Fallout finds power in little moments, big lizards, and some highly addictive drugs

And that’s before we get into the knock-on effects of the Vault 32 transplants’ inability to distinguish their lefts from their rights, which sees Zach Cherry’s Woody stumbling into a clandestine meeting between Betty and her 32 counterpart, Steph, in the forbidden space between the vaults. Leslie Uggams and Annabel O’Hagan, always two of the best performers out of this odd little Vault crew, end up in a pleasantly tense showdown here, as Betty tries to invoke her years of experience to talk Steph into sharing some of her vault’s water—only to run straight into a power differential that she has absolutely no ability to surmount. (Along with a reveal that Steph knows more than she’s been letting on about whatever side project Hank MacLean was running during his time as Overseer, eventually offering to trade Vault 33’s survival for a “keepsake box” he hid somewhere in the vault.) O’Hagan gets a lot of room to shine here on both the comedy and the thriller fronts, in fact, as Steph later attempts to placate Woody with an offer to “escalate” his report on her illegal behavior to the proper authorities, i.e., herself. (“Well that makes it easy, doesn’t it?”) I was worried, when the episode made it clear we’d be spending a lot of time back in 32 and 33, that it might wind up feeling throwback-y and inessential, as it did in the premiere. But this is a much better example of Fallout building tension from the Vault Dwellers’ naivete, rather than in spite of it, while using the brewing conflicts there to reflect on similar issues out in the Wastes.

That includes a very brief interlude with Norm and his little horde of management trainees, who we see discovering a cache of food as they aimlessly move through the Wasteland, exulting in the “mouthfeel” of their trove of uncooked pasta. A short moment of human connection with Rachel Marsh’s Claudia—who, notably, doesn’t appear to have worked at Vault-Tec long enough to go full pod person—gets interrupted by incoming alpha male moves courtesy of a guy named Reg, who proudly declares that he was Bud Askin’s personal assistant before the bombs dropped. (Moisés Arias doesn’t get a ton to do in this installment, but Norm’s unimpressed “Mm. So?” when Reg drops his corporate bona fides is a lovely little grace note.) Claiming to know what “Phase 2” of Bud’s master plan was, Reg begins subtly usurping the “boss’” place at the head of the group—just one more reminder that there’s no portion of the world that can be so thoroughly pissed on that another little pissing match can’t suddenly break out.

 See also, and ultimately, the situation with The Brotherhood Of Steel, which brings us back to that Maximus line I opened this review with. Floundering, as always, for the best bad thing to do in the wake of his killing of Paladin Xander last week, Maximus ends up press-ganging ghoul entrepreneur Thaddeus into getting into the non-smushed suit of power armor and pretending to be the Commonwealth representative for as long as it takes Max (and a quickly recruited Dane) to kill Elder Cleric Quintus, steal the Cold Fusion tech, and get the hell out of Dodge. It’s a terrible plan logistically, but one that pays off in both the comedy and drama departments, as we get to watch Johnny Pemberton bluff his way into a civil war as the various Brotherhood chapter heads start approaching “Xander” to try to broker separate deals, while Maximus has to muster his courage so that he can lethally confront his surrogate father. Which goes about as well as you might expect. As Quintus, Michael Cristofer has always given a performance that veers wildly at times between seeming sincerity and a semi-caricature of messianic delusion, and it’s fascinating to see him act genuinely curious as to why Maximus would suddenly barge into his office, clearly intent on tearing down everything the pair of them have been right on the cusp of building.

Aaron Moten, meanwhile, is just heartbreaking here, as Max tries to explain the basic powerlessness that comes with trying to be good on a case-by-case basis in a world suffused with cruel intent. The final snap in the armor arrives when he explains to his would-be father figure that he killed Xander for no more far-seeing reason than to save the lives of a group of children—and then watches his mentor’s face twist into dogmatic disgust once Quintus realizes that the kids in question were ghouls. (Moten is building up a really effective demo reel of small, gut-wrenching moments this season, and his tiny “I know” as Quintus rails about how ghouls are “Abominations! To be exterminated!” is another serious killer.) We’ve known since basically the series premiere that the Brotherhood wasn’t interested in saving anyone and wasn’t actually worth saving itself. Nevertheless, there’s something very sad about seeing Maximus forced to reckon in full with the fact that there’s nothing good to be salvaged from the Codex that’s given his life some semblance of structure ever since the destruction of Shady Sands. There’s nothing left to do now but run from the wreckage and toward the next moral thing he won’t actually “choose” to do.

