How many assholes can you fill a setting with before it begins, overwhelmingly, to stink? It’s a question Fallout has struggled with before and never more than when dealing with the Brotherhood Of Steel, quite possibly the biggest collection of reeking anuses in all the bombed-out Wastes. Outside of Maximus, Dane, and, arguably, Elder Cleric Quintus—who’s at least a different flavor of power-hungry piece of shit—every Brotherhood member we’ve seen in the show so far has been the worst that the post-apocalyptic world has to offer, a whole army of insecure, heavily armed frat-bros whose only difference from the other “matching jackets” trying to control the Wastes has been a nicer set of duds. Fallout has raised the question before, and it’s one it wrestles with now: If this is the “best” of humanity after the bombs fell, what’s even the fucking point?
This nihilism is underscored by our opening of this episode, which is fixated, as ever, on the ending of the world. It’s a slightly smaller one than usual, admittedly, as we get to see the final moments of the thriving, peaceful settlement of Shady Sands, which we found out last season was Maximus’ original home before, well…just watch, yeah? If Shady Sands isn’t outright paradise, it’s clear that this corner of the New California Republic was a hell of a lot better of a place to grow up than literally anywhere else we’ve seen in this entire show, with people working together toward self-sustainability, libraries set up in the streets, and violence kept to a minimum. It’s a pity, then, that their growing community was growing up just a little too close to Vaults 31, 32, and 33—or that they’d just figured out how to tap into the Vaults’ water supply to continue to grow their crops. (Nobody we see here, meanwhile, seems to know that their real sin was harboring the escaping wife of a cheerful, family-obsessed psychopath like Hank MacLean.) This cold open, in which Maximus’ dad seems to successfully disarm the giant nuke that Hank’s poor cyberzombie has snuck into town—only to have a happy Fallout chirp announce that the backup failsafe has now been activated and this little slice of heaven if irreparably fucked—is a classic Fallout blend of tragic and darkly comedic. Even knowing what’s coming, watching two parents fling their scared little light into the future has a sweetness that this show knows to use sparingly.
Post-title card, we dive into an episode that’s slightly less unfocused than “The Innovator,” by dint of not trying to cram six different sets of unconnected characters, each pursuing their own goals, themes, and tones, into the frame. (Of course, that still means we have four sets of unconnected characters running around and never interacting with each other, but still: progress!) I’ll take these plots separately, and in order of increasing interest—which means I’ll unfortunately (and somewhat surprisingly) have to kick off things with Lucy and The Ghoul., who already seem to be in danger of falling into a rut: I wrote last week about how Ella Purnell has a serious knack for making Lucy’s idealism come off as a deliberate choice instead of rampant naivete, but apparently that has its limits. Having been lured into a destroyed hospital by some screams, Lucy ultimately chooses to ditch The Ghoul (at least temporarily) in order to escort a young woman back to her people, having to wade through a horde of deadly, radioactive scorpions and an even more brightly glowing series of red flags in order to do so.
I understand that Fallout needs to re-establish these characters’ dynamics for its second season. But nothing about this sequence—where Purnell and Walton Goggins toss snide dialogue about the Golden Rule back and forth while their characters mostly talk past each other—does anything that “The Innovator” didn’t already set back up in half the time and without making either character look like a fool. In that context, watching Lucy blindly stumble into an obvious trap, after ignoring the advice of her much-more-knowledgeable-about-this-region partner, is simply infuriating. (Really, Lucy? You don’t think to immediately bail around “I wouldn’t want to see you get raped by the wrong people”?) One of the things I genuinely enjoy about Lucy is that the show and Purnell frequently manage to make her seem nice without making her seem dumb; in this case, well…hey, at least the radscorpions looked pretty freaking cool.
