Is it possible to be a good person when you’re stuck living through the end of the world? It’s a question Fallout has wrestled with, in one form or another, in every episode since its first, with pretty much every single person/robot/mutant abomination that Lucy MacLean has met during her trip across the Wastes attempting to disabuse her of her bone-deep positivity about the moral viability of the human race. “The Profligate,” the third episode of the show’s second season, assays a great many answers to this fundamental question—often involving at least one big-name guest star, for some reason. But they’re mostly here to give us some sterling examples of what decent behavior isn’t.
It says something, for instance, that the best moral exemplar we run into in this episode is probably the recovering fascist lackey working his child labor force for a measly 22 hours a day. That’s right: Our old pal (and Maximus’ former squire) Thaddeus is back, with Johnny Pemberton returning to take center stage in tonight’s cold open, now with a fresh dose of ghoul prosthetics glued to his face. Pemberton’s talent for soft-spoken absurdity remains a perfect fit for Fallout’s joke-telling styles, as he settles comfortably into the role of a sort of sweatshop-owning Mr. Rogers, cheerfully doling out life advice to the children in his charge/servitude and leading them through a sing-song chorus that reminds them that they should be happy to spend their lives peeling bottlecaps off of sarsaparilla bottles for him because “Most kids are dead by this age!” Fallout’s pitch-black comedy can sometimes sit ill at ease with its forays into Big Moral Seriousness, but Pemberton comes off as so fundamentally well-meaning, despite the hideous things he’s saying, that he serves as the perfect guy to bridge that divide.
The same cannot, unfortunately, be said for fellow guest star Macaulay Culkin, whose reveal a few minutes later—as the Roman cosplayer who handles Lucy’s intake by the dog-helmeted goons of Caesar’s Legion, after she blundered into their blatant idiot trap last episode—literally seems to drag the episode to a halt, presumably so viewers can take a second to turn to their partners and go “Yeah, really?” Soft-spoken, smirking, and just a tad stilted, Culkin’s presence here works as a signifier that we’re not meant to take the legionaries entirely seriously—in case the fact that they’re trapped in the military version of the old sitcom plot where two siblings divide their bedroom down the middle with tape didn’t make that obvious enough. But his performance lacks weight in a way that essentially strands Ella Purnell, who’s forced to handle the comedic heavy lifting of these scenes all by herself. (Ably, as it happens: Lucy’s in fine form tonight, pointing out the dopey anachronisms of the Legion’s theme park centurions and shooting down their ambitions of primae noctis by noting that she’s not a virgin even if you don’t count the “page-and-a-half” of “cousin stuff” she got up to down in the vault.) The best you can say about Culkin’s appearance in these scenes is that he gives some workable “petulant prince” vibes, and doesn’t actively trip Purnell up, while also doing his small part to set up one of the episode’s best gags: the jump cut from Lucy offering to handle “conflict resolution” for the brewing Legion civil war to her subsequent crucifixion. (“Aw jeez,” she remarks in the kind of joke I immediately felt bad for laughing at.)
Speaking of civil wars, we spend a decent chunk of “The Profligate” watching Maximus bumble his way straight into one, as his impromptu playdate with/bromantic seduction by Kumail Nanjiani’s Paladin Xander winds up escalating in drastically apocalyptic fashion. Xander—who showed up in the last minute of “The Golden Rule” to try to smarm Elder Quintus’ brewing insurrection out of existence—has, smartly, identified Maximus as a weak point in the West Coast Brotherhood’s armor. One that only opens up further after Quintus unwisely plays the Mean Dad in a council meeting, ridiculing his young hero for suggesting they stop screwing around and just murder the Commonwealth representative before he can bring the full force of the main Brotherhood down on their heads. (“Well, that’s what we do here, isn’t it?” Maximus asks, Aaron Moten injecting some chilling weariness into the young knight’s voice.) Nanjiani, for his part, understands the assignment he’s got here with crystal clarity, as Xander gives the younger man the full-court “We’re all just frat bros in this together, right?” press, asking if the pair can go “hard-dick” while talking seriously about the prospect of war, tossing fist bumps with reckless abandon, and leading Maximus off on a little off-the-books abomination hunt. Delivered with a healthy stink of machismo, the extended seduction is fun, if also maybe a little rote—at least, until we realize that the facility the pair have invaded for their little bonding sesh is actually Thaddeus’ soda factory from the cold open. And, more importantly, that even a Brotherhood member rocking Kingo levels of charisma is still just putting a charming face on a fundamental willingness to gun down children if they don’t have the right kind of skin. Maximus can’t abide it, and, quick as you can say “Short-term moral good potentially leading to a continent-destroying superwar!” he ends up fatally smashing Xander with his own fancy rocket hammer.
