a part that has often demanded little more of his significant talents than a drawl and a smirk. But he’s heartbreaking here, torn-up, but never actually indecisive, about the betrayal, and ruefully agreeing when she nearly sobs, “We were actually beginning to get along.” (Turnabout being fair play, and MacLean’s being a hardier bunch than anyone expects, he ends up getting a power fist to the chest and a pole impaled through his rotting torso—which certainly makes this latest turn in the pair’s relationship a tad more visceral)
We end, then, on two familial reconnections of potentially apocalyptic consequence. In the past, Cooper goes on a bender—producing another indelible Fallout image, as Goggins gets his best Slim Pickins on by riding a fake missile in a Vegas bar like it was a bucking mechanical bull—before waking up in bed and telling Barb “We need to talk.” And in the present, Lucy is awoken on the hotel room floor by Dear Old Dad, apparently no longer content to outsource his parenting, who greets her with a “My little Sugar Bomb.”
I rarely end an episode of Fallout asking “Well, what the hell happens next?” As I said up top, it’s not really an itch this show scratches for me or where its strengths tend to lay. But damn if the second season hasn’t achieved something like real story momentum by this point, as both our past and present plotlines build toward what are feeling like major reveals. All of the things that are always good about Fallout make a strong showing here, of course, as it pivots between absurdity and heartbreak, letting its Wasteland weirdos shine even as its core characters show off their fractured humanity. But I’m now also genuinely curious, and maybe even a little worried, about where this all is headed. What did Barb Howard do? What’s the point of House’s little metal hat? Why were there mutant lizards in Alaska? And, of course,who ended the world? One way or another, we’ll hopefully know in the next couple of weeks.
Stray observations
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- • No Maximus this week, and no Vault 33 dramedy. I appreciate the focus.
- • Lucy, turning to The Ghoul after one Deathclaw turns out to be three: “I defer to you about what to do in this situation!”
- • She’s also too busy to indulge a guy offering “Beat me up 4 caps!” in Freeside.
- • Most of the locations in Freeside are pulled straight from Fallout: New Vegas, as is the “Fully Integrated Security Technetronic Officer,” the subject of one of the game’s most gleefully vulgar sidequests.
- • In the past, Young Hank has the Cold Fusion tech apparently handcuffed to his wrist, which makes him “Suddenly a very important person and a possible assassination target!”
- • Some cute spy vibes as Cooper and Moldaver talk to each other on payphones at the airport.
- • We get another glimpse of Martha Kelly’s Representative Welch here, getting bullied by RobCo goons on the steps of House’s Lucky 38 casino. “Fighting the good fight is mostly a series of humiliations”
- • Goggins gets maybe the line of the episode when he finally gets to the end of House’s big initial reveal: “From the fuckin’ toilet?”
- • Fallout usually weighs in at about two too many needle drops per episode, but the Snake Oil Salesman’s “Luck Be A Lady” montage—completely with the music abruptly cutting as he screamingly kills a radroach snacking on his neck—is delightful.
- • “How would you like to forget everything you’ve ever known? Everyone you’ve ever known. Your language and motor skills will remain intact. Every choice you’ve made, every moment you’ve cherished, will be completely and utterly removed from your memory.” “Please, yes.”
- • “Good luck, dipshits!”
- • A nice moment early in Cooper and House’s talk where House orders him to come down and talk to him; Theroux embodies the frustration of House not being able to simply command another person like a puppet.
- • I know Jonathan Nolan isn’t the showrunner here, just an executive producer, but House’s obsession with mathematically predicting the future feels very of a piece with both Person Of Interest and Westworld.
- • There’s an interesting, stuttering cut between Cooper and The Ghoul after the confrontation with House; hard to know if it’s just stylish editing, or meant to indicate something deeper.
- • Okay, so: F.E.V. is the big threat in pretty much every Fallout game before New Vegas, a virus that “fixes” organic life by (typically) making it bigger, meaner, and way more screwed-up looking. Among other things, it’s responsible for the Super Mutants, the other big Wasteland threat that the show has so far held off on deploying.
- • Daley is so wonderfully goddamn creepy as the chipped version of the SOS.
- • Our closing-credits art tonight feels extra important: a slow pan through a couple of the Strip casinos, ending on a shot of what New Vegas fans will recognize as the life-support sarcophagus where Robert House rode out the apocalypse (and another two centuries of Wasteland life).
William Hughes is a staff writer at The A.V. Club.