Meanwhile, back in our Ascending List Of Disconnected Plots, we also get to hang with Lucy’s little brother Norm, as he successfully manages to turn a bunch of potentially hostile, recently defrosted Vault-Tec management trainees into useful lackeys via some steadily delivered bullshit and a quack motivational program. (Shout-out to the showrunners for successfully signposting what dipshits these guys are supposed to be by casting Jeremy Levick and Rajat Suresh as two of them.) This is pretty slight stuff, running almost entirely in Fallout-as-satire mode, but it does give Moisés Arias a chance to continue fleshing out Norm as he seemingly takes on more importance in season two. (Notably, his excitement for being out on the surface for the first time in his life is palpable, even as one of his new army of doofs can only yell, “Aw, man, the mall’s gone!”)
While we’re checking in on MacLeans, we also get an extended sequence with Hank, who starts burning his way through Vault-Tec’s supply of lab animals in order to try to fine-tune the mind-control devices that are apparently going to be, like, the thing this season. It’s not clear, honestly, if Hank actually knows what the fuck he’s doing here, or if he’s just fiddling around with knobs and making mice explode. But damn if Kyle MacLachlan doesn’t look convincing while doing it! Hank eventually decides he needs to upgrade to human subjects, and it’s here where my enthusiasm for MacLachlan being front-and-center this season continues to grow: That good-natured alien quality that made the actor such a highlight of shows like Portlandia and the Return season of Twin Peaks makes Hank’s utter indifference to human life both funny and deeply menacing—especially when we find out why he might have chosen this particular “Premium Elite Plus” customer to get a chip jammed bloodily into his neck, when he notes that the guy abandoned his family for safety in the vaults. “You can’t put a price on family, Steve,” he says, with that seething chipperness that means heads are about to explode. “We were very clear on that in the advertisements.”
With our subplots nicely sorted, that brings me, in roundabout fashion, back to the main event of this episode: “Knight Maximus,” new golden boy of the California chapter of The Brotherhood Of Steel. His fortunes, along with those of his dickhead comrades, are now literally soaring in the aftermath of their seizure of the Cold Fusion technology last season, which presumably has something to do with the giant airship Quintus and his minions are now tooling around in. And that’s not the least of the treasures this chapter of the Brotherhood is proving themselves almost instantly too stupid to know the value of, as the installation of a quickly acquired MacGuffin, and the activation of some big, impressive fans, allows them to stumble onto actual, no-fooling Area 51, complete with alien corpses and classic cars that are both swiftly destroyed in an orgy of acquisitive idiocy.
Maximus, for his part, has been rendered largely numb to both stupidity and praise alike—which doesn’t mean there’s not a thrill to seeing Aaron Moten back in the part after missing last week’s premiere. Moten had the hardest path to tread back in Fallout’s first season, and specifically when it came to making his part of the show’s three-protagonist structure work: Without Goggins’ veteran, charismatic drawl, or Purnell’s infectious cheerfulness to draw upon, he had to flesh out a character who charted a middle course between semi-suicidal idealism and relentless cynicism, slowly unearthing a sweet kid from out beneath the Brotherhood’s toxic bullshit. Now he’s drowning in it all over again, executing Quintus’ orders even as he has to constantly remind his fellow “Knights” not to play with fusion grenades indoors. (Nobody ever accused Fallout of being subtle television.) His conversations with Dane and his new squire make it clear that he knows nothing good is coming of giving Quintus’ Brotherhood bigger, nastier grenades to juggle, even as he tries to tell himself he’s pushing for small, incremental reforms from within. But what good is keeping yourself clean when the Wasteland mindset is always ready to drag you back down into the mire?