That’s a lot of extremes of moral behavior to chart in a short amount of time, and I still haven’t gotten to the most wobbly ethical vessel of all: a rotting, semi-human ship of Theseus known far and wide as The Ghoul. “The Profligate” is the first chance Walton Goggins has gotten this season to do much more than look convincingly badass from beneath his mountain of prosthetics, and he’s in fine form here—both in the present day and in the hefty chunk of pre-war flashbacks that show Cooper Howard wrestling with his unwanted mission to assassinate Robert House. Who really is The Man Who Knows, apparently, popping up incognito at a VFW awards banquet for Cooper’s old buddy/recruiter Charlie in order to subtly needle his would-be killer. The scene, shared between old buddies Goggins and Justin Theroux, is easily the best two-hander of the episode, with House lobbing implications of menace at an increasingly irritated Cooper and looming over his shoulder like some kind of bowling-shirted bathroom attendant Dracula. (Among other things, the opening of “The Innovator” has me primed to get extremely nervous any time this dude is hovering behind anybody’s neck.) House is interested in goodness too, as it turns out, noting that he doesn’t quibble with “the pinkos’” grievances with the U.S. government—only their chosen solutions. With Theroux slightly overplaying in the face of Goggins’ deadpan, the scene as a whole is a firm reminder that, beyond the jokes and the makeup and the explosions and the mutants, Fallout really can just be a damn fine drama when it wants to buckle down and be one.
See, also, the sequence of The Ghoul performing a little philosophical monologuing/impromptu surgery on himself in that hospital he got abandoned in last episode, before embarking on a mission to get Lucy down off her cross (non-figurative variety). Said sidequest, it turns out, mostly involve a little tour through a series of Fallout: New Vegas Easter eggs and one that leaves me scratching my head, not for the first time, at the show’s weird lack of scope when it comes to depicting these ostensibly large groups like Caesar’s Legion or the New California Republic. Bear with me here for a second: Are we meant to think that the two holdout Rangers that The Ghoul stumbles across in the Nevada hills are the only remnants of the NCR’s military force in the area, just as the destroyed Shady Sands represented the bulk of its civilian members? (While the two small camps of Legion members, also seen here, represent the vast majority of the Roman wannabes?) I can cope just fine with deviations from video game canon, which depicted Caesar’s Legion as a massive army just a few years earlier and the NCR as having civilized most of California. But the show keeps seeming to want to have things both ways, leaning on these groups for the symbolic meaning and weight they carried in the games, without actually depicting them as anything near as large. The NCR, especially, continues to be held up as some tarnished last bastion of decency, while not seeming, in practice, to be much bigger than a single small city and its local militia. The difference between what we’ve been shown, and what we’re apparently meant to feel, remains hard for me to square.
Admittedly, these are also just the kinds of digressions my brain wanders off on when a TV show starts indulging in what I have down, in my notes, as “Exposition Overload.” That is, the long and not especially point-y middle stretch of this episode where The Ghoul wanders from place to place, getting peppered relentlessly by various people and robots who’d like us to know (in suitably vague fashion) about his long, deliberately obscured history with House, the NCR, the Legion, etc. I have a pretty low tolerance for this kind of unnecessarily tease-y tell-don’t-show in any case, but it only gets worse when we damn well know most of this material will be coming to us soon in far-more-enjoyable flashback form. As is, it’s a lot of allusion, and very little information, with the upshot being that The Ghoul decides to not only rescue Lucy, but save the wayward Rangers by inciting the fractured Legion to start killing itself. It’s the most selflessness we’ve seen from him to date, with Goggins capturing the unease of a long-unused conscience rattling back to life.