We end this week on one last meditation on power, as we come back to Lucy and The Ghoul as they wander the abandoned ruins of the Las Vegas Strip. Power, as this quite good episode of Fallout has made clear, can come in many forms. And one of those forms, as it turns out, is a 12-foot-tall mutant lizard with gigantic claws, huge-ass horns on its head, and murder on its mind. Fans of the Fallout games will already know how fucked our heroes are by the time Lucy’s making jokes about giant eggshells; everybody else can presumably infer it from seeing The Ghoul shit himself with fear for the first time in the series’ run. The show (which has held off on this aspect of the Fallout bestiary for as long as it probably reasonably could) doesn’t say the word here. But anyone who’s ever faced down one of these fuckers knows: It’s Deathclaw time. Expect misery and mayhem to follow in its wake.

Stray observations

• • Our cold open tonight goes back further in time than we ever have, showing Cooper Howard and his buddy Charlie fighting against the Chinese military in Alaska, the last big in-universe war before, well, The Big One. Besides building off of Cooper’s season-one anger at Bud for designing West-Tek’s shitty-ass power armor, the sequence is mostly there to foreshadow the final reveal of Deathclaws, which were apparently running around in pre-nukes Alaska for some reason.
• • In case it wasn’t clear, by the way: Deathclaws are one of the apex predators in the Wasteland and generally among the hardest enemies to deal with in any given Fallout game. Genetically, they’re supposed to be distantly related to Jackson’s chameleons, but the important thing is that they’re fast, strong, incredibly violent, and a ton of them bred after the U.S. government lost track of its genetic engineering program when the bombs dropped.
• • “I’m great at running away. I like it!”
• • The NCR’s Rodriguez catches Lucy off guard when she asks her if the quarry she’s pursuing is “Someone you care about, or someone you hate?”
• • Despite the hard sell, Lucy has no intention of joining the NCR, dismissing them with The Ghoul’s “matching jackets” line.
• • Buffout is a common drug in all the Fallout games, where you can consume it for a quick dose of extra strength. It is, as noted here, extremely addictive. (Meanwhile, The Ghoul neglects to inform Lucy that there is an in-universe drug to immediately purge you of addictions called Fixer.)
• • Goggins puts a lot of fun English on “No, you ain’t dyin’. You addicted to drugs!”
• • The poor Vault 32 residents really can’t adjust to their new, mirrored living environment. “Yesterday, I walked into the women’s men’s room!”
• • Bud’s dead, apparently. Alongside Barb Howard, there’s a decent argument to be made for him being one of the single biggest sources of human misery in the whole Fallout universe. 
• • “Hostage is an over-used word.”
• • Pretty much everything about the Strip tonight is pulled straight from Fallout: New Vegas, albeit in now-wrecked form. The Kings were, for instance, a gang of (then human) Elvis impersonators, who believed they could make themselves cooler and more powerful by invoking a figure they knew only as “The King.” And all four of the casinos glimpsed inside the Strip were active businesses in the game. It’s a little sad to see such a lively area reduced to a destroyed wreck here.
• • “Got any cigarettes? I’d like to try one!” “One addiction at a time.”
• • Pemberton’s failed impersonation of Xander is very funny, most notably when he begins narrating his own panic attack through his armor’s on-board voice amplifier. “You belong here. You are loved.”
• • The Grand Canyon Brotherhood leader might be an asshole, but he’s not wrong: Watching the Yosemite Elder stick a knife through the misogynistic Coronado Elder’s head was cool.
• • In terms of plot stuff: Maximus is now running around with Cold Fusion, and Vault Dweller Chet found Steph’s original pre-War ID (including noting that she’s from the United States Annexed Territory of Canada).
• • At some point I might get sick of this show ending an episode on a Lucy “Okey dokey.” But we’re not there quite yet.

William Hughes is a staff writer at The A.V. Club. 

Keep scrolling for more great stories from The A.V. Club.