All of this comes into sharp focus once Quintus—emboldened by all the cheap Fusion Cores he’s now pumping out thanks to the Cold Fusion tech—brings in his fellow local chapter heads to pitch them on a civil war against the “Commonwealth Brotherhood.” Seeing the three other leaders at the table, it becomes clear that all we’re really watching is a different flavor of tribal warlords hashing out their territory, as each chapter asserts its own awful (and occasionally violently misogynistic) brand of Wasteland evil. Even once the four tribes agree to unite, it doesn’t promise peace: Maximus ends up being goaded into a fight with a big, nasty bastard from one of the other chapters, and, as Quintus looks on with a testing eye, he’s forced to brutally kill the man to save his own life, the two locked in mortal combat for no reason other than to show brutal dominance over the other. War, as they say, sure never seems to change (unless, of course, a big flashy guest star like Kumail Nanjiani can suddenly waltz in at the end and force it to, but we’ll presumably get to that next week).
There are big, weighty ideas buried in this A-plot, and Moten quickly re-proves he has the chops to carry them. He’s got command now of both Maximus’ harder side and the flop-sweat doofus hiding just underneath. But, just like the premiere, this episode is also a damn hard piece of television to talk about cohesively, because it doesn’t feel especially interested in being that. Squint and you can pull out something resonant about humanity’s recurrent pitfalls when it comes to re-forging civilization, whether it’s the Brotherhood’s violence, Hank’s head-exploding techno-fascism, or Norm’s reinvention of middle management employee pacification techniques. But it’s a lot of squinting at what are ultimately four stories separated by time, distance, and very little in the way of thematic overlap. Even the most rote of these stories has good or funny stuff, like Lucy subjecting The Ghoul to her re-telling of A Christmas Carol, or the segment where Norm constructs a semi-literal corporate ladder to climb his way out of the Vault. But Fallout, when it’s really cooking, is a smart enough show to have its component sections reflect on each other. So far, though, it’s coming in as exactly the sum of its parts. Nothing less, but also nothing more.
Stray observations
- • In a cute Easter egg, that “Patrolling the Mojave almost makes you wish for a nuclear winter” line that Hank’s suicide bomber keeps repeating is a canned bit of dialogue frequently heard by players of Fallout: New Vegas.
- • There are no pre-war flashbacks tonight, with the show skipping completely over Cooper’s eventual confrontation with House.
- • In case the subtext, such as it is, wasn’t extremely clear, one of the first things we see Maximus do is smash some old NCR armor as he kills “abominations” while hunting down Quintus’ latest prize.
- • Aliens canonically exist in the Fallout universe, by the way; it’s cute to see one get smashed alongside all the other junk—like the U.S. Constitution—that gets smashed as the Brotherhood raids Area 51.
- • “And, by the third ghost, he was pretty much cured!”
- • Today, in fun sign gags: There’s a “half-off lobotomies” sign in the background of the hospital that Lucy and The Ghoul explore.
- • Okay, let’s get nerdy for a second: There’s a lot of talk about the “Commonwealth Brotherhood” here, spoken of as a more central government that Quintus and his comrades are trying to break away from. In Fallout lore, the “Commonwealth” refers basically to Massachusetts, which a branch of the East Coast Brotherhood invaded in Fallout 4 (which, in turn, takes place nine years before the show). Fallout the show has tried to be mostly respectful of the series’ overall timeline, but it’s not clear whether Paladin Kumail, when he pops up for a snarky line at the episode’s climax, is meant to have just flown all the way from Boston to Nevada to crash Quintus’ little party.
- • If I had a nickel for each TV show I’ve recapped where Jeremy Levick and Rajat Suresh were cast to represent gormless business types inadequate in the face of a world filled with monsters, I’d have two nickels. Nice!
- • Hank tries to run a line on his new “Premium Elite Plus” victim: “Did you read the fine print?” “Yes.” “Well, I didn’t.”
- • “I’m improving an outdated piece of technology: civilization.”
- • Our closing credit image lays out exactly what kind of trouble Lucy’s gotten herself into this time, for those who didn’t play the games (or watch the trailers): a football stadium converted into a neo-Roman gladiator camp, complete with all the cruci-fixins. That’s probably going to get worse before it gets better, huh?
William Hughes is a staff writer at The A.V. Club.