So, a few minor performance and script quibbles aside, “The Profligate” is easily the most focused episode that Fallout has posted in its second season to date, following just two plotlines, which manage to meaningfully rhyme with each other in genuinely interesting ways. (I’m starting to be firmly convinced, among other things, that the show all-but-needs at least one solid pre-war flashback scene per episode, just to keep Goggins in fighting shape.) It’s a little worrying that the series still hasn’t managed to put up a really great episode in its second outing yet, but this is definitely a step in the right direction: funny and fairly quick-moving, with a great turn from Pemberton and (shock of shocks!) all three of our principal leads getting at least a moment in the spotlight to shine. If it still feels like we’re waiting for Fallout to actually get somewhere this season—and slightly dangerous that the most interesting plot stuff is still mostly happening in the distant past—at least it now feels like we’ve reached an acceptable cruising speed. Nobody ever said the pursuit of goodness in the wreckage of humanity’s mass grave was going to be easy, after all; at least now it feels like we’re somewhere on the right track.
Stray observations
- • As far as I can tell, Thaddeus’ whole operation is taking the bottlecaps—which, as a reminder, Wastelanders use as currency—off of bottles that somehow arrive on the factory floor pre-capped. Your guess is as good as mine how they get that way in the first place.
- • Pemberton nails pretty much every line in that opening, including comforting a crying child with, “Trudy, why aren’t you making money for me?”
- • The tunic-wearing lady from last episode gets herself dispatched here with a quickness.
- • At the risk of becoming so nerdy that I’ll have to go turn in my wedding ring to the proper authorities, Lucy’s actually wrong in her correction of the “Kaisar” pronunciation here. That was, in fact, how Caesar was pronounced in the original Latin, and the guy who founded the Legion (in the video game, at least) was both a linguist, and enough of a (highly violent) pedant, that he got very insistent about it.
- • She’s dead-on about primae noctis, though, including the fact that the people trying to float it “were just nasty people borrowing a Latin phrase.”
- • Was anyone else hoping The Ghoul would put his hat on Dogmeat?
- • “It’s just been a while since I had someone worth talking to.”
- • I feel like if you’re going to cast someone as funny as Martha Kelly in a bit part like the congressperson speaking at the VFW event, you should at least give her a couple of actual jokes.
- • “You back billions of bodies into a corner…tsk.”
- • “I take it you’re not a vet.” “What gave me away?” “Because a vet would know better than to talk politics when a man has his dick in his hand.”
- • Both Camp Golf and Victor The Securitron are taken straight from Fallout: New Vegas; the former is a big NCR camp from just before their big war with the Legion, while the latter drags the main character out of a shallow grave (at House’s request, no less).
- • Even for a show that likes its weird needle drops, the combat scene scored to the mega-bombastic cover of “The Star-Spangled Banner” felt like a lot.
- • Hey, The Ghoul! If I were entirely dependent on little vials to not turn into a zombie, I’d probably make sure not to drop one on the ground when a nice Ranger lady hands me a box of them.
- • “When something’s dead, it’s usually because it deserved to die.”
- • Nanjiani stays in the lane he’s asked to for most of the episode, but Xander’s glee at cutting down the ghoul kids is a nice, nasty little touch; his private smile right before he pulls the trigger helps sell how fucked even the “nicest” orthodox Brotherhood member is, deep down.
- • After ragging on Culkin’s performance here, I’d be remiss not to note how good he was—opposite Goggins, as it happens—in his episode of The Righteous Gemstones from a few years back.
- • No Hank or Norm this week. I missed a bit of that wild MacLachlan energy.
- • “Hey, man!”
William Hughes is a staff writer at The A.V. Club.
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